If there was a limit for the number of bald tough guys in one movie, Fast Five would just be scraping the limit. It’s one of those films in which the action gets bigger and more unrealistic as the film progresses, but at the same time the sequences become increasingly awesome. Fast Five is jump-started with adrenaline and fueled by non-stop over-the-top action.
The fifth installment of the popular Fast & Furious film franchise brings together the characters of all the previous films. You have Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker), Mia Torreto (Jordana Brewster), Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Ludacris), Han (Sung Kang), Gisele (Gal Gadot) and even a cameo appearance from Eva Mendes. On top of all that, the series introduces Dwayne Johnson and Spanish actress Elsa Pataky as the forces hunting Toretto and his team.
This movie begins right where Fast & Furious ended. Brian and Mia break Dom out of prison, and they head south to lose the heat. They end up down in Rio de Janeiro, now being pursued by a special ops team. To gain absolute freedom, they have to pull one last job. They assemble a team of drivers to steal a vast sum of money from the Rio drug kingpin who wants their heads. The entire film is composed of one crazy action scene streaming into another, it’s a system that works very well here.
Director Justin Lin has crafted a well made film with Fast Five. Lin is progressively becoming one of the best directors in terms of filming bad-ass driving and fighting sequences. Also, even though the story isn’t great, at least Lin attempts to tell a story and the writers have come up with many new ways to wreck havoc while, to a large extent, avoiding the all-to-cliché approach of simply blowing everything up (like any Michael Bay film).
The acting is simple and fewer sentences with more than ten words are spoken. Dwayne Johnson speaks almost entirely in one-liners, his character seems to stand there with his muscles tensed for a majority of the film. Despite any problems that arise through the lack of characters with depth, this is still a great action movie. The first Fast & Furious told the story of a cop infiltrating an LA street racing gang. The fourth film in the franchise, the next one to continue the main storyline, brought the films out of LA and added many actions sequences on a much grander scale. The newest edition to the franchise improves on this by making the movie bigger in almost every way. Fast Five is an awesome action movie which adds on to an already great franchise.