Hi gang, Ben here. Long, long ago when I was just a wee lad of high school age – or maybe even middle school? – I saw a movie called The Fast and the Furious. I high-fived my friends a lot, we made fun of the part where the camera zooms through the laughable CGI engine, and I promptly forgot about it for a decade. There were other Fast and Furious movies, but I didn’t see ‘em. At a certain point all the Vin Diesel Fast and Furiouses and xXx’s started blending together. I knew that most of them were bad, and I didn’t feel like it was worth my time to sort out the one or two bits of wheat from the proverbial chaff.
So I rolled my eyes last month when the trailer for Fast Five started. Another one, great. But something magical happened in those two minutes. The stunts looked…cool. Really cool. Like, I mean, they drive a convertible off the side of a cliff and have to jump out before it hits the water and shit. I was genuinely excited to see a Fast and Furious movie. What the hell?
It’s unbelievable that Fast Five’s marketing campaign made me excited to revisit this silly, silly franchise. Because of that, I wish had been able to avoid the critical hype from the movie’s early screenings. The online geek community is going nuts for this movie. If only I had gone into Fast Five with my previously modest expectations intact, I imagine I would have had a ridiculously fun time. Don’t get me wrong, I still had a blast, but let’s be levelheaded here. Guys, this is still a Fast and Furious movie. I really hate being the voice of reason about a movie like Fast Five, but it’s not the second coming of Christ or anything. It’s not like The Rock killed Osama Bin Laden (or, wait, what?).
The entire purpose for delving into the world of Fast and the Furious again is to see some cars go fast and do crazy stunts. With Fast Five, director Justin Lin has really perfected what is compelling about the “make shit blow up good, fuck everything else” school of moviemaking. Movies are arguably spectacle as much as they are art, and if it weren’t for the current vogue of shakey-cam, choppy editing, and avoidable CGI, we could be in a real golden age of big budget stunt work right now. Fast Five excels at totally awesome, gloriously ridiculous, physics defying stunts.
Two scenarios stand out as the pinnacle reasons why you should see Fast Five: A sequence early in the movie finds our franchise heroes – tough guy with an honor code Dom (Vin Diesel), ex-cop-turned-roguish-car-thief Brian (Paul Walker), and Dom’s sister/Brian’s pregnant girlfriend/freakish anorexic Mia (Jordana Brewster) – stealing four cars by cutting a hole out of the side of a moving train, driving them onto a transport vehicle that’s running alongside the train, then being lowered on to the ground and jamming into gear at, like, 80 miles per hour. Oh yeah, and half the team defects halfway through the heist. And there are federal agents on board the train. And there is a cliff coming up so they better hurry. It’s like the shit I would have made up when I was 8 if I had been a complete badass.
Later, a climactic chase finds Dom and Brian hitching their cars to an 8 foot tall bank vault and speeding through downtown Rio de Janeiro with the city’s entire police force giving chase. Do you remember at the end of Bad Boys 2 when Will Smith drives a Humvee through a Cuban shantytown, destroying everything in his path? Imagine that but in downtown Rio with a 2-ton safe being dragged along behind. Though there are conspicuously few onscreen deaths, the toll must be in the thousands, as Dom and Brian level entire city blocks with their cargo. It is a sight to behold, perhaps the tip of the iceberg for “high concept” car chases.
Somewhere in between those two spectacular set pieces there’s, like, a plot. But it’s pretty generic. After all the shit they pulled in parts 1-4, Dom, Brian, and Mia skip the country for tropical Rio de Janeiro. They plan one last big heist to rob Rio’s biggest slumlord blind of his $100 millions of drug money, as good of an excuse as any to get the rest of the gang from the other movies back together. There’s comic relief black guy (Tyrese Gibson), Asian guy (Sung Kang), hot lady (Gal Gadot), comic relief Hispanic dudes (Tego Calderon and Don Omar), and other comic relief black guy (Ludacris). They are all from different parts of the Fast and Furious oeuvre, so some of them don’t know each other. That way, when one does something the others didn’t know he could do, he says, “I had a life before you knew me, you know.” It’s convenient, because I had no clue who these people were. For all I knew, one of these characters could build a NASA space shuttle from scratch, and it would have been in character as long as he said, “I had a life before you knew me, you know.” That must have been really useful for the writers. Munitions expert? Check. Encyclopedic knowledge of bank vault design? Sure, why the hell not?
The Rock joins in the fun as a U.S. federal agent tasked with tracking down Dom and his gang by any means necessary. The greatest complement I can give Mr. Rock is that it wouldn’t have been surprising in the least if he had been in two or three of the other Fast and Furiouses. He fits this fictional world like a glove. His buff, bald, humorless asshole is a perfect foil for Vin Diesel’s buff, bald, humorless asshole. The scene where they fight mano-a-mano and throw each other through approximately 17 brick walls is priceless.
Fast Five is loaded with unnecessary subplots, from Mia’s pregnancy to Dom’s romance with a Rio cop to Asian Guy’s romance with Hot Lady to, well, you get the idea. The Rock doesn’t need any romantic subplot because he’s too cool for that shit. He is on task.
Eva Mendes shows up at the end. I have no idea who she's supposed to be or why she's there, but can I just say, she is a nice looking lady. Thanks.
-Ben