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Movie review: Fast Five
Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster take a leap in the action film Fast Five.
(Posted May 6, 2011)
By Maggie Scott
Your favorite gearheads are back; the boys with Valvoline in their blood and Hemis in their hearts, in Fast Five, director Justin Lin’s newest installment in the Fast and Furious franchise.
Bringing you up to zero-to-sixty-in-seconds speed, the story picks up where the last film ended with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) about to be spectacularly rescued off his prison-bound bus by his best bud Brian (Paul Walker) and Dom’s sister, Mia (Jordana Brewster), Brian’s lover.
Reunited in the slums of Rio, the hard-up trio takes an “easy money” job hijacking some high-end cars off a train. But their unaware that one of the cars contains information crucial to the illegal operations of Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), a man who’s bought the loyalty of the slums with electricity and running water.
Since DEA agents were gunned down during the hijack, not only Brazilian police, but elite federal agents led by the muscle-bound Luke Hobbs (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) are breathing hard down the necks of Dom and Brian.
Along with Elena (Elsa Pataky), one of the force’s “incorruptible” officers, Hobbs and his men invade Dom’s hideout, guns blazing; only to face competition from Reyes’s men on the same mission. Shaking them all off for the time being, Vince lays out “one last job: to take every last dime of Reyes’s money and disappear.” As good as Vince and Brian are, they’re going to “need a team”: fast-talkers, fast drivers who “won’t crack under pressure” and fast fingers with circuits, weapons and punching through walls. The
job could net them an even split of one-hundred million dollars.
Hit once by Vince and his team (Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Tego Calderon, Don Omar), Reyes moves his money to a vault in the bowels of the municipal police department; and the mission impossible, turned mission insane, begins. Missing the major elements of what made the earlier films peel-out entertainment, Fast Five is fuel-injected with warm fuzzies instead of adrenalin.
The occasional shots of scantily clad Brazilian bodies seem obligatory, and there’s one lame drag race and a couple of ho-hum sequences of the team pushing the limits of their cars to fake out surveillance cameras.
Hobbs comes across as a blow hard Terminator and we’ve heard the team members’ comic relief wisecracks before. Unless you’re into muscle cars, the wheels aren’t impressive, and the final, over-the-top chase with Vince and Brian hauling a huge vault (shades of hijacked ATM machines) with their souped-up Dodge Chargers is too long on smash-ups and too short on thrills.
And yet….just when you think there’s no more charge in this series’ creative battery, you find yourself hoping as you leave the theatre that they’ll find just the right imaginative cables to jumpstart these demon drivers and their cars for more, and more worthy, cinematic mileage. A Universal Pictures release, rated PG-13
Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster take a leap in
‘Fast Five’ Leaves You Hoping For
More From Fast and Furious Guys
By Maggie Scott
Your favorite gearheads are back; the boys with Valvoline in their blood and Hemis in their hearts, in Fast Five, director Justin Lin’s newest installment in the Fast and Furious franchise.
Bringing you up to zero-to-sixty-in-seconds speed, the story picks up where the last film ended with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) about to be spectacularly rescued off his prison-bound bus by his best bud Brian (Paul Walker) and Dom’s sister, Mia (Jordana Brewster), Brian’s lover.
Reunited in the slums of Rio, the hard-up trio takes an “easy money” job hijacking some high-end cars off a train. But their unaware that one of the cars contains information crucial to the illegal operations of Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), a man who’s bought the loyalty of the slums with electricity and running water.
Since DEA agents were gunned down during the hijack, not only Brazilian police, but elite federal agents led by the muscle-bound Luke Hobbs (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) are breathing hard down the necks of Dom and Brian.
Along with Elena (Elsa Pataky), one of the force’s “incorruptible” officers, Hobbs and his men invade Dom’s hideout, guns blazing; only to face competition from Reyes’s men on the same mission. Shaking them all off for the time being, Vince lays out “one last job: to take every last dime of Reyes’s money and disappear.” As good as Vince and Brian are, they’re going to “need a team”: fast-talkers, fast drivers who “won’t crack under pressure” and fast fingers with circuits, weapons and punching through walls. The
job could net them an even split of one-hundred million dollars.
Hit once by Vince and his team (Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Tego Calderon, Don Omar), Reyes moves his money to a vault in the bowels of the municipal police department; and the mission impossible, turned mission insane, begins. Missing the major elements of what made the earlier films peel-out entertainment, Fast Five is fuel-injected with warm fuzzies instead of adrenalin.
The occasional shots of scantily clad Brazilian bodies seem obligatory, and there’s one lame drag race and a couple of ho-hum sequences of the team pushing the limits of their cars to fake out surveillance cameras.
Hobbs comes across as a blow hard Terminator and we’ve heard the team members’ comic relief wisecracks before. Unless you’re into muscle cars, the wheels aren’t impressive, and the final, over-the-top chase with Vince and Brian hauling a huge vault (shades of hijacked ATM machines) with their souped-up Dodge Chargers is too long on smash-ups and too short on thrills.
And yet….just when you think there’s no more charge in this series’ creative battery, you find yourself hoping as you leave the theatre that they’ll find just the right imaginative cables to jumpstart these demon drivers and their cars for more, and more worthy, cinematic mileage. A Universal Pictures release, rated PG-13
