Furious Five Get Fast In Rio

I'm tempted to say about this fifth entry in The Fast And The Furious franchise that if you've seen one, you've seen them all. After all, it's got the same life sapping performance from Paul Walker, the same ill-advised use of CGI and the same rambling plotting that made the other films so average. But Fast Five is a little different. It's got scale and it's got silliness. Tons of silliness.

First off the dialogue, as scripted by Fast Three & Four's Chris Morgan and Gary Scott-Thompson, is the dumbest, cringe inducing, most cliche ridden of the franchise to date. You can smell that shit coming from a mile away (and the films take themselves a touch too seriously to pull that kind of bullshit off well). With a bigger team dynamic to work with this time, the screen writers largely let the opportunity go to waste. You end up wishing for the alchemist hand of Joss Whedon to magically turn the leaden words into gold. It's also got a wee bit too much of the soap-opera family dramatics that over-whelmed the Lethal Weapon franchise in its later installments.

Then there's the ensemble cast, this time assembled like a greatest hits compilation from the other franchise entries. Walker is still a charisma vacuum, Vin Diesel is pitch perfect as ever, Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris get to do the comic relief jive banter (which works well in the group dynamic), Sun Kang (from Tokyo Drift) is a distraction as he died in third film, Jordana Brewster does her best Ali MacGraw impression and Gal Gadot and Elsa Patasky are both brain dead, wooden actresses AND jaw droppingly stunning eye candy. And the less said about the team of tree trunk law enforcers the better, which slows the pace considerably.

The biggest surprise is Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson as the cop sent to take our heroes down. Now I love The Rock. It says a lot about his measure as a movie star and thespian when he's the very best thing in the turd-fest Be Cool. But he's taken on a role far beyond his ability in Fast Five. Physically he's perfect, perfectly embodying the unstoppable force of nature who inevitably must go mano-et-mano with Vin and his team. But acting wise, he's incapable of turning the shitty dialogue into something convincing. The role he's been lumbered with is basically that of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive, and if Jones were cast I'm sure he'd be able to pull off the same kind of Oscar winning thesping he did in 1993. But Dwayne stumbles. Plus, the film follows the first film's basic plotting of relentless cop eventually teaming up with the 'anti-heroes'...except this time the cops motivations are so weak and so sudden it's utterly laughable. Again, in a more knowingly bullshit movie like Under Siege 2 or Passenger 57, this would work every time, but Fast Five still fancies itself as a proper thriller.

But, it is still good fun. Great locations, great stunts (the reliance on CGI is minimalised since the last movie), and the scale of the action is ramped up considerably...especially in an unbelievable, OTT chase sequence at the finale. The move away from street racing is a smart move and the swing towards heist movies (it's pretty much that contemporary Italian Job sequel they were always talking about) makes it far more accessible for haters of boy racers.

If you don't like the franchise then this won't change your mind, Fast Five is once again a solid entry in the series, and once again demonstrates it's a series with great, yet unrealised, potential.