In “Fast Five,” the latest installment of the “Fast and the Furious” series, cars are driven off of police parking lots, moving trains and towering cliffs; any number of things — public toilets, enormous stacks of cash, the best-laid plans — are made to explode. Men with guns and no names are in turn mercilessly riddled with still more bullets. But perhaps no set piece in the most self-aware installment of a very, very self-aware franchise is as electric — nay, as volcanic — as the sight of Vin Diesel and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson lustily beholding one another, their majestically huge bald heads and biceps pulsing in sympathetic rhythm.
Diesel — as you will already know if you’re 17 years old and male — plays Dominic Toretto, car thief, drag racer and morally upright villain. He opens the film dressed in cuffs and a prison jumpsuit, headed off to a sentence of 25 to life (and no parole!), presumably for something he did wrong in an earlier “Fast and the Furious” installment. But here come the cars! And their drivers! In no time at all, Toretto is freed from his prison transport (which turns into an airborne, computer-animated hunk of steel and rubble) and reunited with his rescuers, fellow franchise linchpins Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) and his girlfriend, Mia (Jordana Brewster), who is also Toretto’s sister, or something. They’re in Rio, a fact we know because director Justin Lin (stepping up for the series for the third time) flies about 15 different helicopters over the city’s iconic Christ the Redeemer statue, as if Jesus himself were paying tribute to this indomitable series of movies and their billion-dollars-and-counting revenues.
How much to give away about the caper that ensues? Suffice to say it involves cars — cars being blowtorched out of DEA-secured rail compartments, cars being driven willy-nilly through shack-filled favelas, cars towing full-size bank vaults through crowded city streets. At some point, a fulsomely goateed the Rock — er, federal agent Luke Hobbs — is dispatched to deal with the troublemakers; he arrives on a gigantic cargo jet, only to climb manfully into an equally gigantic armored car that seems loosely modeled after an armadillo. Hobbs is the sort of man who sports a thigh holster with the same purposeful equanimity with which certain businessmen wear BlackBerries on their belts. Needless to say, he is soon in the favelas too, gunning down person after person in search of Toretto and his crew.
But the movie needs a true villain, not merely a soulmate for Vin Diesel. Thus Toretto and O’Connor set their sights on drug dealer Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida, playing the bad guy yet again), “the most powerful man in Rio.” The words “one last job” are uttered. Refugees from earlier films — Ludacris, Tyrese, etc. — are recruited for comic relief. The Rock is made to refer to good news as “dessert” and bad news as “veggies,” a task he pulls off with the professional aplomb of a man who has been forced to say much worse in America’s wrestling rings. But it’s Tyrese — alias Roman Pearce of “2 Fast 2 Furious” — who gets saddled with what will surely soon be the film’s catchphrase: “This just went from Mission Impossible to Mission In-freaking-sanity!”
In reality, of course, Lin has things well in hand. Though the details of the final score read like they’ve been cribbed from the back of a napkin salvaged from the “Ocean’s Eleven” wrap party, and the film stretches needlessly past the two-hour mark, we are in the care of a bunch of men — and three token women! — who are doing anything but taking themselves seriously. Follow their lead and you’ll be fine.
Diesel — as you will already know if you’re 17 years old and male — plays Dominic Toretto, car thief, drag racer and morally upright villain. He opens the film dressed in cuffs and a prison jumpsuit, headed off to a sentence of 25 to life (and no parole!), presumably for something he did wrong in an earlier “Fast and the Furious” installment. But here come the cars! And their drivers! In no time at all, Toretto is freed from his prison transport (which turns into an airborne, computer-animated hunk of steel and rubble) and reunited with his rescuers, fellow franchise linchpins Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) and his girlfriend, Mia (Jordana Brewster), who is also Toretto’s sister, or something. They’re in Rio, a fact we know because director Justin Lin (stepping up for the series for the third time) flies about 15 different helicopters over the city’s iconic Christ the Redeemer statue, as if Jesus himself were paying tribute to this indomitable series of movies and their billion-dollars-and-counting revenues.
How much to give away about the caper that ensues? Suffice to say it involves cars — cars being blowtorched out of DEA-secured rail compartments, cars being driven willy-nilly through shack-filled favelas, cars towing full-size bank vaults through crowded city streets. At some point, a fulsomely goateed the Rock — er, federal agent Luke Hobbs — is dispatched to deal with the troublemakers; he arrives on a gigantic cargo jet, only to climb manfully into an equally gigantic armored car that seems loosely modeled after an armadillo. Hobbs is the sort of man who sports a thigh holster with the same purposeful equanimity with which certain businessmen wear BlackBerries on their belts. Needless to say, he is soon in the favelas too, gunning down person after person in search of Toretto and his crew.
But the movie needs a true villain, not merely a soulmate for Vin Diesel. Thus Toretto and O’Connor set their sights on drug dealer Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida, playing the bad guy yet again), “the most powerful man in Rio.” The words “one last job” are uttered. Refugees from earlier films — Ludacris, Tyrese, etc. — are recruited for comic relief. The Rock is made to refer to good news as “dessert” and bad news as “veggies,” a task he pulls off with the professional aplomb of a man who has been forced to say much worse in America’s wrestling rings. But it’s Tyrese — alias Roman Pearce of “2 Fast 2 Furious” — who gets saddled with what will surely soon be the film’s catchphrase: “This just went from Mission Impossible to Mission In-freaking-sanity!”
In reality, of course, Lin has things well in hand. Though the details of the final score read like they’ve been cribbed from the back of a napkin salvaged from the “Ocean’s Eleven” wrap party, and the film stretches needlessly past the two-hour mark, we are in the care of a bunch of men — and three token women! — who are doing anything but taking themselves seriously. Follow their lead and you’ll be fine.
