Fast Month - Fast Five

We're through the preliminary stages here, this is where this franchise began to make the big bucks. The budget was increased to $125m but the sweet reward was earning over $600m at the box office, and this wouldn’t be the heights of this franchise’s success. And it’s the first to gain a more positive critical buzz with a 77% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (average 6.4/10) and a 7.3 rating on IMDb. What caused this sudden turnaround, let’s take a closer look.

After breaking Dom out of prison, he Brian and Mia join up with Vince (from the first movie) in Rio, performing heists to keep themselves afloat. But when a heist done under the employ of notorious drug lord Herman Reyes goes wrong and the arrival of FBI agent Luke Hobbs and the knowledge that Mia is pregnant. Dom decides it’s time to pull off one last heist.

Now, I’ve noted in previous movies how they’ve begun backing away from street racing for more action set-pieces and chase sequences. This one goes the whole hog and is basically a heist movie. There are still street races but most are low stakes or just glanced over. The focus of this movie is the heists.

This is not an unwelcome change, you may remember in the first movie I found the heist the most entertaining part of that movie, and more of that is welcome in my eyes. They do play fast and loose with physics in certain scenes, like somehow having a car flipping a bus but… In all honesty, I’m willing to look past stuff like that in an action/heist movie, which this ultimately is.

It’s pretty obvious where the money went, there’s a lot more action in this movie than any of the previous ones, and one of the more ambitious final car chases I’ve seen. And the best bit, they’ve brought back all the characters from the previous movies. Tej got a haircut since the last one, Roman’s still got a mouth on him, that’s for sure. Gisele falls in love with Han I guess, oh and Han’s back, they’ve retconned it so he’s not in Japan yet. She also has to take her top off because this movie is sexist, all these movies are sexist.

We also have that Spanish duo from the last movie, you might remember what their deal was but I don’t so I won’t bother covering them. I like this idea of forming a team, and they’re all people Dom and/or Brian know because they’d been established in previous movies. It’s almost like the Avengers of the Fast and Furious universe, of course they’d stick with this pretty much to the end.

I like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in this, he’s the bounty hunter of the FBI, there to get the job done and get out. He encounters Dom a few times, and ultimately a sort-of respect for him in a way not dissimilar to the way Brian was swayed. The difference, everyone around him dies, unless she’s a woman in which case she ends up joining Dom for some reason so no-one who mattered actually saw him let Dom get away. Anyway, I like Hobbs, and he’s coming back for more in the next few movies so…

The final heist takes up half the movie, and this is the theatrical rather than the extended run, which is already the longest in the franchise thus far and I was surprised how engaged I was, it’s not a short heist, it takes up several days, and requires what I presume is considerable expenditure. It also leads to some of the only street racing in the movie, and a couple of confrontations with Hobbs.

Fast 5 ups the ante, providing solid action and a truly interesting heist, whilst bringing together characters from the previous movies for one final job. But we’re not done yet, this juggernaut continues to grow, with Furious 6.

Rating 70/100