Fast Five another engaging high-speed drive

SPOILER ALERT! This review contains spoilers for some scenes in Fast Five. Proceed at your own discretion.

After loving The Fast and the Furious, I was less in love with its two sequels. They felt like trying to put something together without half the pieces, and so it didn’t surprise me that they didn’t come close to the original. Fast Five reinforces what we learned from Fast & Furious: don’t mess with something that works so well.

Picking up from the end of Fast & Furious (in fact, it opens with the final few minutes of that film, ostensibly to refresh your memory), Fast Five sees Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) busted out of a prison bus by now ex-federal agent Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker), Dom’s sister Mia (Jordana Brewster), and his buddies Leo and Santos (Tego Calderon and Don Omar). Everyone is on the run yet again. Mia and Brian end up in Rio de Janeiro, where they reunite with Dom’s childhood friend Vince (Matt Schulze). Vince persuades Mia, Brian and Dom to help him with the theft of some high-end cars, but things go wrong in a hurry. Our heroes soon find themselves afoul of Rio’s supreme bad guy, Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida, also known as Ramon Salazar on 24), as well as being blamed for the deaths of three federal agents, which means the relentless Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) is also after them. It’s up to Dom, Brian, Mia and a cast of friends from all four films in the series to take care of Reyes, evade Hobbs and find a way to disappear for good.

The one thing Fast & Furious has that Fast Five didn’t is a real emotional strength, which was due to the plot of Fast & Furious being so intensely personal. Other than that, Fast Five does all the things right that the previous film did. That begins with the characters. Diesel and Walker are now old hands at this, making Dom and Brian as awesome as ever. Brian is still with Mia, and their relationship takes another turn that forces him to reevaluate his priorities again. Walker does a great job of conveying just how much Brian has changed and is still changing. You can see growth in Mia, whom Brewster has brought out of her brother’s shadow between this and the last movie. Dom, despite having been on the run for what now seems like a huge chunk of his life, is still the authority figure amongst the group and still holding on to who he is, no matter where he is. Diesel never loses sight of his character even as he’s at the center of all the action.

You might not remember all the supporting characters, but within minutes of their arrival, it’ll come back to you. In particular, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges and Tyrese Gibson nearly steal the movie with the banter between Tej and Roman, which hasn’t dulled since 2 Fast 2 Furious. And even though there’s a cast of double digits, the script finds space for each of them, without losing sight of the fact that Dom and Brian are the heart of this franchise. It’s an impressive balancing act, which feels like a family reunion.

All these characters thrive on action, and Fast Five doesn’t skimp on that. Like the previous movie, it wastes little time in giving us one heck of a setpiece, this one involving a train and a nod to Diesel’s xXx; it’s applause-worthy. From that point on, there’s lots of shooting, a few fistfights, and some cool driving, though not as much as I’d hoped for. (Dom and Brian’s arrival at the local street racing hangout is cut disappointingly short.) There’s a great foot chase across the rooftops of Rio, the almost-mandatory brawl between Dom and Hobbs that has a nice callback to The Fast and the Furious, an excuse for Diesel to wield a shotgun yet again, and a huge final act that’s as big as any I’ve ever seen in this franchise. On more than one occasion, I was cheering. From start to finish, it’s unapologetic, rousing fun.

What I admire most about this film is that it balances characters with action. Though this is an action-oriented flick, we never lose sight of who these people are, what they’re going through, and why we should care. Too many action movies have been made where the heroes are just interchangeable caricatures. Fast Five proves that a film can be driven by its action, but also maintain strong characters. This is not just another big, mindless, loud “blockbuster movie.” Not by a long shot.

The icing on the proverbial cake is that Fast Five is as visually interesting as its predecessors. The other four films looked truly stunning, especially when they were re-released on Blu-ray, and this one is equally impressive. Director Justin Lin gives us plenty of epic shots of Rio, from the skyline to the beach. Action sequences are handled well and don’t disintegrate into nausea-inducing blurs (which is more than I can say for Paul Walker’s last film, Takers). Colors pop on the screen. If you have the option, this is a movie where it’s worth plunking down the extra money for IMAX. It really is an experience.

There are three things which keep me from giving Fast Five a perfect score. The first is the character of Elena, played oh so flatly by Elsa Pataky. She adds little to the film in general, and then there’s a heavy-handed scene at her home, which rather blatantly tells us that Elena is to be Dom’s new love interest. Not only does Pataky have zero chemistry with Diesel, but the scene also serves to show us how he acts circles around her. Between this and the scenes with Gisele in Fast & Furious, the writers’ attempts to give Dom a new love interest have been miserable failures. (In defense of Gisele and actress Gal Gadot, her character is allowed to actually develop on her own in Fast Five, which makes her plenty watchable here.)

Speaking of love interests, two of them return in a post-credits scene that was as bad as the rest of this movie was good. We’re treated to Monica Fuentes (Eva Mendes) showing up with a photo of Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), leading us to infer that Letty may still be alive. I despise this scene on many levels. For one, I am a fan of neither Mendes or Rodriguez, but that’s the least of my concerns. The character of Monica Fuentes was relatively pointless in 2 Fast 2 Furious – an obvious replacement for Mia, and a poor one at that. With Brian and Mia reunited in Fast & Furious, I can’t see what purpose Monica would serve except to be a bother to both him and the audience. While I’m not a fan of the character of Letty, either, at least I understood why she meant a lot to Dom, and her death in Fast & Furious lent the story a real emotional core. To bring her back from the dead would undercut that whole movie, to say nothing of how ridiculous it would be; this isn’t a comic book. This scene actually induced groans and expletives at one showing I attended, and I hope it has no bearing on Fast Six, which rumblings say is already in development.

The last but relatively minor quibble on my list is that Fast Five has much less street racing in it than any of the previous entries in the series. I love the street racing culture and action that The Fast and the Furious introduced us to; that was a big part of what made that film — and this franchise — unique. I don’t want to see that forgotten. Especially as we’ve already seen someone attempt to make a chain of heist movies (I’m looking at you, Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen).

Despite those nitpicks, though, that’s not enough to keep me from loving this movie. It reunites us with characters that we can still embrace now as much as we did before, yet who have also grown and changed over the years. Those characters, in turn, take the audience on an action-packed, attention-arresting ride that could only be accomplished in the movies. I didn’t think about checking my watch once during Fast Five, but I certainly did after…to remind myself that it’d only be two days until I could see it again. This is a drive that you shouldn’t miss.

Clacked by Brittany Frederick
on Apr 29, 2011 @ 20:26 EST5EDT