Against all expectations, 2011’s Fast Five was a blast; turning the wheel sharply away from gearhead porn to head into heist-fueled high jinks proved a creative, critical and commercial success, so who can blame returning director Justin Lin for dishing out more of the same?

Not I, but he adds so much more that the result is a mess — a temperately enjoyable one, but a mess all the same. The mess opens Friday.

With the promise of full pardons, the team headed by Toretto (Vin Diesel) and O’Conner (Paul Walker) is called back into action by federal agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and his new partner (Haywire’s Gina Carano) to stop a madman (Immortals’ Luke Evans) from assembling some billion-dollar super-weapon. On that baddie’s team is Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Toretto’s girlfriend presumed to have died in the fourth chapter.

None of that matters; it’s all fuel to get to the big action scenes. But with half a dozen more major characters on top of that, Lin piles subplots atop subplots, to the point where some pieces are moved across the board not for strategic purposes, but stalling.

In big-and-dumb films such as F&F6, I’m willing to play along with extending a metaphorical finger to the laws of gravity ... provided I can tell what’s going on. This time, overly frenzied editing and spatial disorientation make that problematic. —Rod Lott

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