Out of all the movies made that have been dubbed Fast and Furious, I’ve seen exactly one. This one. So, I’m not really the most educated source to go to when it comes to a critique of the fifth film in this series; but I think I’ve seen enough action films to go ahead and take a stab at it anyways. And seeing as this movie has way more in common with your typical heist film than it does the previous four films, which I understand were about illegal car racing, it doesn’t feel much like they were required viewing. What we have here is a gathering of all of the disparate characters from those different race sequels for an Oceans 11-esque cash grab. We even get the typical heist movie recruitment scene where Vin Diesel runs down who each character is and what their specialty is going to be. And that’s not all; we get a lot of scenes that we’ve seen in other movies before. Fast Five is a movie about “one last job” for Heaven’s sake. Don’t go in expecting originality. And I didn’t, but still, the lack of originality to be found here in this fifth installment of an action movie franchise isn’t so much surprising as it is egregious. If you told me that this film started as an already existing action script that had been sitting on a shelf somewhere for the past couple decades and was haphazardly re-written to be another Fast feature, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. And if you told me that this was a script composed of nothing but a patchwork of well-worn action movie tropes due to the studios’ increasing reliance on sequels and remakes to turn a profit and the increasingly tight schedules that they demand these sequels and remakes be pumped out on, I would be even less surprised.
While most of what we get in Fast Five is familiar faces put into familiar situations, the big addition to this one is the inclusion of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson playing a lawman sent to hunt Vin Diesel’s outlaw down. At the turn of this new century, when all of the action icons from the 80s were winding down in their careers, a lot of people were questioning who would take their places to become the new standard bearers of the action genre. At that point, Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson were probably the best bets. Both men were burly, both were physical, both had some acting chops, and both projected an inherent charisma. If anybody had what it would take to step into the shoes of Schwarzenegger and Stallone, then surely it would be these two slabs of beef. Things didn’t quite end up working out that way though. Diesel had some success with his role as the villain in Pitch Black and the first Fast and the Furious film. He had a big starring, action debut in xXx. But not many people remember that film for anything other than sucking. And not many people remember the Diesel-free Fast sequels or the Pitch Black sequel for anything. So we got the movie where he played a meathead forced to take care of children instead of more action films. Then Diesel kind of just went away for a while. Similarly, Johnson’s career never quite went down the action path that people imagined it would either. He started out with some lower tier action fare that people responded to well enough in things like Walking Tall and The Rundown, but then he seemed to inexplicably find his real groove as an actor doing family films and comedies. You know, playing the role of the meathead who is forced to take care of children. Before you knew it, Johnson cut most of the bulk leftover from his wrestling days and started doing his best to distance himself from his “The Rock” moniker in order to position himself as a comedic leading man. It looked like the big bucks just weren’t in action films anymore, and the guys who were supposed to be the next generation instead ended up being the guys who abandoned a sinking ship. But recently the Fast franchise has offered a last chance for these would be icons. Diesel returned to a starring role in the fourth, and then this fifth promised to have the two big guys butt bald heads for the first time ever. The Rock even put back on a bunch of muscle and returned to wrestling in preparation. Could Fast Five be the last big hope for a struggling action genre? Not really. The best parts of the film are definitely the sequences where Diesel and Johnson go up against each other, but there’s just too much other lame stuff mucking up the works to make this almost dream pairing an actual success.
While the advertising of this movie, rightly, painted it as a cat and mouse game between Diesel’s Dominic Toretto and Johnson’s government agent Hobbs, what the film is instead is a heist story of Diesel’s character trying to steal from a drug kingpin (with Hobbs hanging out somewhere in the background for much of the film). The problem with that is the drug kingpin, Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), is probably the most boring, generic villain that I’ve ever seen in a film. It feels like the script didn’t even come up with a character for him and instead just left footnotes saying [do something a powerful crime lord would do here]. Fast Five says that if you have someone pour somebody a glass of whiskey menacingly, kill one of his underlings suddenly, and oogle a woman’s goodies lecherously, then that’s detail enough to create an effective screen villain. That’s not really the case. I defy anyone to give me a detail about Reyes’ character other than the fact that he is evil and has an accent. Johnson at least spits Hobbs’ macho dialogue with enough conviction, bulging biceps, and glistening sweat to milk some energy out of his scenes. This should have been his film, but instead we spend far too much time watching de Almeida’s character set up deals and control the local cops, all in boring fashion.
And while Diesel has enough of a physical presence and a growly charisma to pass as an action lead, the same cannot be said for the rest of his crew. This is actually the first time I’ve seen a film with Paul Walker in it, or at least I’m 90% certain it is. If you were to put him in a lineup with nine other generic looking white guys I’m pretty sure it would be little more than luck guiding my hand in pointing him out. I would struggle to describe what I thought of Walker’s performance in this film, but luckily the adjective “Milquetoast” was coined for just this occasion. And, similarly, if you asked me to describe anything about Jordana Brewster’s performance as Mia, I would struggle to come up with anything to say other than skinny. Whenever she was onscreen I found myself just focusing on how much of her skeletal system I could see struggling against her skin, and she wasn’t offering up any amount of emoting or dynamism to take my mind off of the situation. It felt like they cast a taxidermied Karen Carpenter as Vin Diesel’s sister. Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, Gal Godot, Tego Calderon, and Don Omar round out Diesel’s crew of miscreants. I don’t know how effectively their characters were played in the previous Fast films that they appeared in, but here they are given less than nothing to work with. Most of the action that we get is saved for Diesel, Walker, and Johnson, and the rest of the characters don’t get much to do other than sit around going over blueprints and trading insults back and forth. And if there is anything that Fast Five doesn’t do well it’s witty banter and moments of levity. The jokes and good-natured ribbing that make up a large part of the dialogue in this film are so forced and poorly written that I started feeling bad for everyone involved. I hope that being a side character in Fast Five pays well, because it seems like as tedious a job in the acting world as you can get.
When the script isn’t trying to make us laugh and winkingly remind us that we’re seeing characters that we know and love interacting together in a sort of Fast and Furious version of the Laugh Olympics, it spends the rest of its time showing us the planning of a robbery that never really happens and making us sit through lame, clunky speeches about the importance of family. Yeah, that’s right, Fast Five of all movies has lengthy morality speeches that read like they could be taken straight out of the third act of an episode of Full House. I was appalled. Given that nothing the film was offering outside of the action sequences was agreeing with me at all, it became super important for its success that the action scenes went above and beyond and really blew me away. Fast Five is, first and foremost, a stupid action movie. So if it was able to give me a bunch of awesome, stupid action to be thrilled by, then all of that other stuff about wooden acting, paper-thin characters, and lame dialogue wouldn’t really have mattered. Unfortunately I found the action sequences to be too few. And the ones we got, while spectacularly conceived, weren’t executed as effectively as I would have liked. The action of Fast Five was a case of the director having eyes bigger than his stomach.
Fast Five drops us right off in the middle of its action. We’re shown flashbacks of Toretto getting sentenced to 25 years in prison and being boarded onto a bus heading for some sort of prison out in the middle of the desert. But before it can get there it is surrounded, on a conveniently abandoned stretch of highway, by a couple of fast moving cars driven by Mia (Brewster) and O’Conner (Walker). A couple of seconds of high speed, precision driving later and the bus is in the air, hitting the ground, and rolling countless times across the desert floor. The scene is horrific, the destruction total; and yet we’re soon told that this was the planned means of escape and Diesel’s character has been retrieved from the wreckage with nary a scratch on him. From scene one all of the gravity, all of the danger of the car crashes in this film are portrayed as being nothing to worry about. Characters fly through the air, hit the ground, crash in cars, smash through buildings, and never does anyone come out of it the worse for wear. Superman has Kryptonite because if he didn’t there wouldn’t be any way to hurt him and there wouldn’t be any inherent drama in his battles. Watching him systematically succeed at everything without breaking a sweat would become boring and redundant. Diesel and crew have no Kryptonite, and worse, their screenwriters don’t seem to understand why they would need any.
A train robbery scene soon follows that I enjoyed much more than the opening prison break. Our trio of protagonists are tasked with driving up to a moving train, cutting a big hole in the side of it, and driving several expensive muscle cars out of the hole and into the terrain below without completely destroying them. It’s ridiculous, and impossible, and much of what we see defies the laws of physics; but it’s presented as being pretty exciting. They get caught in the act, there’s some gunfire, some betrayal, a few explosions, and finally a pulse quickening beat the clock sequence as the train speeds toward a cliff. The linear motion of the train helped the action to be shot in a way that was easy to follow, much of what we get relied on real destruction and thrilling stunt work rather than cheesy looking CG and green screen visuals, and it all came off as being one of the most epic and large action sequences I have seen since something like True Lies. But then, the end of that beat the clock sequence cheated. It put two characters in a situation that was certain death and simply had them survive anyways, with no explanation. Perhaps these characters have mutant healing factors or enhanced alien genetics that have been established in one of the previous four films, and I’m simply ignorant of all the facts. Perhaps: but probably not. If the first scene hinted at a movie that was all bark, but no real bite, then the end of this train sequence solidified the fact. These characters are bulletproof, it’s no use getting invested in what they’re doing whatsoever. It’s all just distracting lights and motion.
My reaction to the action only got worse from there. Not only does it start to come too infrequently, the shooting and editing of it gets worse and worse as the film goes on. There is a foot chase scene when The Rock’s character first catches up with our protagonists that was a complete load of garbage. No rules of how to present sequential, visual storytelling are followed. The action is shot from every angle with no rhyme or reason, and no attention paid to making sure the characters maintain consistent location relationships with one another. You never have any idea where anybody is, how close they are to being caught, or why you should care about any of the choppy, quick edited nonsense that’s on the screen in front of you. And then it ends by getting two more characters out of an impossible situation with a lazy, blatant disregard for human mortality. How do you end an action sequence that has hit a dead end? Just have somebody jump off of that cliff that’s been presented as an impossible obstacle and then have them show up in perfect condition for the next scene without making any mention of their previous plight. Who cares? It’s not like any of this stuff matters.
Then it all leads up to a ridiculous climax where an entire bank vault is stolen by being pulled from it’s foundation by two muscle cars and then dragged at high speeds through the city of Rio. I don’t consider this a spoiler, as it was in all of the advertising for the film, and was probably the big selling point next to The Rock’s involvement. Much will probably be said about the logistics of two cars being able to actually do that to a bank vault of that size, but this wasn’t my problem with the scene at all. I’m willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of fun, as long as what I’m watching doesn’t get too insulting. The issue I had with the climax was the ridiculous amount of damage that the sequence caused. Once again, this is epic, grandiose stuff. Countless cars are destroyed, buildings are smashed, steel wires traveling at high speeds cut everything in their path in half, and people scatter in fear like roaches when the lights get turned on. If even a quarter of the reckless destruction that occurred in this scene happened it would be the cause of the end of dozens of innocent lives. Yet Fast Five doesn’t show us a single person get taken out. It’s A-Team violence if B.A. Baracus was lobbing nuclear weapons at people and still no deaths were occurring on screen. This would be fine if it were happening in a nihilist film that reveled in destruction and didn’t treat any of its characters like real human beings, but Fast Five spends a frustratingly boring amount of its run time selling us on the fact that our protagonists are heroes with hearts of gold who would never kill anyone. One of the big plot points is that they are being wrongfully blamed for murders that they didn’t, and would never commit. They are just a loving “familia” of psychotic, violent criminals after all. And yet, after listening to all of that garbage, their big plan is to destroy a large part of a crowded city in broad daylight, killing what must have been at least dozens of innocent civilians in order to steal $100 million worth of drug money. It’s at this point that I have no choice but to just give up. If Fast Five would have just shut up and been a dumb action film none of this would have mattered, but it spends too much of its time talking and then contradicting what it says.
