Fast Five (2011)
Directed by Justin Lin
Former cop Brian O'Conner partners with ex-con Dom Toretto on the opposite side of the law. Since Brian 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.
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30 films that influenced Fast Five
What critics say influenced Fast Five
This is far from a glowing endorsement as the pic isn't remotely an overall action masterpiece, and it does lose some forward momentum when it starts to turn into something akin to a far less clever or smart version of "Ocean's Eleven."
The plot's also a stunning "Ocean's Eleven" ripoff, and action stops being cool once you laugh at the absurdity of it—like Dom and Brian driving off a cliff without getting a scratch.
Call it a cash-grab or a no-brainer beginning to the 2011 summer movie season, but taken on its own simple merits, and divorced from the stupidity of its four predecessors, the handily-titled Fast Five is an upgrade that does sequelizing right: it sticks with just enough of the established formula to keep the old fans happy, it brings back "a lot of the old gang" in an affably pleasant fashion, it borrows (and quite liberally) from popular heist movies like Ocean's Eleven and The Italian Job, and (best of all) it seems to actively avoid "churning up the same old wake."
The point, of course, is that this advances the story so that it can turn into a less clever hybrid of Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and The Italian Job (2003).
Something like Ocean’s Eleven and its various numerations, except with muscle cars and knuckleheads and without the laughs.
Who cares if, in its place, we get a shoddy Ocean’s Eleven heist knockoff, the kind in which someone says things like, “We need a bisexual Martian who can pick locks and do improv,” and then someone else says, “I know a guy,” and then those requested talents never get used?
The second half of "Fast Five" elaborately and humorously plays out the back-and-forth tactics that ultimately lead to a stunning finale chase sequence spanning much of downtown Rio, and seems inspired in part by a similarly spectacular scene in "Bad Boys II."
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.
Convinced that more of the same won’t cut it at this point, the film thus goes for safe reinvention, turning itself into the perfunctory love child of Bad Boys II and Ocean’s Eleven .
But if you know big-studio action cinema at all, and know how good it can be when it is good, you'll understand that this film is like the improbable offspring of " Bad Boys II " and Soderbergh 's "Ocean" films -- the visceral violence and vengeance meshing perfectly with the clockwork cleverness of the caper.
As the original movie borrowed heavily from Point Break (1991), so Fast Five borrows from the various Ocean’s movies (take your pick) and all the other variations on the “one last heist” scenario that requires assembling a crack crew of experts that will work together as a perfectly tuned symbiotic whole, which is essentially what returning screenwriter Chris Morgan (who penned the last two sequels) does by raiding the previous films for their surviving characters.
Paul Walker is Paul Walker; if you saw him in The Skulls, you know what to expect (but then again, Keanu Reeves emerged from Point Break a bona fide action hero, so you never know).
Lin also borrows from Andrew Davis' classic "The Fugitive" - Dwayne Johnson turns up as a relentless, order-barking U.S. fed in Rio to find Diesel, leading to a massive bald-head-and-biceps smackdown.
They're pursued by Agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), even more muscled and sweaty than Dom, and expressing a lack of concern for his prey's sort-of innocence far less wittily than Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive .
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Time is taken in putting them face to face — long enough to think the suspense is not unlike waiting for Al Pacino to meet Robert De Niro in “Heat,’’ long enough to think, even fleetingly, that Diesel and Johnson are the Pacino and De Niro of absurdly muscled, totally bald, racially mixed action heroes.
Lin teases with an open-ended ending that screams, “Drivers, restart your engines!” Hey, why not combine franchises a la “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man”?
Instead, I’ll concentrate on the way Lin stages the scene, which may be the most singularly destructive demolition derby since John Landis laid waste to half of Chicago in The Blues Brothers.
It's gleefully ridiculous, as if you're suddenly watching the climax of "The Blues Brothers."
It’s not the cars that are really wanted, it’s something in one of the cars—something involving the DEA and a Brazilian drug lord named Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida, Desperado).
Dom shows up, the heist goes wrong (the cars were seized by the DEA and several agents end up killed), putting them in the doghouse of corrupt Rio businessman Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida, portraying the same evil Hispanic he played in Clear and Present Danger and Desperado ), who wanted one of the seized cars because it contained a microchip that just happened to contain the location of all his ill-gotten money.
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We’ve all known it was coming, since the days of Vin Diesel’s performance in xXx to Dwayne Johnson’s take on Beck in The Rundown.
Plus, “Fast Five” also benefits immensely from the inclusion of WWE wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (“The Rundown” and “Walking Tall”), who brings his usual mix of bravado and effective humor.
Dom shows up, the heist goes wrong (the cars were seized by the DEA and several agents end up killed), putting them in the doghouse of corrupt Rio businessman Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida, portraying the same evil Hispanic he played in Clear and Present Danger and Desperado ), who wanted one of the seized cars because it contained a microchip that just happened to contain the location of all his ill-gotten money.