“Fast Five "

By Bob Garver

__-_ I know by now what to expect from the “Fast and the Furious” franchise. People don’t see these movies because they’re good movies, they see them because seeing them in a crowded theater makes for a big party. I even gave a positive review to 2009’s “Fast & Furious” because even I had to admit that the party was a blast. So all “Fast Five” really needed to be was a fun, dumb action movie with fast cars. This past Friday the Cocoaplex was packed and my expectations were lowered, and “Fast Five” still managed to disappoint me on almost every level.
__-_ When we last left the franchise, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) was going to prison, having finally been captured after a history of implausible hijackings. He was on the bus to a penitentiary when we saw that a team of his friends led by Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) were in hot pursuit of the bus, no doubt ready to bust him out. At the start of this film, we get to see the follow-through. Turns out their plan was less eloquent than I thought. They cause the bus to crash and by pure luck Dominic is the only one to get away.
__-_ Dom, Brian, and Dom’s sister (Jordana Brewster) end up in Rio de Janeiro where the try to pull “one last job” where they are to steal a microchip from the DEA so they can sell it to a drug kingpin (Joaquin de Almeida). The job goes awry and they end up on the wrong side of both the DEA and the kingpin. Now they have a new “one last job”. They’ll steal the kingpin’s money and avoid the DEA at all cost. This will be doubly tough since the kingpin is a powerful figure in Rio and the DEA has called in the dangerous, determined Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to bring in Dom and Brian. It will take a whole team to pull this off.
__-_ It is at this point where the film can’t even be dumb properly. The rest of the team is made up of characters from the previous four films in the series. “Fast Five” expects us to actually remember these characters. Even the ones from the last movie barely registered with me, the older ones had gone off my radar entirely. While there might be a place in the film for the moderate star power of Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris (from 2003’s “2 Fast 2 Furious”), do they really expect anyone to care about Matt Schulze’s character from the decade-old original? There’s a difference between being clever (which the film thinks it is) and being unfairly complicated (which it definitely is). By the way, even more characters are re-introduced midway through the end credits.
__-_ The film doesn’t do action very well. The sequences are choppy and it’s hard to keep track of where the characters are in relation to each other. The botched hijacking at the beginning has a few exciting moments (and I’ll give credit to a particular spot involving a cliff), but then there’s a long stretch where our time is wasted with increasingly dull banter and one-liners. The cars themselves are conspicuous by their absence. There’s only one race, and it goes for two blocks. Yes, the climactic sequence involves a car chase, but it’s too little too late.
__-_ Perhaps the biggest flaw in “Fast Five” is that it really doesn’t want to be a “Fast and the Furious” movie at all. What it wants to be is “Ocean’s Eleven”. There is much focus on the finer points of the heist, which make for more needlessly complicated details that the film can’t even keep straight. I said the film should have been a fun, dumb action movie with fast cars. “Fast Five” is low on action, unforgivably low on cars, and dumb for the wrong reasons. I didn’t have much fun.

__-_ Two stars out of five.

__-_ “Fast Five” is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, sexual content, and language. Its runtime is 130 minutes.