Exciting mechanics

Rating: Null/10 (21 July 2013)

We don't watch these for the superb insights, do we? The storytelling is mechanical and simple, recycled from spare parts of other movies, here a dark caper that owes both to Bond and Nolan. The plan is to know enough at any given moment, and very crisply, to know where we are in the larger vista, except the parts moved by the villain which carry the surprises.
It's all so we can lunge ahead with what we came to see: motion mechanics.
This is my go-to franchise for expertly calibrated precision in the cinematic engine. I'm not even a gearhead, the whole world with its thuggish posing is far from my sensibility. I just like to watch. The container may be simple and dumb but the pure energy it creates in the eye excites me to no end, this is stuff I want to see. Expert work in the edits, impacts, gravity. Just so you know, the editing team is headed by a guy who has worked for Bay, John Woo in M:I 2, and Tony Scott.
To have these astounding stunts, it means we're going to have corresponding leaps in story logic. We do, some truly mind-numbing ones. Remember the opening of Goldeneye with Bond diving off the cliff after that plane? We have several more ridiculous stunts here—the pinnacle is perhaps the one where Diesel flies several feet in the air from a speeding car, catches in mid-air his loved one who is about to plunge to her death, and they roll together on the opposite side of the highway. (This connection between visual and logical leaps is metaphysical, but more on that in other comments)
It's ludicrous of course, but I can buy it because it is the pinnacle of a very clearly mapped urge to have her back.
And this is also why the stunts work so well; it's the same very clearly mapped linear narrative space, usually streets and cars snaking after each other, within that linear action space we have constant explosions in the eye—Tony Scott terrain, Unstoppable being the appex. French Connection is the template of this thing, with its big chase in three linear vistas, a film I like more because it carries the same 'real' gravity to the cop story, whereas this is M:I crazy. Which is why the finale with the plane fizzles into noise, it's just messy visual information, the sort that Bay deals in.