Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Good action.  Crappy plot.  Vin Diesel should not be allowed to speak.

You know going in to any “The Fast and the Furious” movies that you’re in for a certain level of ridiculousness.  That level is high.  Very high.  If you accept that, you can usually have a lot of fun watching these movies.  Not even that acceptance could save this movie.

Before I get into the plot, let me start by saying, man, is Vin Diesel a bad actor.  He is only capable of saying three words with any sort of range or emotion and those words are “I am Groot!”  The man is the luckiest SOB in the world that this whole mythology was built around these movies with him in the lead role.  Fortuitously, the writers realized both what they had and how bad Vin Diesel was and developed a strong supporting cast of hardbodies to pick up his slack, including Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham.  And, in what must have been a ‘you’re going to pay me how much?” moment, Charlize Theron is also in this movie as the main villain,

I know, I know, making fun of the plot of a “Fast and Furious” movie is kind of like mocking the athletic ability of the kid that always gets picked last in gym class, but man, what a ripe target!  You may know that a lot of the premise for the series is based off of the “do anything for family” creed.  Well, throw that right out the window!  In this one, Dom (Vin Diesel) is blackmailed by Cypher (Charlize Theron) to turn against his family and steal an EMP device from his team, the execution of which causes Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to be sent to jail.  Bye bye, family!  Dom, of course, keeps the reasons behind the blackmail secret from his family and plays the perfect villain because reasons!  Of course, he’s not really a villain and he hatches a hair-brained plot to make everything right and save the day at the last minute and everything is executed perfectly.

But you don’t want to hear about the plot!  You want to hear about the car chase scenes!  I’m happy to report that they are quite entertaining.  You have the necessary drag racing for ownership of a car that has a lot of “been there, done that” to it, but that’s more to satisfy a certain demographic of the audience than to add to the movie.  The best part by far is the final chase which has Dekard (Jason Statham) hand-to-hand fighting his way out of an airplane while carrying a baby.  Statham has some fine comedic chops.  Really, though, the entire final chase is terrific and an honorable mention should be paid to the scene where hundreds of cars are hacked and go careening through the streets of New York en masse.

Money making idea!  Take all of the “Fast and the Furious” movies string them together and remove everything except the car chase/action scenes.  I think I would pay for that.