MOVIE REVIEW: 'Fast Five'

Movie review in the Friday, April 29 Oregonian....

 

About a minute into "Fast Five," there's a moment that pretty much sums up the last few films in this increasingly physics-light carsploitation series. Brian (Paul Walker) is helping Dom (Vin Diesel) bust out of the pen. If memory serves, Brian achieves this feat by backing a car into a moving prison bus -- which causes the bus to neatly flip over the muscle car and tumble end-over-end forever, without seriously injuring anyone. It's gleefully ridiculous, as if you're suddenly watching the climax of "The Blues Brothers."

Now. If you're capable of finding that sort of collateral-damage-disregarding nonsense amusing (and I am, in the same way I find the "Bad Boys II" car chase amusing), I have good news: "Fast Five" is kind of a fun surprise.

At minimum, "Five" is a damn sight better than the last CGI-choked entry in the "Fast and the Furious" series. The producers and returning director Justin Lin give the series a nice shot in the arm by making three tweaks. First, they set the new film amid the spectacular decay of Rio, where Brian and Dom and Mia (Jordana Brewster) are on the lam as fugitives.

Second, they build the film around an over-the-top heist plot, which I'm told is the direction they'll be taking this oddly durable series henceforth. Dom and Brian take on a crime kingpin (Joaquim de Almeida) by cherry-picking an all-star team from the previous flicks -- including Tyrese Gibson, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, and Sung Kang (whose megasuave character, Han, still spends all his scenes casually munching on snacks).

Third, and best, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson joins the cast as a ruthless federal manhunter whose task force is assigned to nab Dom and Brian at any cost. Imagine if Tommy Lee Jones' team from "The Fugitive" spent three hours a day pumping iron and 25 hours a day glistening, and you're starting to get the idea. Between this and last year's overlooked "Faster," it's great to see The Rock re-embracing the action genre, and when his clobbering match with Diesel finally happens, it's as outlandishly room-wrecking as I'd hoped.

Let's be clear: "Fast Five" is one of those movies where any logical or end-of-narrative-storytelling critique you lob at it is valid. I enjoyed it anyway, because it so clearly enjoys itself and that enjoyment somehow becomes infectious. The action set pieces are huge and cartoonish and violent and inventive (though, again, I could do with less CGI, especially toward the end), and the movie has a hard-to-manufacture charisma that probably hasn’t been in play since the first "Fast and the Furious." This thing will kill in Portland's beer theaters.
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(130 min., rated PG-13) Grade: B-minus

'Fast Five' (The Oregonian, Friday, April 29, 2011)

Comments

[Carson Ahlstrom]

I think Fast Five is the best film of the series. The movie violates every law of physics, but it has Dwayne Johnson and a lot of testosterone. Definitely a winner.

[Ivo Beutler]

They say director Justin Lin is the next Michael Bay. That could be right, since Fast Five is almost like Transformers without the robots and Megan Fox. But Lin didn't just focus on the action scenes. He added depth to the story and injected new life on it with Dwayne Johnson. You have to give Justin Lin a hand.