Fast Five
Forget street racing let’s do a heist movie instead. And, unlikely as it may sound, it’s not just best movie of the franchise so far it’s actually quite a good film in its own right.
Everyone’s back again, people from the first 4 films, the director… it’s all back baby. But what isn’t back is the street racing, in any real capacity at all. It’s a buddy movie about people who love cars, not a car movie with some buddies in it - and it’s what this whole dumb franchise has been screaming out for.
The broad strokes of the plot are pretty simple. Vin Diesel escapes from prison, and with his friends he cooks up a plan to rob a local crime boss in Rio who has the local police under control. Meanwhile, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is hot on Vin’s heels as a US federal agent tasked with catching him (because, and the film is quick to forget this, he is on the run from a 25+ year jail sentence).
The in and out details do make it a bit more complicated, in the name of continuity with the other films. This is laughable at this point given that they have basically created a whole different franchise that just happens to have the same actors. Our old friend Han is back so it seems like he never made it to Tokyo (and that this film is still set before Tokyo Drift1), and once more he’s amusingly under-used which makes even less sense as to why they bothered messing with the timeline of events.
Anyway that’s too easy to make fun of, because the truth is they made a good entertaining film here. It’s dumb fun, but slickly directed and creatively staged. The action scenes all carefully crescendo to a massive, stupid, mad but spectacular final scene, dragging a bank vault through the streets of Rio.
The actors have finally broken in and warmed to each other, even The Rock who is preposterously stiff in the first half loosens up as the film wears on.
There you have it, we’ve finally hit a film which is good, as in, you might enjoy watching this even if you think you won’t kind-of-good.