Z/Web

Another movie I expected to be terrible and had little interest in seeing. I thought the original film was okay, but the first sequel was so bad I never watched any after that. I wasn’t into this one but the early reviews were highly positive (over 70% on Rotten Tomatoes) and since there was nothing else I wanted to see, I gave it a go. You know what? It’s pretty fun. It builds on the previous films so I was confused as to who was who (I barely remember the first except it had fast cars in it and Paul Walker’s unquestionably the worst actor on the planet), but you don’t really need to worry that much about the plot. Whether people are good guys or bad guys hardly matters — just enjoy the action and humor. The story ultimately is the gang are going to rob a drug dealer of his millions, so this really becomes a heist movie. It’s pretty fun and the climax is so absurdly ridiculous that it’s actually good. I won’t spoil it by revealing details, but I will say that I was pleased that the producers went whole hog on the premise. I can envision a film with this type of the plot element where they just hint at what’s going on and don’t actually show it. Here they really show what’s going on with nice long-range shots of what really appears to be main streets in Rio, and they must destroy — and I mean destroy — at least 500 cars in this film. Speaking of Rio, that was the other thing I really liked about this: the exotic location (almost the whole film is in Rio) really adds to the atmosphere. Ultimately this is a formula film, done very Hollywood, but if you aren’t too much of a curmudgeon, you can enjoy this carnival ride. I liked it better than the first one.