Fast Five

RATING: B-

So, this movie should totally have been the last gasp for a franchise that, up to this particular point, had never even gotten off the ground enough to die in the first place, right? Because the first four movies weren't good at all. And considering that that they were bringing back the same director that had given us the last two installments, this one shouldn't have been any different, right? Right? Yeah. About that... 

This fifth installment picks up literally right from where the last one left off, with Dominic Toretto being transported in a prison bus, and Brian, Mia and a couple others coming to save him. They do that... then they go hiding in Rio. After an auto theft incident (on a train!) gone wrong, their names shoot up on the Wanted list--enough to the point that DSS agent The Rock (aka Dwayne Johnson, aka Luke Hobbs in this movie) comes to Rio just to bring them in. Wanting to disappear permanently, Dom and crew do one last job: stealing all the money from a corrupt businessman who is at least partially responsible for them being extra wanted in the first place. 

Yup, this fifth movie in the franchise decides to shift gears... from racing to a heist film. Which is certainly a welcome change. In doing so, they bring in several characters from previous movies: Han from Tokyo Drift, Gisele from the fourth movie, Vince from the first movie (yes, seriously) and Roman and Tej from 2 Fast 2 Furious (which I didn't even watch, so this was my first introduction to them). Oh yeah, and these two guys Leo and Santos from the last movie that just kinda hang around and do random stuff are there too. 

This movie is an improvement over its predecessors in many ways, but realistic physics and stunts are not one of them (if anything, they're taken up a notch). In the very beginning, one car is able to somehow flip over the prison bus Dom is on (and all the prisoners live, even after the bus flips about ten times). Almost everything else is at least sort of tolerable... until we get to the climactic action sequence, which oddly ditches the heist theme for a drunken video game action sequence in which after all their planning they literally just drive through the wall of the place they're breaking into, tie a giant several-ton safe with money in it to two cars using tow cables, and then drag it all the way through Rio while utterly destroying all the cops in the process (they're basically all corrupt, so don't worry about it too much) and not having the cables snap or just get flipped over by the sheer weight of the safe they're attempting to drag. It's kind of fun... but it's also really stupid. 

But the film is a vast improvement over all the others in most of the other facets. Save for one very brief drag race, the street racing theme is dropped completely; which is honestly a bit of a welcome change. The "planning the heist" stuff is actually fairly cool. And there's actually quite a bit of levity and humor--something that was missing from previous installments. The actors all seem to have great chemistry with one another--particularly Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris (who provide most of the humor), the latter of whom is better than you'd expect. Dwayne Johnson is a super-welcome addition too, arguably now being the best actor in this entire series. In this movie, he's often spitting out ridiculous hammy lines you can't help but chuckle at. And few can pretend they weren't excited to see Vin Diesel and The Rock fight each other. 

What ultimately makes this installment so much more bearable? It's genuinely *fun.* Yes, it's a little ridiculous, over-the-top and even a little stupid at times, but it's still quite fun. And that's really what the other movies were truly missing. The first was sort of fun in a throwback-to-the-90's way, but the others weren't that at all. The fourth was at least interesting, so it was watchable, but there was very little levity in it. 

At this point, the franchise starts going the route of just being fun ridiculous movies that aren't meant to be taken too seriously. I am ultimately mostly fine with that. It probably means the films won't ever get ratings higher than this one did, but come on, who could ever really expect a franchise like this to have actual classics? For what it is--a fun popcorn action movie--it really works. It's a formula that really shouldn't have worked, but it somehow did.