THE last four films in this actioner franchise, all directed by Justin Lim, have been box-office successes.

I heard women filmgoers responding enthusiastically to the vigorous mayhem and oblique humour of Number 6. Was that because its women were getting a goodly share of the action, driving muscle cars at perilous speeds along busy London streets and inflicting serious pain on each other in unrestrained stoushes? Or the muscularity of the boys’ biceps and buffed pecs? I didn’t ask.

It’s unlikely that the plot was turning the girls on with its intelligence. Dwayne Johnson plays Hobbs, a cop, who offers unconditional pardons for all previous criminality if the small coterie of good bad guys and women, led by Dom (Vin Diesel), will track down and terminate the team of truly really bad guys led by Shaw (Luke Evans), who is working on a machine that will allow him to dominate the world once he gets the final high-tech bit needed to make it go.

James Bond has been doing that on screen for decades.

“F&F6” earns a slightly tarnished gold star for the imagination of its dramatic fantasies and the energy of their staging. Yes, I know that gold doesn’t tarnish, but you get my drift.

It offers moments setting new benchmarks for the action genre. A tank hurtles along a freeway crushing everything in its path. A car chase drives up the rear ramp of a giant cargo plane trying to reach take-off speed along what must be the longest runway on the planet. Dom’s people are going to bring that flying behemoth to a bad outcome before things get sorted out.

“F&F” built its reputation on American muscle cars. Version 6 has plenty of those, together with bevies of bikini-clad (or perhaps more correctly, semi-clad) young women.

It wastes many of its 132 minutes showing feet stamping on pedals and grim-faced drivers ramming gear levers and clutching steering wheels, apparently to pump up notions of speed.

Bottom line? Who cares? It is what it is without pretending to be something else.

At Greater Union and Hoyts