While it is sometimes overlooked because of the series-altering movies surrounding it, Fast & Furious 6 was hugely important to the course of the Fast franchise. Many of the plot elements and twists introduced in Fast & Furious 6 would come to define the larger-than-life tone of the later movies in the series, as well as how it would handle its multiple stars. There are at least five major changes made in Fast & Furious 6 that would have a significant influence on the shape of the series to come.
Released in 2013, Fast & Furious 6 was the fourth film in the franchise to be directed by Justin Lin. The plot of the movie saw Dominic Toretto and Brian O’Conner’s team of car thieves recruited to take down a mercenary organization led by Owen Shaw. It continued the Fast & Furious franchise’s transition away from street-level crime stories to larger-than-life action movies. Fast & Furious 6 was the highest-grossing film in the franchise when it was released, setting the stage for the even bigger success of Furious 7.
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Fast 5 largely reinvented the franchise as a globe-spanning action movie, and Furious 7 was both an emotional send-off to Paul Walker and one of the most financially successful movies ever. Because of this, Fast & Furious 6 is sometimes the forgotten middle child of the more modern Fast movies. However, Fast & Furious 6 introduced several important changes that would have both positive and negative ramifications still felt by the series many years later.
Fast & Furious 6 Proved Dead Characters Could Return
One of the most significant developments in Fast & Furious 6 is the decision to bring back Dom’s love interest Letty Ortiz, who had been presented as killed off in Fast & Furious, the fourth movie in the franchise. Fast & Furious 6 retcons the previous movie so that Letty instead lost her memory and became one of Owen Shaw’s gang members. It was the first time that the Fast & Furious movies would bring back a seemingly-deceased character, but it wouldn’t be the last, with Han later resurrected in F9.
The plot twist, right out of a soap opera or comic book, helped contribute to the feeling that the Fast movies took place in a heightened reality where anything could happen. Michelle Rodriguez was also a great presence to have back in the franchise as a necessary counter-balance to the hyper-masculine personae of Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson. However, Letty’s resurrection, and the series’ continued use of Fast & Furious retcons to bring back dead characters, eventually contributed to a sense that there were no real stakes in these movies.
Fast & Furious 6 Set Up Justice For Han
Fast & Furious 6 also made a major change to the franchise by seeming to conclude the story of Han, the fan-favorite character introduced in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift after previously starring in Justin Lin’s debut feature Better Luck Tomorrow. Han actually died in Tokyo Drift, but Lin wanted to bring back the character so the following three movies were actually set before the third one. However, this created a somewhat confusing chronology. Fast & Furious 6 helped the series finally move forward in its own timeline by concluding with Han making his fateful trip to Tokyo
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The mid-credits scene in Fast & Furious 6 also re-contextualized Han’s death, showing that he had in fact been killed by Deckard Shaw looking for revenge for his brother. This reveal created a cliffhanger leading into Furious 7, but also led to issues down the line. When Shaw later became part of the team in Fate of the Furious, many fans objected, feeling that the killing of Han had too easily been forgiven. This led to the viral #JusticeforHan hashtag. Justin Lin has said that he returned to the director’s chair in F9 in part to provide this justice, bringing Han back to life in the process. Fast & Furious 6 put the franchise in a position where it later had to respond to fan pressure for the first time.
Fast & Furious 6 Leveled Up The Franchise’s Villains
Prior to Fast & The Furious 6, the crew largely dealt with drug lords and other relatively realistic antagonists, which increasingly led to problems with The Fast & The Furious villains. Even the larger-than-life Fast 5 had the crew clashing with a street-level threat in Brazilian cartel kingpin Hernan Reyes. As the main characters became more superhero-like, they needed more memorable and equally exaggerated villains. Luke Evans’ Owen Shaw, an international mercenary who had more in common with a James Bond villain than the street criminals of the earlier movies, fit the bill and marked a major turning point in the type of threats Dom Toretto and his crew would deal with.
The Shaw family would go on to become significant recurring characters in the Fast & Furious series, with brother Deckard being the primary villain of Furious 7, and later becoming a hero in Fate of the Furious and the Hobbes & Shaw spin-off series. Introducing Deckard in a cliffhanger also cemented that The Fast & The Furious was now more of an ongoing story instead of a series of episodic films. While Owen may not be the most remembered Shaw today, his characterization in Fast & Furious 6 marked a major shift in how the franchise used villains.
Fast & Furious 6 Took The Ridiculous Stunts To New Heights
The Fast & Furious series has always been based around dramatic action scenes using real stunt work, but Fast & Furious 6 raised the bar dramatically. In part this was a marker of how big the series had gotten. For instance, the opening scene where Dom drives his car through a cargo plane was originally planned for Fast & Furious, but only in the sixth movie was there the budget and technology to actually do it.
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Famous stunts like Furious 7’s cargo plane drop wouldn’t have been possible without the way in which Fast & Furious 6 expanded the range of the franchise’s action scenes. This is best embodied by the climactic scene where tanks are thrown through the air and cars race alongside a moving airplane. This involved building a 40-ton plane replica that was then set on fire as it pursued a stunt driver, with the sequence reportedly involving more than 200 crew members and over 350 visual effects. The over-the-top action sequences in Fast & Furious 6 represented a pretty dramatic escalation of a series that had started with street racing. The financial success of Fast & Furious 6 also meant that Universal was willing to pay for even more expensive and over-the-top stunts in future Fast & Furious movies.
Fast & Furious 6 Made The Rock’s Hobbs Part Of The Team
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s character Luke Hobbs was first introduced as an antagonist in Fast Five, a government agent pursuing the team who eventually came to see that they weren’t the violent criminals he expected. In Fast & Furious 6, however, Hobbs fully joined the “family”, teaming up with them to take down Owen Shaw. He continued to be part of the crew in Furious 7 and The Fate of the Furious. Adding a larger-than-life star like Dwayne Johnson to its recurring cast further helped the Fast & Furious movies to feel massive, and later enabled the spin-off movie Hobbs & Shaw, raising the possibility that the Fast & Furious movies could become a broader cinematic universe beyond the main series.
Making Hobbs a regular character also substantially changed the on-set dynamics of the Fast & Furious movies. Vin Diesel was no longer the unquestioned biggest star in the franchise, and this led to a much-reported-on feud between Diesel and Johnson. This ultimately led to Hobbs’ departure from the mainline Fast & Furious movies, but the idea that the cast really was one big family behind the scenes was permanently shattered. Behind-the-scenes speculation has become a mainstay of discussion about the franchise, especially following events such as Justin Lin’s departure from Fast X. The elevated role of Dwayne Johnson’s Hobbs is another example of how Fast & Furious 6 introduced trends that helped make the franchise feel bigger and more exciting, but created issues later on.
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