Fast Five (***½)
Directed by: Justin Lin
Starring: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Jordana Brewster,
Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Matt Schulze, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Joaquim De
Almeida, Elsa Pataky, Michael Irby,
Seen: May 16th 2011
***½
Out of ****
Being the fifth instalment in a series that has waned quite a bit from
the first movie, Fast Five doesn’t set expectations very high, even though you
might hope for some good entertainment value. Thing is, this is the best one of
the franchise so far, and yes, a 6th movie is already in the
pipeline. Where the first four movies played out strictly within the world of
underground racing, this one is a heist movie with very little focus on racing.
There’s one race, but it’s a throwaway scene – this movie is an action caper
from start to finish.
At the end of the fourth instalment Dom Toretto (Diesel) was arrested
and driven off in a prison buss. This movie starts right her, with Dom’s sister
Mia (Brewster) and his ex-cop friend Brian (Walker) breaking him out with some
daring driving, and they disappear to Rio de Janeiro. There the team, along
with Dom’s childhood friend Vince (Schulze, reprising his role from the first
movie), are roped into a heist: stealing four cars from a moving train. They
are joined in the robbery by Zizi (Irby) and his gang, and things go south
quickly, Zizi killing three DEA agents in the process, the blame falling on
Dom, Brian, and Mia. They go after Zizi and his boss Hernan Reyes (De Almeida),
the crime kingpin in Rio, while at the same time being hunted down by the very
motivated and talented U.S. DSS Agent Luke Hobbs (Johnson) and his team. On Hobbs’
team local rookie Elena Neves (Pataky) points out that Dom and Brian and Mia staying
in Rio when they should actually be running is very much out of the ordinary
and Dom and Brian are shown to, in fact, be digging in deeper, assembling a
team to take on the impossible mission of taking down bad guy Reyes.
The team members are a collection of characters from the previous
movies, with Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris reprising their roles as Rome and Tej from
the second movie; Sung Kang is back as Han from movies 3 and 4; Gal Gadot returns
as Gisele, the former Mossad agent from movie #4; and Tego Leon and Rico Santos
reprise the smaller roles of Tego and Don from the 4th movie. The
big extra feature this movie has is the screen presence of the two big guys: Dwayne
Johnson and Vin Diesel – these two have tension and pure macho sizzling on
screen, and their fight alone is almost worth the price of admission. The movie
features great action sequences with fights, foot chases, car chases and
shootouts. Crazy and wild on an epic scale, the main set-piece of the movie features
the heist of a truck-sized vault, which Dom and Brian drag behind their two
slick black Mustangs in one of the most destructive chase scenes you are likely
to ever see, as buildings and sidewalks and quite possibly close to fifty cars
are completely totalled – one car is shown to literally cut down a tree, it
doesn’t bend around the tree, it goes through the tree.
While the action is at times almost ridiculous and quite hard to
believe (if you look at the sheer physics, etc.), it is so much fun to see a
decent action movie again for once that I might be seeing this one again. Unlike
the second Transformers movie, you don’t have to wait for the smoke and dust to
clear to see what happened, director Justin Lin makes it clear as daylight what
is going on, and how the action goes down. Fast Five is the ultimate big action
movie of the past few years, bringing back memories of such over-the-top
classics as The Rock and the Bad Boys movies, and it does it in spectacular
fashion – Fast Five is my favourite in the series, and I hope they can continue
in this vein.
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