Fast Five Review [Rating:8/10]
Movie Review by The New Yorker
The fifth film in the series (and the third directed by Justin Lin) about a group of speedy knucklehead cons, who, in this adventure, want to rob the richest bad guy in Rio. Cool cars and thrilling chases are the hallmark of the franchise, and they are indeed spectacular here (Lin’s direction and the sharp editing never confuse or lose momentum). But the film hardly warrants its more than two-hour running time, and the actors’ pedestrian byplay is just subpar “Ocean’s Eleven”-style banter. As the convicts, Paul Walker (who seems to be in this film for the money) and Vin Diesel (who’s in it for his career) are serviceable.
Review by Seven Days
If you’re like me and couldn’t recognize a Ford GT40 or a Nissan Skyline if your life depended on it, you’ve still been following the Fast and Furious series for its bold innovations in sequel titling. Retro B-movie title The Fast and the Furious (2001) was followed by the funky 2 Fast 2 Furious, the clunky The Fast and the Furious: Toyko Drift, and a fourth film lazily called Fast & Furious, destined to merge with the first in every alphabetical database.
Not that indexing the Fast and Furious movies for posterity is a pressing concern. Nor is catching up on them so you can understand what happens in the fifth installment. (Street-racing hero Dom Toretto [Vin Diesel] once killed somebody with a wrench, but he had a very good reason. That’s all you need to know.)
What matters is that Fast Five will satisfy any jones you may have for a good, old-fashioned stupid action movie.
Review by New York Press
“From where I’m sitting, it looks like you both could use the pay day,” an underworld thug says to Vin Diesel and Paul Walker. Sharp viewers will chuckle at them reprising their The Fast and the Furious roles in the sequel, titled Fast Five. Devoted audiences (which number in the millions) will get the in-joke. The Fast franchise isn’t highbrow, it’s a street-racing series with the same kind of appeal as the Indianapolis 500. Working-class viewers share attraction to its virtues—Dom (Diesel) a fearless ex-con teams with ex-cop O’Connor (Walker) in their outlaw pursuit of fun, family (O’Connor loves and impregnates Dom’s sister) and “Freedom.”
Installment five finds the two American roustabouts in Brazil, planning to heist a drug-dealer and net $100 million. Yet the charm of Fast Five beats the Oceans franchise because this isn’t materialistic. It’s about brotherhood. Dom and O’Connor repeat the urban ethnic mythology that started with James Cagney and Pat O’Brien in 1930s gangster films at Warner Bros. studios, but update realities to include contemporary, post-Civil Rights-era race-mixing.
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