Fast and Furious 6: A Live-Action Pixar Cars Movie

I’ve taken to watching movies when I’m doing my exercise each lunch break. The nice thing about watching movies while you exercise is that I’m not really all that concerned with finding a perfect film. That’s right: I lower my standards a fair bit when I know all I’m going to be doing the whole time is jogging in place while I watch. So I’m actually looking for movies that are diverting and that’s about it. Hence my willingness to give Fast and Furious 6 a shot. I watched the first one way back when, as I recalled, and if they’ve gotten to number 6–with number 7 just around the corner–they can’t be all that bad, right?

And for the first while, it was fun enough as far as explodey action movies go. There were some cool sequences with car chases and car races and car shootings and car driving and car mechanics and car destruction. (It was about this time that I realized that Fast and Furious 6 is essentially a live action version of a Pixar Cars movie. I mean, in Cars 2 Pixar ditched the whole “racing cars” theme, and the characters in Fast and Furious 6 aren’t really that well developed anyway. Mater is pretty much Vin Diesel. Lightning McQueen is Paul Walker.

So I was enjoying the movie, more or less. Thinking not required. Fine. But then came a scene that wouldn’t even work in Toontown. Vin Diesel is driving to rescue his girl, who happens to be driving a tank. Or at least, hitching a ride with a guy who’s driving a tank at race car speeds down a freeway. (Because tanks go wicked fast when they don’t have to drive on sand and stuff, I guess). But there’s this dead car attached to the tank, and Tow Mater’s girlfriend needs to go outside the tank to cut the car off it. (Because I’m sure cutting really thick wire is pretty easy to anyone who’s dating Vin Diesel, and wind resistance is for the weak.)

So there’s the girl, perched precariously on top of a tank going 100mph the wrong way down the freeway, and her tank’s about to get whipped into the air by that dead weight it’s dragging behind it. Vin isn’t scared. Vin is concerned, but confident. You wanna know why? Because Vin has spent the last decade playing Angry Birds nonstop. Vin has made the ability to anticipate trajectories into an art form. So he does a bit of mental math, falling back on his Angry Bird skillz, to know where his girl is going to be, and to know just how to catch her if she flies up into the air. And not just catch her, but be able to traverse a huge chasm between them, and still land on a car to break his fall. Because cars are like pillows when you’re Vin Diesel. And–

Why don’t I just show you the clip?

This is why I’ve started practicing Angry Birds more. Just in case.

Sigh. Even jogging in place, this scene lost me. There was just no possible world where something like this can happen and I believe it. Scratch that–maybe in Cars it would have been fine. Or if there were a roadrunner or a coyote involved. Even in some over-the-top action movies, this might work–if it were played for laughs and acknowledged how ridiculous it was. But in this movie it just knocked me out, revoked the films suspension of disbelief privileges, and derailed the rest of the movie for me.

Have any of you ever had a scene that did that for you? Book, film, TV show, or other? You’re pretty much along for the ride, but then it all falls apart at once? Please share.

And avoid Fast and Furious 6, unless you like your action cartoony and with absolutely no repercussions.