Directed by Justin Lin
(PG-13)
**
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A familiar cast provides just enough charisma to keep this car-chase franchise rolling, said Todd McCarthy in The Hollywood Reporter. With Michelle Rodriguez returning despite her character’s apparent demise in 2009’s installment, the series’s “scruffily attractive” original crew of car-racing bandits—including Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and Jordana Brewster—are “finally all back.” Dwayne Johnson also returns, playing a federal agent who this time offers the gang pardons for past offenses if they help catch a villain bent on world destruction. The plot, of course, is just a skeleton for preposterous car chases and explosions, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). Every scene between feels slow-witted, “even by the paltry standard of previous scripts.” But at least the actors aim here for a comic tone, ditching the “self-important glumness that gummed up the fun” before, said Alan Scherstuhl in The Village Voice. Viewers should feel lucky to find such light-hearted entertainment arriving under a brand name that means so much to Universal Studios’ global revenues. “This is what it used to feel like to play.”
