Richard Crouse

I don’t know how much “Fast & Furious 6” cost to make. The huge cast must be raking in substantial paychecks by now and you’d need to be a mathematician to figure out the number of cars they destroy. Heck, just the screeching tire sound effect budget alone was probably worth more than

The new movie is the culmination of the previous five. A greatest hits—literally, there are some wild crashes here—featuring characters from most of the films in the series. All the old faves are back—drug lord Braga (John Ortiz), Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and even Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez), who was presumed dead in the last installment—in a story that doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but if it was supposed to make sense it would be called “Sedans and Sensibility” or maybe “Of Miatas and Men.”

No, this is a “Fast & Furious” movie that plays fast and furious with believability but still delivers a pretty good time at the movies.

Picking up where “Fast Five” left off, when we first meet Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Company they are wealthy outlaws, living in countries with no extradition to the United States. Their quiet lives are disrupted when a gang led by super villain Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) stages a daring raid that threatens international security. A task force led by Hobbs (Johnson) calls on the expertise of the furious fugitives to help bring Shaw to justice. It becomes personal for Dom when he discovers that his former girlfriend Letty is working with Shaw.

These movies are review proof. If you liked the other movies in the franchise, you’ll like this one. It’s faster and furiouser than the others, so drenched in machismo—the women are even macho—you can almost smell the Brut cologne, but other than that it is essentially the same film.

It can be broken down to essentially this: Swagger interrupted by a snappy one liner, a wild car chase, a fight scene, repeat.

The themes of loyalty and friendship are still at the forefront, usually expressed in very dramatic dialogue delivered in the best teen noir style by Diesel who speaks every line as though he is dragging it through sandpaper but that wouldn’t mean much if cars don’t become air born before they burst into flames.

“Fast & Furious 6” puts the pedal to the metal one more time in a franchise that will eventually run out of gas, but for now is still running on fumes.