Fast Five

And so, another summer starts. We kick off with 8 straight weeks of mindless entertainment, and what better movie to begin with than Fast Five. I saw this with Evan and Shaun, and we got there late (actually, Shaun was on time. Evan and I were late because I have terrible ideas about traffic, and Evan listens to them). We walked into the theatre just as it was starting. The studio logos had just faded, and an ominous voice was sentencing Dom Turetto (Vin Diesel) to jail.

About 30 seconds later, he's broken out by Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) and Dom's sister, Mia (Jordanna Brewster). They do this by making the prison bus lose control, then flip over many, many times. Yet no one is killed, and of course, Dom is the only one unaccounted for.

We soon meet up with Brian and Mia in Rio, taking a job for Vince (who I think is Letty's brother, from one of the previous films). Anyway, the job is to steel fancy cars from a train, so we cut to the train, speeding through the Brazilian outback (they have an outback?) Mia and Brian are on the train, while the other part of the gang drives up beside the train on a flatbed truck/dunebuggy, and cut through the side. The cars are then pull from the train onto the dunebuggy, then driven off into the desert. Mia makes off with the one car the boss actually wants (the boss is a drug dealer), and so the plot is on.

After a harrowing escape from the train when the rest of the gang tries to kill them, Brian and Dom (who finally showed up in Brazil, by the way), meet up with Mia and strip the car. Turns out there's a chip for a GPS navigator in there that lists all the addresses of where the drug dealer stores his money. All $100 million of it. On a side note, the drug dealer, Reyes, is played by Joaquim de Almeida, who's smooth but evil in all of his movies. Desperado? Smooth but evil. Clear and Present Danger? Smooth but evil. I think I've only ever seen him as a good guy when he guested on The West Wing and tried to woo C.J.

Anyway, a heist plot starts and many fun-but-time-wasting intricacies introduce themselves. Also, three DEA agents were killed on the train by the gang and their head, the right-hand man to Reyes, a guy Evan nicknamed Weasel-guy, since he always showed up at the end of shoot-outs to look mean, but not be in any danger. Dom and Brian are blamed for their deaths, so the US government sends down Hobbs (played by The Rock, in all his steroidy glory) to hunt them down and bring them in. Hobbs gets the best line - "Put on your funderwear" - which I need to start using more.

Anyway, driving ensues. Not as much as you'd expect. They even skip over a street racing scene they could have pumped for tension, but the movie was long enough as it was. Still, there's enough driving at the end to make up for it.

There were a few things I was disappointed in. First, there were more emotional scenes than I expected. Most of them didn't work. Dom bonding with a cop who lost her husband in the line two years previously. She's apparently the only one who understands how he feels about Letty (Michelle Rodriguez, whose character was killed last movie). The dialogue is so wooden, it could have burst into flames. Which definitely would have improved the scene, mind you. Some of the emotional stuff actually did work, at least for me. Dom and Brian have a quiet moment drinking beer on a balcony and discussing their fathers, because SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER ... Mia's pregnant (She and Brian are married, or something). END SPOILER.

Another thing they missed was during a footrace through the Favelas. I gather that Favelas are the tiny houses in the slums, with four walls and a corrugated tin roof, and a million crammed together in every South American city, with winding walkways scattered throughout. Anyway, The Rock and his team invade the garage where Dom, Brian, and Mia are at, just as the drug dealers get there as well. A fairly tense footrace ensues, across roofs and through narrow, twisting passageways. But I would've liked to see what a true expert in Parkour could have put together. Unfortunately, neither The Rock, Walker, or Diesel are at all skilled in Parkour, so there was just a lot of running, some punches, and a few jumping off roofs and onto (or through) others. What David Belle or Cyrel Raffaelli could have done with that would've been amazing.

Now, onto what surprised me. I think Paul Walker is growing on me. Maybe it's just that he's spent so much time on movie sets, but he can actually act now. At least, some of the time. I’m as surprised as you. I thought he was a blonde Keanu Reeves when I saw The Fast and The Furious, but now he has depth and everything! Besides that, I enjoyed the one or emotional scenes that worked, and the music. By golly, the Music! Of course, it's by Brian Tyler, who you may recognize as the guy I raved about for doing the score for Battle: Los Angeles. Apparently, he has the skills to pay the bills, since his scores are awesome. Usually, these movies are filled to the brim with generic hip-hop and bland rap, but there was very little of that here. Only three or four songs. Of course, they'll release the soundtrack, and it'll have those four songs, plus a few more rap songs "inspired" by the movie, and only one or two songs from the score, and it'll be terrible, so I won't buy it. Blah. It's what happened to Bad Boys, which had a tremendous score, and a terrible soundtrack. I had to wait 12 years for the score and there was only 3000 cut, and I had to buy it from this fly-by-night website that kept sending me spam since I was silly enough to shell out for one of those products. Makers or Fast Five: Please sell the score on Amazon. I will be forever temporarily grateful! (okay, rant over)

Sometime around the end of the movie, they don't defy the laws of physics, they just turn them off. Gravity? Only when the lines fall flat. Momentum? See ya! Inertia? Get the hell out! Of course, that just makes the last chase scene (and it's fairly long) more exciting and awesome. Totally a theatre movie, if only for the hot women, exciting music, and tremendous action. These cars are so agile, they can drive right around the plot-holes and not miss a beat!