Just the Ticket #5: The Autobahn Society

Fast Five Poster
FROM October 15, 2011: I had not seen any of the The Fast & The Furious series prior to watching Fast Five, and didn't have high hopes for the fifth installment despite seeing that Dwayne Johnson (Faster) would star in the film. I was pleasantly surprised (but not in love) with the results.
Original Fast cast Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, and Matt Schulze reprise their roles as members of a highly skilled auto-theft team, this time falling in with a ruthless Brazillian drug lord (Joaquim de Almeida, Che: Part Two) and hiring a team of characters from previous sequels (Tyrese Gibson and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, 2 Fast, 2 Furious, Sung Kang, Tokyo Drift, and Gal Gadot, Fast & Furious) to bring him down, all the while being pursued by Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs (Johnson).
Diesel appears to have grown as an action star, for once showing a level of personality not seen outside his dramatic or comedic roles, and stands on even keel with the formidable Dwayne Johnson in every scene they share.
The action sequences are epic in their disregard for the laws of physics (and human life, on occasion), making the viewer ooh, ahh, and cringe at every destructive moment and free-fall.
The attempted comedy is subtle and welcome, allowing Diesel to cut loose a bit between car chases and gunfights, and the drama between Diesel's character and DSS agent Elena Neves (Elsa Pataky, Snakes On A Plane) gave dimension (however brief) to an otherwise brainless actioner.
At two hours and ten minutes, Fast Five was longer than it should have been, filling the action-free minutes with dry humor, underdeveloped romance, and planning for a heist that was ultimately discarded in favor of a final, 45 minute smash-and-grab sequence, entertaining enough to be a movie all its own while feeling like a tacked-on third act, irrelevant to the previous hour-plus of Fast Five.
If you want to watch some truly worthwhile Vin Diesel performances, may I suggest these films:
- A Man Apart
- The Pacifier
- Find Me Guilty
But if you elect to watch Fast Five instead, do it for the action. It will be shorter that way.
C+

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