Fast & Furious is no longer the hands down best entry in the Fast and the Furious franchise, for it has now been beaten at its own game by Fast Five. And judging by how astronomically successful it’s been so far, chances are you’re aware of that as well.
How to define this abnormal, steady sequel improvement, where Part Five is the most interesting, creative and necessary entry? Boiled down to its essence, Fast Five is simply a functional action movie, full stop. It takes the sometimes slipshod willed-into-existence nature of the first three Fast and the Furiouses (plus their superior Fast & Furious), creates something coherent out of them, and evolves beyond the series’ somewhat niche premise. Conceived with The Fast and the Furious as a one-off exploration of the underground (not literally) racing subculture, the films – through sheer quantity – are now starting to ditch cars as the central factor. With such a changeup, perhaps that ridiculous Fast Five title makes sense, for how little it obviously invokes its own franchise.
Looking for someone most responsible for this late-stage Furious turnaround, it’s simplest to settle upon director Justin Lin. He started out unpromisingly with The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the series’ low point – a movie with really no reason for existing, and no relation to the greater franchise mythos. Lin has evolved markedly as an action director…not a proper, well-rounded director, as the dramatics of Fast Five remain as plodding and one-dimensional as ever – a series trademark – but someone who can deliver mere mayhem, adrenaline and delight, now solidly capable in that arena, and not overburdened with expectation like a Michael Bay.
The chief thing making Lin’s action sequencing so effective is the impression – mostly justified, from what I can tell – that these scenes are 98% practical. There’s something to be said for simply seeing real cars do outrageous things in real locations. In a cinematic state where every summer promises the CGI destruction of the world ten times over, this is tangible counter-programming. It more solidly echoes the exploitation cheapies the series is somewhat indebted to far better than Rob Cohen’s more flashy and generic Part One. And while I’m sure there is some computer work going on in Fast Five, I honestly couldn’t pick it out, except for certain moments that are the equivalent of old 1980-style bluescreens…a more allowable trick when it is itself old. We know at least someone did something insane to bring all this to the screen.
With an approach like this, Fast Five’s furious climax is perhaps the most ingenious bit of action we’re likely to see this summer. I don’t want to see it topped. We’re talking about a vehicular destruction derby through downtown Rio, home of the 2016 Olympics, where the laws of physics give way for a big, barreling bank vault. As spectacle, it’s impressive, but still low-key…because this isn’t 2012 or Dark of the Moon, where computer technicians can after the fact destroy whole digital cities at little creative cost. Comparatively, this is merely a heavy thing smashing slightly less heavy things, but it’s genuine heavy things, a pileup closer to the original Gone in 60 Seconds or The Blues Brothers or Vanishing Point or some such more than anything newfangled.
It’s all rather impressive that this is the least (obviously) CGI-assisted Fast and the Furious. Hell, even the use of NOS (now limited to a climactic cameo) doesn’t engender a big show-offy special effects engine tour. That’s be out of place in context, where we’re rather grooving on the pure, simple joys of seeing police cars hurtle off of bridges. Come to think of it, it all plays like a more modest, moral Bad Boys II – but to be honest, there’s enough frivolity here for you to best think of vehicles as mere objects to be crushed, and not potential conveyances of humans.
So…the action is the star. So is Vin Diesel, and a whole roster of other fools. Fast & Furious was notable for bringing back Diesel and many other figures from the first movie, reinvigorating a sense of purpose the first two sequels lacked with their tenuous continuity. That one told of Diesel’s Dominic Toretto and his further adventures with ex-cop Brian O’Conner (Paul “White Person” Walker) and his own sister Mia (Jordana Brewster). This vote of casting confidence (it helps to solely employ non-superstar actors) reignited series momentum, and restored audience confidence.
So how does Fast Five one-up that recurring character hat trick? Why, by assembling seemingly every significant character from all four former Fast films! Forget simply Diesel, Walker and Brewster, we now have…
• Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson, who also features in the Transformers films), the Diesel substitute (making him Vin Unleaded) from 2 Fast 2 Furious. Now with Diesel, Roman can settle into the role of comic relief, and be all the more amusing for it.
• Han Lue (Lin-regular Sung Kang), the ill-fated mentor of Tokyo Drift. His living presence here and in Fast & Furious indicates these are interquels (god, what a dumbass word!), for as much as continuity even matters. That means the films endlessly delay Han’s inevitable death, but hey, we all know it’s the future in Tokyo! It’s becoming almost a joke now, for how deeply unconcerned the series is with such niceties.
• Giselle Harabo (Miss Israel Gal Gadot), from Fast & Furious. She lacked any functionality then beyond being attractive (I can’t even recall if Giselle drove in that movie), and she’s…mostly the same here. An attractive woman…no major complaints here. And she’s given a promotion to Dom’s gang for the sake of maintaining this casting coup.
The effect of all this is that, retroactively, Fast Five solidifies some of its more random predecessors. There’s now, counter intuitively, more series cohesion than there was in, say, 2006. Add to that Vince (Matt Schulze), back for the first time since Part One, though I can barely remember that movie now. On top of that, the series cashes in its chips re: rapper cameos and adds three, count ‘em, three returning rappers to the fold: Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Tego Calderon, Don Omar – though that last one technically does reggaetón.
The cause for this massive assembly of talent – the best of the best in the world of car-based crime, Fast Five rather incongruously asserts – is a heist Dom has schemed out down in Rio (setting of Rio). Basically, his seven or so cronies are going to steal $100 million – something Fast Five itself has already just about done. Their target: Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida, your go-to guy for vaguely Hispanic villainy), a kingpin who runs the fuvelas and is basically evil simply because the movie posits that he is. Despite a thinly-stated emotional motive for Dom, this is all perfect sequel one-off; a few callbacks aside, Fast Five is just its own goofy movie with the need for character development already removed (a sequel’s luxury).
Before delving into the meat and potatoes of Dom’s car-based downtown heist – The Italian Job, anyone? – there’s some final casting to relate…for what good is it for Fast Five to mash up the old supporting cast without also tossing something new into the ring. That “something new” would be Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, proving incontrovertibly (or through The Social Network-style digital trickery) that he is in fact not the same person as Vin Diesel. Mr. The Rock plays Hobbes, the needed U.S. law enforcement representative sent abroad to defeat America’s notorious, elusive enemy – oh geez!
Man, I’m sorta surprised they squandered the inevitable Rock-Diesel combination on a mere sequel. That’s the sort of thing you save until you’ve got a truly crappy, sub-Babylon A.D. sorta mess on your hands, which wouldn’t otherwise sell in any way. Fast Five barely needs The Rock, though he is hugely welcome. For we do get the actor combo, uniting two proponents of a similar bulging action cinema (MIA: Jason Statham), like when they put together Li and Chan (The Forbidden Kingdom), or De Niro and Pacino (Heat), or Stallone and Schwarzenegger (eh…that hasn’t really happened yet – nope, you don’t count, The Expendables – though Schwarzenegger’s post-governator status makes it a boon possibility).
The Rock’s is a supporting role, as this remains Diesel’s franchise through and through, at least when he deigns to actually appear in an entry. So we get Heat-lite (Luke Warm, really), with a law man chasing a criminal, as the Fast and the Furious enterprise continues to half-ass its way around the question of Dom’s antihero status – good thing we’ve got Reyes waiting in the fuvelas as an inarguable baddie. The Rock makes an impression in his limited screen time, all veiny rage and whatnot. Given the situation, we just know Hobbes and Dom are gonna throw down – with each one possessing necks larger than anything on my body, one fears that when it happens, it’ll be such a surfeit of mass, a black hole is liable to manifest. As it is, the duo performs the chest pec dance mere inches from each other, as fans of unintentional homoeroticism in action cinema rejoice.
There’s one substantial fallout from The Rock’s inclusion. He and Diesel will fight. No big deal, but in a Fast and the Furious this is monumental. Recall, the series has been so focused upon cars as its sole concern, but now an extended drag out scrap is necessitated. In fact, Fast Five is a much purer action movie than any before it, as we’ve moved beyond the realm where any action scenario is solvable by cars. Look to Fast & Furious, which started edging in this direction, with moments of parkour and gunplay. Now look to Fast Five, with its Ocean’s Eleven tale that could, conceivably, be done entirely sans car, were it needed. Here we get fistfights, foot chases, shootouts, and assorted other bits of auctioning having nothing to do with vehicular mayhem. Hell, we even get the flipside: A promised car race sequence gets setup, then simply doesn’t manifest (just as well – it’d’ve been a perfect duplicate of one from 2 Fast, and no one wants that).
An example of how far beyond cars we are: One-upping his land train sequence in Fast & Furious, Lin offers us a flat out train sequence – criminals hijacking cars straight off of a moving train. For all this is still rather automotive (what contemporary action film can truly forego cars?!), the sequence actually resolves itself as…a fight upon the cars? It’s a simple enough notion, but unheard of in a Fast and the Furious. But consider, the first film was about straight driving – purely one-dimensional. The second added curves – two dimensions; the third followed this trajectory, and now by Part Five we’ve reached the car film equivalent of the fifth-dimension (what the hell am I saying?!), which is then transcendental, post-car. Indeed, some of Lin’s promises hold that the eventual sixth entry (by this franchise’s titling style, likely to be called either F 6 or The Fast and the FuriSix) mightn’t even dwell upon cars at all…though they say it’ll feature Germany’s Autobahn, so…yeah, it’ll involve cars.
I can see how some might be frustrated by this steady (Tokyo) drift away from automobiles – it’s so pronounced, I have now dropped my former Fast habit of bolding car makes in these write-ups. Simply as a movie, it’s a good move. We sort of need a barebones action franchise told without the renderings and the wire-fu and all that nonsense, and one-off resurrections of Die Hard and Rambo don’t cut it. This’ll do in a pinch.
And it’ll do to jumpstart the summer movie season as soon as freaking April – Thor never saw it coming! Given its summer action identity, one gauges Fast Five by its own standards, by simply what it sets out to do. It’s a perfectly pleasant, soufflé-light entertainment, the Iron Man of the car genre. The acting or characters don’t matter too much, which is just as well since they’ve never been of a high caliber. A shame, then, that these Fast and the Furiouses continue to enjoy saggy middle sections, reveling in antics only marginally connected to action. It’s the tricky balancing act of this genre, that it’s expensive to explode things, and action heroes are hard to deepen. As a series entry, Fast Five continues to worship at Dom’s feet, beyond our real concern. Enjoyment of this franchise is purely vicarious – to ogle the cars, booties, hear the rap, see the devastation. On that end, it’s better than ever.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 The Fast and the Furious (2001)
• No. 2 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
• No. 3 The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
• No. 4 Fast & Furious (2009)
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