Fast and Furious is flaming good fun on arena tour date
An explosion of fast cars, machine gun fire, roaring engines and the air lightly fragranced with the acrid smell of gasoline and gunsmoke … Fast & Furious Live is a teenage boy’s dream night.
Convinced I was about to be served up a lame procession of souped-up boy racers tootling about the arena floor under the Fast & Furious banner, I felt for my wide-eyed 14-year-old on the edge of his seat as we awaited the “action” to begin.
I mean, surely the real-life confines of the glorified aircraft hangar that is the arena couldn’t possibly do justice to the computer-generated high-octane action of the movie franchise? Oh, how wrong I was.
The show was, like the movies, a visual spectacular. This was a perfectly synchronised mix of high-tech lighting and movie projection with live action stunts and, of course, roaring racing cars.
And, unlike the movies, this was clever and innovative!
I mean, they even turned the arena floor into a frozen sea with a submarine crashing through the ice in a set-piece spectacle which ended in a rocket flying around the auditorium before sinking the vessel in a flash of flames.
The pace was unrelenting. There were machine gun-toting bad guys leaping from car to car in a hail of bullets as wheel-spinning multi-coloured mean machines tore around belching smoke and flames at every turn.
And, get this, there was even a story to the whole shooting match! A convoluted and none too convincing story, I grant you, but who cares when a car can fly?
Yep, at one stage they recreated a famous Fast & Furious scene in which vehicles are dropped from a moving plane in the stratosphere and, I kid you not, we had cars flying above the audience!
For the life of me I don’t know how they did it … I could see no strings.
At various times in the show famous faces from the movie franchise appeared on a big screen to wax lyrical about the Fast & Furious “family”, even the aptlynamed Vin Diesel rocked up to address the audience.
Its popularity of the franchise is undoubted, but this live show really captured the spirit of the movies and the audience lapped it up – especially my inner teenage boy racer.