The Last Blockbuster We Ever Made

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Fisting a donkey, fucking a monkey, or sucking off a badger? I keep asking myself what must be in the photographs that Vin Diesel has of the movie producer that he keeps blackmailing for work. Because I refuse to believe that he actually gets hired for his acting ability alone. Have you seen any of his movies? The Fast And Furious franchise literally only works because he seems to be the only person involved in it that doesn't realise how fucking stupid it is. I don't dislike him but I think that we all know that he is a po-face figure of absolute ridicule. In which case it must be his good looks that people keep casting him for.. right? ...Are you kidding me? He looks like a camel fucked a potato and then nine months later a baby made of shoe-leather fell out. When I look at him I see a gingerbread man wrapped up in recently-waxed bollock skin. Sure he has a deep voice but he sounds like a butch woman that's been smoking seventy a day since the early Fifties. I agree that his best role is in Guardians Of The Galaxy but that's only because he's playing a tree monster called Groot and he'd already spent his entire career giving wooden performances anyway. I'd probably sound like him if my voice was booming out of from a charisma-free husk too and listening to him speak is like being shouted at by a haunted cupboard door. About forty-five minutes into his latest film Bloodshot, he takes off his jacket to reveal that he's also wearing a white vest. As usual. My theory is that filmmakers actually keep hiring the vest and he just comes fucking free with it.

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Better Than Shakespeare?

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The trailer to Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw played at the cinema the other day and I heard a couple of teenaged boys exclaim that “these films have gotten too stupid now”. “Err.. no. Actually, you've gotten too stupid now, you fucking little dweebs” is what I screamed back at them with the power of my mind. This franchise started as a flat-out rip-off of Point Break but in which Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze had been replaced by a couple of bargain-basement understudies. It wasn't until the fifth instalment in which The Rock arrived to kick the doors off the franchise that it finally evolved from something tediously dull and into something enjoyably so. The stupider the films became and the more stubbornly oblivious Vin Diesel remained to the fact that he was now in a comedy, the better they seemed to get. In the way that a shark can smell a drop of blood in a mile of ocean however, it was only a matter of time until the scent of this dumb action comedy would attract the attention of Jason Statham. He entered the series by murdering one of the key members of the lead gang before being locked up in a maximum-security prison for attempting to kill the rest of them. But it's all good because they're all cool now.

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Dom And Dumber

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In many ways, I think you could argue that the Fast And Furious series is one of the most important franchises in cinema right now. Firstly it presents us with a diverse cast without in anyway making a big deal of it. The team consists of characters from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, with both genders being shown to be as strong as the other. Well, mentally anyway. Because let's not forget that The Rock is in the movie and I'm pretty sure that the only woman that's of equal strength to him is the fucking She-Hulk. Which isn't a slight against women of course, being that the only way that most men could even slow him down would be if they drove at him in a tank after making peace with the fact that they're about to die in a tank crash. And of course when I say the female members of the group are all of equal mental strength to the men, that's not really saying too much. At the end of the day, this is a group that's led by Vin Diesel who I'm pretty convinced is actually a rogue potato that's made a deal with the Pinocchio's fucking Blue Fairy.

Some Trash Potato

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XXX: Return Of Xander Cage is an interesting title because it implies that people give one solitary fuck about Xander Cage. That's about the only thing interesting about the movie really. If it wasn't for the fact that XXX was in the title and that the poster featured the giant chicken nugget-like head of Vin Diesel, then I really wouldn't have a clue who Xander fucking Cage was. The film begins fairly promisingly with a Donnie Yen fight and then Diesel himself skateboarding down a hill. Sadly I hadn't realised that as Diesel was going down hill, the film would manage to beat him to the bottom. In fact, I've quite literally seen two people banging each other in an Amsterdam titty booth and yet I've never seen anything going down faster than the quality of XXX: Return Of Xander Cage. As Donnie Yen lay the smackdown on a bunch of goons, I stupidly thought I might actually enjoy this film too. I love the Fast And The Furious movies from the fifth instalment onwards, so maybe this would be in a similar vein to those? Well, if Fast Five, Six, and Seven are the film equivalent of a steroid-addled super-freak, then XXX: Return Of Xander Cage is both tedious and predictable- the film equivalent of watching a bodybuilder lift too much and accidentally rupture his anus.

Space Is No Place For Women Or Gays!

If I were you, I would seriously see the film Riddick as soon as you can. Not because I thought it was very good but because the special effects will be dated to shit by the end of next week. This is the third film in the franchise with each instalment following the on-going adventures of a supposedly psychotic potato that can see in the dark. However after the previous film in which the title character was wrapped up in some big, shitty, fantasy bollocks, this new release has scaled things back to the simplicity of the original Pitch Black. Vin Diesel's big bald vegetable of the night is stranded on a desert-planet and wants to get off before too much sunlight leaves him either dead or nicely baked. That's pretty much the whole plot really with the rest of the running time being padded out by some bad effects, a voice-over that states the obvious and a refreshingly blatant theme of sexism. 

Riddick wasn't a bad film particularly, it's just that it seemed a bit lacking in the brain department. As I mentioned, the first third is pretty much just him alone in the desert and titting about with some crappy looking dog that he's found. The problem with this bit though is that as an actor, Vin Diesel is about as charismatic as a lightly-cooked turd on a stick and I say that as a huge fan of Fast 5 and Furious 6. I loved those films because of how fucking ridiculous they were and how obliviously serious he seems to take them. Here however, there's no stunt too dumb to laugh at and if we're to compare the two franchises then Riddick seriously suffers from its lack of The Rock... although so do most films to be fair. Watching Vin pissing about on a lonely planet for a while is made worse by how contrived the appearance of the mongo-looking dog actually is. Not only does the creature look like it was created by a blind animator with stumps for hands but it's blatantly only there to provide Riddick with some motivation later on. Not only that but the dog also obviously exists so that he has something to react to during these scenes when surely the logical thing to do is to just fucking eat the thing. I know that everything in a film tends to be there to progress the story of the main character but usually it's done organically and in a way that feels at least a little more subtle than a bite to the cock. 

"This ain't nothing knew".

To its credit, the second two thirds of Riddick do deliver on Diesel’s promise of returning to the franchises stripped-back roots however it kind of cheats by just remaking Pitch-fucking-Black. So basically what you get is him running about trying to convince people to trust him whilst fighting a bunch of demonic, space-cunts in the dark. It might seem that the obvious issue is that retelling that story is kind of lazy however the real problem is actually the few things that they've decided to add to it. This time Riddick is fighting against the monsters with a gang of bounty hunters who, with the exception of one woman, are all male. None of the guys here have an inch of depth to them with each actor playing a character that has about as much memorability as a background shadow in a shit level of Gears of War. Pretty much every line of dialogue that's spoken is clearly just copy and pasted from the 'Twats Guide to Speaking Grunt' and that's when it's at its best. Diesel spends most of his time silent which is probably a good decision if his voice-over is anything to go by which is itself about as insightful as listening to a teenaged simpleton play 'no shit Sherlock' on his own.

When Diesel does open his mouth however he randomly turns out to be a little bit rapey by aggressively threatening to shag a lesbian in a fairly graphic way. This next bit probably counts as a spoiler alert but really, that's only because it kind of spoils the film. As mentioned there is only one main female here and interestingly she claims not to be into guys. Usually this would be an opportunity to add depth to a character or at least explore issues of sexuality and independence in a dystopian future. Instead however the makers decide to go down a more homophobic path of simply making her a prize to show how amazing Riddick actually is. By the end of the film not only has his manliness managed to bag him a girl that would be unobtainable to the rest of us but it's also implied that he's about to succeed in fucking the gay out of her as well. What a guy! Personally I'm not a lesbian but it does seem pretty offensive to treat homosexuality as a condition that can be cured with just the smallest of pricks.

There is of course an alternative possibility that the character is not really a lesbian and has just claimed it to help stall any advances from her fellow horny crew members. Although to be honest this would be crediting the franchise with more intelligence than it has so far displayed in all of the three films. If this ruse is true then it might go towards excusing the film from being homophobic but it's still a sexist bag of wank. I think there are five female characters in total with one being the probable lesbian who falls for the rapey Riddick and at least three more being naked orgy members near the beginning. Obviously I'm not against sex scenes in films but these three women literally only seem to show up to be objectified by treating us to a cheeky bit of nipple and flashing their neatly combed lady vadge's. The final woman is a prisoner of the bad guys who is raped and killed within the space of about two minutes and again simply to provide Riddick with some anger related motivation. This is made worse by the fact that she and his dog exist for the same reason but with the shitty looking pixel-pooch getting a significantly more memorable character arc. So according to this film the ranking of importance is men at the top with space-dogs next and then finally women at the bottom. If you see this film at the cinema and there's a loud buzzing sound then please don't worry. It doesn't mean that the speakers have broken it's just that the corpse of Emily Davison is somewhere spinning in its grave at about four thousand rpm.

It's a shame about all this too because before it crossed into this bizarre world of misogyny I was kind of enjoying it. I mean yes, it's just a retread of Pitch Black and dragged out for about thirty minutes longer, but it was okay I guess. There's some fun action in it and enjoyably gloopy gore so I certainly wasn't too bored anyway. If I were to guess, I would say that the main problem is that the whole thing just feels like it's been made by a teenage boy whose in-between playing Xbox and tossing off for the fourteenth time that hour. I think the design of Riddick himself is kind of evidence of this as he's basically just some boring as fuck, bald cunt with a green vest and some snazzy, swimming goggles. You can imagine a kid in school drawing something as dumb as that and being as proud as tits with his moronic creation. This apparently infantile outlook might also explain the complete lack of understanding on gender equality and the very clichéd characters and action. You know those annoying moments that pop up in all shit action films from time to time? Well, expect them all here but only as a bit of light relief from all the lady-bashing.

Nice tits...
Shame about the existence of equal rights! 

So yeah, to kind of conclude, this was a half decent-ish movie that was completely killed by being at best sexist and at worst homophobic. Riddick tried to be First Blood meets Aliens but ended up being Commando crossed with Alien: Resurrection and only if it was written by Jim Davidson. I suppose you've got to admire Vin Diesel’s love of the character but at the same time I haven't got a fucking clue as to what he sees in him. If we're being generous then Riddick is just a shaven Snake Plissken if he over-dosed on steroids and suffered from a bad case of brain damage. However if you like the idea of a genuinely scary R-Rated movie then I suppose I can't recommend Riddick strongly enough. It's just such a shame that all of the horror comes from its completely chauvinistic depiction of women in a 2013 film that has no excuse not to know better. I guess Diesel is just lucky that the only people who would think this movie is an acceptable thing to make are those who are clearly so stupid that they really can't be held responsible for their own confused thoughts. Plus his next film will be the inevitably amazing Fast and Furious 7 so even if he has just insulted half of the human race, I won't be able to stay too mad for too long… which is lucky because with something as truly offensive as this movie, there really aren't enough horses for Diesel to throw himself under in apology anyway. The shitty special effects might be out of date by the end of next week but I'm pretty sure that its gender politics have been stale since at least 1928.

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Check Out The Skid Marks

Technically I passed my driving test on the second go but they just kept on failing me for the money. I know everybody says things like that but for me at least, it's genuinely true. I failed on my third attempt because the examiner predicted I was about to do something that I didn't actually do. From that, I can conclude that either they're screwing me over for some extra cash or they're deluded, amateur psychics. I never found out which though because afterwards he rudely refused to argue with me about it. Considering I was single-handedly funding the company’s Christmas party, you would have thought the least the fucker could do would be to entertain my desire for a bit of a fight. Eventually I passed on the fifth attempt which was lucky because that time I was planning to accuse them of sexual assault and blackmail the license out of them. It'd have been my word against theirs and there's no denying that I do have some pretty lips. I've been driving now for a good while and I still have fuck-all interest in cars. In regards to any specific models or companies, the most in-depth I can get is in identifying that something probably isn't a bus. Beyond that, I really couldn't give a shit.

Because of this, a crap film series that focuses on street racing was something that had never really appealed to me. As a result, I therefore managed to avoid the first few instalments of the turdy-looking The Fast And The Furious franchise. I was aware that Vin Diesel was the star but as a rule I tend to avoid films in which the main character looks as though he could be directly descended from a potato. Interestingly though, after over a decade of polluting our screens a dirty little rumour began to circulate which claimed that the fifth instalment was miraculously pretty good. With minor curiosity, I therefore decided to watch Fast Five and was shocked and overjoyed to discover a movie that was so fucking awful that it actually became a work of unquestionable genius. The story was bollocks, the action was ridiculous, the dialogue was retarded and the realism was non-existent. Everything contained in its two hour running time was fucking hilarious and to be fair, even though the action is completely over the top, it's still good fun to watch. By the time the credits began to roll I was sixty percent less intelligent and I couldn't wait to see what they had coming up in the sequel.

Having now seen both 5 and 6, I think the franchise's main character is called ‘Dom’ but as most people in it have an American accent, it kind of sounds like they're all addressing him as ‘Dumb’. Considering Dumb is played by Vin Diesel who seems to be dead from the eyebrows up, there's a good chance that this is just a cruel but accurate nickname. Also- what is up with his voice? Not only does he look like somebody’s cross-bread Patrick Stewart with a slower-than-average gorilla but he sounds like a ninety year old woman who’s in the final stages of throat cancer. It's not that he's a particularly bad actor- it's just that he's clearly taking this film way too seriously. Also appearing as some sort of super world-policeman is The Rock who, in contrast to Diesel, clearly knows how moronic the whole thing is and so seems therefore to just enjoy the ridiculousness of every scene he's in. Whereas most characters drive around in stupidly expensive looking cars, he travels about in what looks like a small metal room on wheels. Presumably this is the only vehicle strong enough to support his entire weight. In many ways, Fast 5 and Furious 6 contain this generation’s Arnie and Stallone. The Rock is obviously the new Austrian Oak sharing both his Hulkish frame and undeniable charisma. Vin Diesel by elimination is therefore like Stallone in that they're both just a bit fucking dull.

"Rainbow Road can fuck off!"

Anyway to try and explain the plot for Furious 6 is to slightly miss the point. If you come in expecting some sort of ‘storyline’ then you should probably significantly lower your expectations. All you need to know is that a moustachioed English fucktard is causing some car related chaos and so The Rock has recruited Dumb and his gang to catch him. Also the bad guy drives around in an odd little car that kind of looks like what Saws’ villainous Jigsaw might own if he became a playable character in Mario Kart. This time too, the setting has left the exotic locations of Fast 5 and instead predominantly takes place in rainy old England. Although, it should be noted that this is an American’s version of England in which the country is populated with either toffs or skinheads and nobody ever says anything harsher than, “cor blimey” or “bloody hell”. In fact, there's one fun scene in which a snobby Brit insults The Rock and so to get revenge, one of Dumb’s friends pays the toff millions of pounds for the cars he's selling and the clothes he's wearing. I guess that what we can learn from this is that when Americans get a little insecure then some of them turn a little bit rapey. Either way, I was proud to see the British stoicism on display as the semi-naked chap proudly walked away without his dignity but still significantly richer.

To describe this sixth movie as both brain-dead and utter shite is completely accurate. Thankfully though, I'd have only been disappointed if it had delivered me a quality story and well-rounded characters. I was hoping for more of Fast 5's, 'so bad it's good charm', but no amount of punches to the head could prepare me for the stupidity of Furious 6. For over two hours I sat transfixed at the screen in complete shock with what I was watching. Occasionally something will fail because the hype is too great however here, the movie succeeds because my expectations just weren't low enough. I have never seen something as moronic as this in my life, with Fast 5 now looking like a gritty kitchen-sink drama in comparison. Vin Diesel's Dumb is thicker than ever and The Rock continues his record breaking attempt of saying lines that are so ridiculously macho that his script must have been spelt out in steroids. It's the action though that gets the audience into the cinema and this certainly didn't disappoint with each set piece getting progressively bigger and more unbelievable as the film goes on.

The thing is though, that as farfetched as the action was, I couldn't help but think that it was so creatively absurd that it must have been written by a genius taking the piss. As everyone will probably know from the trailer, there's a bit where the cars speed after a plane before it takes off in a sequence that lasts for about fifteen minutes. However not only does this mean that they're on about four-hundred-fucking-miles of runway but as the plane takes off, they have harpooned their cars to the wings. As it begins to fly, the cars dangle from it with at least two characters having a fist fight on their vehicles’ roofs. Inside the plane, there's another fight taking place which only climaxes when The Rock magnificently flies about sixteen foot into the air and delivers a ‘clothesline’ to a villain’s throat. Although if we're going to mention flying then this minor miracle is nothing in comparison to Dumb’s earlier impression of a big bald Superman.  

To quickly summarise that incident, there are two bridges that are about forty foot apart and with a drop between them that must be at least a couple of hundred feet. Dumb is driving on one bridge with his amnesiac girlfriend surfing the roof of a tank on the other. For reasons too stupid to explain, the tank is about to get its nose shunted to the ground meaning the girl is probably about to die. Dumb sees this and so aims his car at the wall of his bridge, speeds up and climbs out onto the roof. The Tank gets flipped over causing the girl to be catapulted into the air and over the drop. Dumb’s car hits the wall throwing him off his roof and also over the drop and in the direction of the girl. He flies towards her, catches her, carries her back over to her bridge and the two land safely on a broken car. It's at this moment that the film started to lose some of the people in the cinema as one person angrily shouted out, “Fuck off!”, at the screen. Although, interestingly, their outrage at this presumably implies that everything else so far had seemed perfectly plausible to them. Having survived without a scratch, the girl now turns to Dumb and asks how he knew, ‘there'd be something there to soften their fall’, to which he romantically answers, “I didn't”. Err what!? Are cars considered soft these day? Last time I checked, they were made out of pointy metal and glass. When you fly towards it at like two hundred miles an hour, I'm pretty sure you may as well just hit the concrete floor because either way- you're  fucked. The guy a few seats in front of me might not have enjoyed what he'd just witnessed but if I'm going to be honest, it was probably the greatest ever moment in cinema history.

If police actually looked like this,
it would be the end of crime...

This film is completely perfect in every way and so I'm actually struggling to think of anything to properly criticise it with. You could argue that it's perhaps about twenty minutes too long, although if we're going to get serious then lets face it, it's really about two hours and ten minutes too long. I suppose the villain is a little underwhelming but that could just be because he's played by the only person in the movie with more acting talent than muscle. However as the closing credits showed, this minor quibble is about to be rectified in the future. A car pulls out of nowhere, kills one of the main characters and then Fast and Furious 7's villain steps out. I won't ruin the identity of this surprise cameo except to say that seeing him in this franchise caused my brain to just implode with excitement. I don't think I'd stopped smiling since I sat down but this was the point that I had to actually prevent myself from doing a full on maniacal laugh/scream combo. Usually I prefer my films to be at least slightly intelligent but occasionally you have to admire something that's so confusingly terrible that it becomes unpredictably brilliant. Judging by the arrival of this new mystery bad guy, I'm putting it out there now that the sequel is probably going to be a full blown masterpiece of retardedly epic proportions. 

People keep telling me to go back and see the first few films but in honesty I think I'd miss The Rock too much. In fact, any movie that I now watch that doesn't feature him seems like a waste of time to me these days. Like I keep saying though, this film is God-awful, but it’s that fine blend of shitness which makes it so funny and so much fun. It's so bad that if I didn't know better, I'd assume it was a spot on spoof of its own franchise. If you take the risk of watching this then make sure you have something to stimulate your brain with afterwards as there's a very real risk that you could just slip into a coma and die. Believe me though, it's worth the danger as it really is rare to find something that's so consistently entertaining, even if it is mostly unintentional. Based solely on its mystery villain, Part 7 has a very real chance of being even better but as things stand, Furious 6 may well be the greatest film of all time. I'm running out of words that can fully express my love for this film and I can't tell if it's irony or the brain-damaging effects of having actually watched it… Either way however, you should definitely see the film simply to witness the joy of car-crash cinema at its absolute and devastating finest. 

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