Since Brian O'Conner and Mia Toretto broke Dom Toretto 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.
Genres: Action/Adventure and Sequel Running Time: 2 hr. 10 min. Release Date: April 29th, 2011 (wide) MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, sexual content and language.
Cast And Credits
Starring:
Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson
Directed by:
Justin Lin
Produced by:
Michael Fottrell, Neal H. Moritz
At one point during the preordained throwdown between the two colossi who stride through “Fast Five,†Dwayne Johnson rips off his bulletproof vest with the practiced economy of a 17th-century courtesan flinging off her corset. His character, a professional tough guy bluntly named Hobbs, has just found his fugitive bad twin, Dom, the gnomic guru of the “Fast and Furious†franchise, played by Vin Diesel. They are the fast and, yes, the furious. Yet as these giants grasp each other’s bulging muscles, their bald heads rearing in the frame with tumescent vigor, it’s easy to imagine that they’d like some alone time.
They don’t get it, largely because the earth might spin off its axis if they did, though also because the director Justin Lin, having come of cinematic age in the maximalist era of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, cleaves to the principle of more. About the only silence you hear in this movie, amid the crunch of metal and the hard rain of shattering glass, is the one between Dom’s ears. Given that he’s been molded along the bulbous lines of Sly and Arnold, but with a hip-hop backbeat, this makes sense. Words, after all, are tricky, undependable things, and Dom communicates just fine with glares (darting, lingering, burning) and gears (fast, faster, fastest). When he zoom-zooms, everyone listens.
Fast Five†is the fifth installment in this surprisingly durable, often absurdly entertaining series, though the fourth chronologically. I didn’t notice or care about the disjointed time frame, what with all the distracting noise on screen. In a free-for-all like this, where the laws of gravity and dictates of narrative logic are left to eat dust, it doesn’t matter when anything takes place or why. Here things happen â€" like two racing cars pulling, with choreographed precision, an enormous safe through Rio de Janeiro without killing the entire populace â€" because the filmmakers make it so. Characters, like franchises, can even rise from the dead, as with Han (Sung Kang), who checked out in the previous movie, “Tokyo Drift.†In genre filmmaking it’s all about the eternal return.
Han’s seeming resurrection allows him to reunite with Dom and much of the old crew, including Brian (Paul Walker, wooden), a former cop and street-racing fiend who’s in love with Dom’s sister, Mia (Jordana Brewster, leaden). Shortly after the movie opens, these well-matched empty vessels are making goo-goo eyes at each other on a Brazilian train, a lull before the over-the-top robbery that sparks the combustible action. Mr. Lin, a smart tease, waits before showing Mr. Diesel in all his hypertrophied glory. Dom enters as a cubistic enigma â€" a hammy hand manhandling a gear shift, a bulky outline in long shot â€" before bursting into full view in a nimbus of white light, a cross slung around his neck to announce his status as the franchise redeemer.
He doesn’t save it alone, having help from Tyrese Gibson and the moonlighting musicians Chris Bridges (a k a Ludacris), Tego Calderón and Don Omar. On the little ladies’ side a former Miss Israel, Gal Gadot, mostly mounts and dismounts a motorcycle, though she also points her bony, bikinied hips toward the story’s ogling heavy, Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida). The Spanish actress Elsa Pataky, as a Brazilian cop, mainly bats her lovely lashes at Dom. All these types are in play because Dom wants to rip off Reyes, though the big steal here is from the “Ocean’s Eleven†series, innocuous pilfering that helps put meat on what had become an emaciated run of flicks. Mr. Johnson, trying his best to look serious, is the gravy.
Manufactured for extreme wows and not a single thought, “Fast Five†is an exemplar of industrial moviemaking calculation, one that combines demographic savvy with revving engines, grunting men, crashing cars and promenading female bumpers that are made for looking but not touching, partly to maintain the child-friendly PG-13 rating, partly to keep the men and action moving relentlessly forward. In between the increasingly over-the-top action scenes that turn Rio into another demolition derby for visiting Americans, the writer Chris Morgan tosses in a little God talk and some manly jabber about family (along with some self-aware laughs), if not enough to provoke even the young and the restless to start texting. The only time you won’t be watching the screen is when your eyes have squeezed shut because you’re laughing so hard.
At one point during the preordained throwdown between the two colossi who stride through “Fast Five,†Dwayne Johnson rips off his bulletproof vest with the practiced economy of a 17th-century courtesan flinging off her corset. His character, a professional tough guy bluntly named Hobbs, has just found his fugitive bad twin, Dom, the gnomic guru of the “Fast and Furious†franchise, played by Vin Diesel. They are the fast and, yes, the furious. Yet as these giants grasp each other’s bulging muscles, their bald heads rearing in the frame with tumescent vigor, it’s easy to imagine that they’d like some alone time.
Fast Five†is the fifth installment in this surprisingly durable, often absurdly entertaining series, though the fourth chronologically. I didn’t notice or care about the disjointed time frame, what with all the distracting noise on screen. In a free-for-all like this, where the laws of gravity and dictates of narrative logic are left to eat dust, it doesn’t matter when anything takes place or why. Here things happen â€" like two racing cars pulling, with choreographed precision, an enormous safe through Rio de Janeiro without killing the entire populace â€" because the filmmakers make it so. Characters, like franchises, can even rise from the dead, as with Han (Sung Kang), who checked out in the previous movie, “Tokyo Drift.†In genre filmmaking it’s all about the eternal return. 
Manufactured for extreme wows and not a single thought, “Fast Five†is an exemplar of industrial moviemaking calculation, one that combines demographic savvy with revving engines, grunting men, crashing cars and promenading female bumpers that are made for looking but not touching, partly to maintain the child-friendly PG-13 rating, partly to keep the men and action moving relentlessly forward. In between the increasingly over-the-top action scenes that turn Rio into another demolition derby for visiting Americans, the writer Chris Morgan tosses in a little God talk and some manly jabber about family (along with some self-aware laughs), if not enough to provoke even the young and the restless to start texting. The only time you won’t be watching the screen is when your eyes have squeezed shut because you’re laughing so hard.
