Fast Five

Fast cars! Bikini-clad babes! Gratuitous violence! Vin Diesel's acting! If you think these are the best things in the whole wide world, you're probably going to like Fast Five. Yup, that Fast and Furious bunch have clocked up their fifth installment, and if you can ignore how god-awful the movie is for a second, you might just about be able to salvage a couple of laughs from the ensuing wreckage.  

Fast Five wastes no time in putting pedal to metal; en route to a 25-year prison sentence, Dominic Toretto (Diesel) is broken loose when chums Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) and Mia (Jordana Brewster) slam their cars into the side of the convict's bus ride, overturning it and giving him the chance to leg it. Following this forthright little escapade, the three flee to Rio de Janeiro, where a train robbery set up by buddy Vince (Matt Schulze) goes awry, and the team ends up finding a new enemy in money-laundering scumbag Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida). From here, Fast Five's plot (for want of a better word) sees Toretto and Co. decide to relieve Reyes of every cent of his ill-gotten money by fastening their seat belts and pulling off "one last job."

If it wasn't for its unintentional knack for making you spit popcorn across the auditorium with mirth, Fast Five would be a one-star write-up. But from its ham-handed writing and meat-headed acting emerges a clumsiness and ineptitude that's actually enjoyable to watch. Well, sometimes, at least.

For instance, when Toretto and O'Conner are sent hurtling into a ravine, rather than being broken up like meringues on impact, they surface from the water as if they've just come off a diving board at the local pool. This is just the start of their apparent invincibility; plenty of adroit bullet-dodging and emerging-unscathed-from-car-wrecks is to follow. Plus there's some fascinatingly clunky dialogue ("This just went from Mission: Impossible to Mission: In-freaking-sanity!")

Compounder of Chuckles though is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who plays snarling Action Man federal agent Luke Hobbs. His mission is to bring Toretto to justice once and for all, yet although Hobbs' reputation precedes him as a razor-sharp persona who always "gets his man," there's nothing to actually suggest this in Johnson's performance (largely a display of grimaces, grunts and cusses). The whole Muscle Beach physique, meanwhile, undermines Hobbs' supposed intellectuality, leaving him looking somewhat slow, somehow simian.

Perhaps the funniest scenes in Fast Five come with the face-offs between Johnson and Diesel; when the two perspiring actors glare into each other's mugs and swear to be victor, it's close to comic genius, while Hobbs' moment of "Count me in" defection to the other side is liable to produce cinemas full of hernias.

As for the rest of Team Toretto, they're not exactly the desperate, ragtag bunch you'd expect for such an "in-freaking-sane" job. Although there's enough of them, and they all apparently boast their own vital skill (one of them is good at gibber-gabber, one can crack safes, and all can drive with reckless abandon), they have the kind of model looks and swagger you'd usually expect from a group of final-year fashion students. In their scheme to steal every cent of Reyes' cash, there's a twisted Robin Hood logic at play: "Let's steal the bad guy's ill-gotten fortune ... and keep it all ourselves." This kind of avaricious mentality is a touch irresponsible, seeing as Fast Five is largely aimed at impressionably pubescent boys who have only recently acquired their driving license, along with permission from their parents to go to the cinema.

Despite an elaborate scheme to stealth their way into the corrupt police station where Reyes has his loot stashed, Toretto's gang eventually abandons this in favor of smashing a car through the wall, yanking the safe out of the building and dragging it along the streets of Rio, leaving a trail of destruction and bemusement in its wake. It has to be said the obligatory car chase is nicely choreographed, but it's also incredulous and tasteless (plenty of innocents suffer as a consequence) in the extreme. Really, the whole flagrant heist could be read as a mirror image of the film's producers plunging their mitts into moviegoers' pockets one final time, before doing a runner.

Like a 16 year-old who's just learned to drive, Fast Five is all horn-blowing and no sense of direction. To its credit, the movie knows its target audience (possibly too well) and even provides some giggles for the more "refined" cinemagoer. All in all, though, here is a moneymaker to steer well clear of.

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Will Noble can be reached at
wnoble@praguepost.com