Transporting action

Rating: Null/10 (12 July 2013)

This may be the most dependable entry so far. The story and many of the stunts are of course unrealistic in the extreme, like the FBI SWAT team rolling around Rio shooting gangsters or the American cop who teams up with our guy to take down the local drug-lord. It's a knucklehead story with no larger world of diplomatic relations, and just goes a long way to display everything that is obnoxious about how Americans see themselves in the world.
The narrative style adopted in this entry is the heist film, whose chief goal of course is to hoodwink the viewer.
So I can buy the big switcheroo at the end, because the action is transporting, it has energy that carries me into the thing, some times it's enough when a film can do that. The train hijack at the beginning has amazing dynamism, it goes a long way when real stuff break and shoot in the air and it's not just models on a computer screen, admirable stuntwork. Action films need this gravity to work.
Another gravity it affects, weirdly, is that many characters from previous films assemble for the big con. They're not charmers like in the Ocean films, they wouldn't be in reality. But knowing them, and spending some simple time with them as the film wisely does, places this higher than all previous ones. The story is fast and simple, it's long but the mechanics are so finely oiled it zips by.
I also take from it those evocative and sweeping aerial shots of Rio, such a beautiful city. I could watch those for two hours and really wished for a more abstract look at place like we'd have in a Michael Mann film. This is a recurrent complaint from me for these films by the way. All in all, I'm just a different guy to what the franchise has to offer, especially the thuggish wrap. But I take a few things from each film, which is more than I expect to get from the new Superman movie.