The latest in the Vin Diesel franchise reminds one writer too much of The Great Gatsby.

The elephant in the pop-culture room at the moment is the obvious fact that Fast and Furious 6 and The Great Gatsby are the same movie. So I invited Gatsby narrator Nick Carraway to guest-review Furious. Here he goes:


Though I am by nature a man inclined to reserve judgments, I found myself instantly moved to astonishment by the gaudy spectacle of this tale. It is a colossal affair swollen with the hubris and arrogance of men who swagger across the planet trailing the foul dust of mayhem and death in their wake. And proudly so, it would seem to the more modest eye that cannot fathom such monstrosity in the cause of mere diversion from the mundanities of the world, an affliction that would appear to distress not only those observers who might turn to it for a satisfactory distraction but those ennui-rattled men of whom the tale speaks.


Dominic Toretto is a hard man, a hulking brute ill-suited to the life of comfort he has arranged for himself on the soaring cliffsides above the turquoise waters of the Canary Islands. He arose from a hardscrabble life out West, and nothing in his uncouth manners would put lie to that, though the fetid bursts of whispered gossip that cling to his person. Some insist that he exhibited a certain wretched athleticism as a racer of illegally souped-up automobiles in illicit street races in the untamed wilds of Los Angeles; others that he was a mastermind robber of banks amongst the glittering metropolises of South America. The extremes of such fantasies, appealing to a low sort of imagination, illustrate the scope of the mystery Toretto holds for some, even if we consider the impossibility that both extremes could hold even a soupçon of truth.


Toretto’s infamy could not long take his ease before the lure of criminal labors along the parlous edges of civilized society would tempt him again. His weaknesses would barely seem to require additional inducement, and yet here is such in the form of Letty Ortiz, a secretly fragile girl who subsumes her feminine vulnerability beneath a carapace of willfully extruded insouciance. Toretto loved her once, or so it’s put about, and there was an understanding between them. Or perhaps not, for Letty abandoned Toretto only to resurface now, a dolphin rising above the deceptive calm of the sea, in the company of one Owen Shaw, though succor will not be hers.


Thus is a chessboard of masculine battle set, a competition between two men of the most unpleasant sort for the heart of desperate girl not so foolish as she might wish to be, as any girl might wish to be when the likes of a Toretto and a Shaw vie for her soul.


It is a folly of our era that such men are able to give voice to their most natural and expected of human longings only through excess. Mute with their own powerlessness of feeling, Toretto and Shaw bestir themselves to communicate through the shiny vapid coldness of vehicular warfare, a battlefield of confused desires expressed on a canvas of metallic carnage overlain with the choking stench of exploding petrol. Suppressed rage and denial of childlike fear bursts out of damaged men automotively, fecklessly absent of any concern for the countless anonymous wounded they leave behind. And yet they find a philosophy in the externalization of their inner violence: “Show me how you drive, and I’ll show you who you are,” Toretto promises the hapless Letty. The Kaiser would surely approve of such tactics, but what sensate witness?


“Is that legal?” one representative of entrenched law enforcement inquires, prompted by an act of his fellow that would once have been seen as unquestionably in the demesne of the scoundrel yet now serves only as a cynically humorous reminder of a lost idealism.


We few may beat on, boats against the current, but we will still drown. 


FAST & FURIOUS 6 (1) •Directed by Justin Lin • Starring Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, Paul Walker • Rated PG-13 • 130 min • At Maya Cinemas, Century Cinemas Del Monte, Northridge Cinemas, Cannery Row XD.