Fast & Furious 6

The franchise that's so fast it's shed its definite articles zooms back over the horizon. Can director Justin Lin's previous installment - the none more fast, none more furious F&F5 be further modified for fastness and furiousness? Apparently so: F&F6 now features harder-bottomed girls and even larger man-mountains.

Forget cars. These days Vin Diesel’s crew are going to war against supertanks and military air carriers and something that looks like the Batmobile. Forget polite introductions: recurring characters arrive with handy cut-out-and-keep guides: Tyrese Gibson shows up in a private plane bearing the legend “It’s Roman, bitches”; The Rock, an ill-defined law enforcer who spent the last movie hunting the crew, is now a close enough confidant and unofficial team player to have earned the nickname Samoan Thor.

As with the Lethal Weapon series, there's a whole lot of positively SPUC-friendly chatter about family values. The final scene ends with – we kid you not – a prayer. It hardly matters that Gina Carano sounds like she's reading from a chart at the opticians. It hardly matters that the dialogue is composed exclusively in meme slogans ("This is all on me", "I'm going to make this right").

The big news is that Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) – she’s our fave Fast and Furious! – is, for reasons far too nonsensical to explain, back from the dead. Unhappily, she’s now in the employ of Luke Evans’s megalomaniac who may or may not be attempting to bring down a city. Possibly London. Most of the movie, with a nod to Rest of World takings, is set there.

Pleasures don't come any simpler or more homoerotic than the F&F movies. Unlike, say, Olympus Has Fallen, Fast and Furious 6 embraces its craziness and implausibilities with no little aplomb and with minimal crummy CGI. It's not logical. All it wants is for you to shout out "freakin' sweet!". It's not clever. But it is big.

Stay tuned for the credits: a starry cameo promises even bigger things for F&F7 . It's a date, dog.