Since Brian O’Conner and Mia Toretto broke Dom out of custody, they’ve blown across many borders to elude authorities. Now backed into a corner in Rio de Janeiro, they must pull one last job in order to gain their freedom. As they assemble their elite team of top racers, the unlikely allies know their only shot of getting out for good means confronting the corrupt businessman who wants them dead.
But he’s not the only one on their tail, hard-nosed federal agent Luke Hobbs never misses his target. When he is assigned to track down Dom and Brian, he and his strike team launch an all-out assault to capture them. But as his men tear through Brazil, Hobbs learns he can’t separate the good guys from the bad. Now, he must rely on his instincts to corner his prey…before someone else runs them down first.
Director Justin Lin returns to the Fast and the Furious franchise with his third instalment following ‘Tokyo Drift’ released in 2006, and then ‘Fast and Furious’ released in 2009. Lin has assembled a cast using various actors from several of the previous films to all return for this latest outing.
Without surpassing the original film, ‘Fast Five’ delivers a loud action packed enjoyable ride, hitting many of the marks that fans of the previous films would have come to expect. The cast is good looking, the dialogue cheesy, and the action sequences entirely over the top in an explosive popcorn manner.
‘Fast Five’ is well paced throughout, it quickly delves into the action from the start and returns to it regularly and does so in a more pragmatic manner than the previous film which tended to rely more heavily upon computer generated effects. This film takes a more balanced approach between practical and computer generated visuals, and really pushes the envelope in terms of exaggerated action sequences which tends to work for a film that isn’t taking itself too seriously.
This film decides to take a slightly different approach to the previous instalments in terms of the setup, coming across as more of a group heist film with less reliance upon the street racing scenes of the earlier films.
Vin Diesel and Paul Walker slide into their previous roles with ease bringing us more of the same, the remainder of the cast round things out in an entertaining manner and Dwayne Johnson delivers on what he’s there to do by bringing a hardened tough guy cop to the mix who complicates things somewhat for the main characters.
Story wise it’s fairly straight forward with a few turns which aren’t difficult to predict and a main villain who is pretty much a one note figure in the background who really fills no other role than providing the characters with a villain to face off against. Where ‘Fast Five’ does excel is the production values, compared to the earlier films it’s obvious this latest instalment had a decent production budget to work with, and it shows, this is a good looking film.
‘Fast Five’ isn’t going to win over any new fans to the franchise, but it does give its existing fans what is arguably the best instalment since the original. With a flimsy script, familiar performances, dialogue which is laughable at times, crazy car chases, car races, shoot outs, and punch ups it all comes together in such an entertaining manner.
I’m giving ‘Fast Five’ 3 out of 5 stars, it is released in cinemas around Australian on Wednesday 20 April 2011.