Fast & Furious 6 Review

Six is the sequel that understands what Five did and repeats it competently rather than expanding it. Luke Evans gets the best villain the series has had, a cold professional who is explicitly the crew's opposite number, and building the antagonists as a mirror team is a smarter structural idea than anything in the films that follow. The tank sequence on the motorway is Lin at his most legible, and the hand to hand work has improved enough that Gina Carano and Michelle Rodriguez get a fight worth watching twice.

The problem is the amnesia plot, a soap device that flattens Letty into a puzzle to be solved, and the runway climax, which is where the series openly stops caring about physics. That finale needs a strip of tarmac several miles long and the film assumes nobody will notice, which is the moment the franchise trades gravity for spectacle permanently. There is still real craft here, and the post credits hook remains the best one Universal ever landed. It is a good time that quietly signs away what made Five feel grounded.