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Fast & Furious 5 (Fast Five)
Picking up exactly – and I mean exactly – where the fourth one ended,
“Fast & Furious Five” begins with Dom being busted out of the prison bus by
his crew. With their leader back in the game, they all high-tail it to South
America, realising their home country is no longer safe for them to be in.
Despite being wanted criminals on the run, Dom, Brian, Mia and a few
others still pull off extravagant crimes to fund their lifestyle – and purely
because I think they just like doing crazy shit with cars. In an impressive
scene where the gang try to steal cars off of a moving train, the operation
goes sour when two of the crew try to double cross Dom. He and Brian take care
of them, while Mia flees in one of the cars. All the while, some DEA agents are
on board the train and hear the action happening in the last carriage. Brian
and Dom manage to escape, driving off a cliff and plummet a long way down to a
river. Like they’ve done it a thousand times before, they casually leap out of
the car just before it hits the river’s surface and splash safely into the water.
But they’re apprehended by some thugs and taken hostage.
Escaping that
situation as well, the two join the rest of the group in Rio where Dom’s sister
Mia reveals she is pregnant with Brian’s child. Now if this was FF1, Dom would
have beaten the shit out of the skinny-as-a-rake Brian, but they’re good pals
now, so no harm no foul.
Cue Special Agent Hobbs (Dwayne “Don’t You Dare Call Him The Rock No
More” Johnson) with his own team, ordered with the task of bringing down
Toretto and his team. Hobbs means business; he’s built like a brick shithouse,
talks fast and rough and always gets his man. Dwayne Johnson was a big surprise
here, given the former WWF wrestler is still new to acting in many ways. He
takes on his role as an unstoppable agent with pure class.
As Hobbs and his
team close in on our heroes, they go on the run, again and decide they need to
pull of one last job to pay for the rest of their lives on the lam. Brian finds
out about the secret locations of stacks-of-cash belonging to the crime boss
who tried to kill him and Dom earlier. The crew discover that within the Police
HQ of Rio, Brazil sits a vault filled with $100 million dollars cash. By this
point, no street racing has occurred, which went to show that FF5 was firmly
establishing itself as a heist movie with cars, not a car movie with just some
action in it. This was a whole new direction for the series, which many
original fans threw their arms up about in complaint. Seriously Fanboys?
Embrace some change once in a while. Losers! So, off in this new direction it
went and it’s safe to say the new approach paid off for the film. Fast and
Furious 5 went on to be not just the best film in the series to date, but one
of the best action films in years.
Some
characters from previous films made a return, such as Roman Pearce (Tyrese
Gibson) and Tej Parker (Ludacris) from “2F2F” and Han (Sung Kang) from “Tokyo
Drift”. With great organisation and planning, Dom and the gang figure out how
to get that $100 million dollars out of the police station and out of Rio
itself so they can all live long, happy and rich
lifestyles. But Hobbs isn’t done with them yet. He crashes the party and
dukes it out with Dom, in one of the greatest fist fights in movie history.
These two huge, bulking, angry men smash, bash and thrash the hell out of each
other and destroy half the building in the process. Seeing these two tough guys
occupy screen time together was great fun.
In a surprising twist, Hobbs joins up with Dom and his crew as they
proceed with their plan to pull of the greatest heist in the history of Brazil,
and probably the world for that matter. Believability and reality are pushed to
the limit in how it’s all done, but you won’t care because it’s just so
entertaining.
And towards the end of the film, it looks like all is well and the story
of these characters has finished. But stick around during the closing credits
for a short scene that leads right into FF6…
There you have it.
My review of the Fast & Furious franchise to date. Hope you enjoyed it.
Check back with the blog in a couple days where I’m hoping to have seen Fast
& Furious 6 by then, and will have a review up for you. I’m looking forward
to the film. The buzz out of America so far (as it was released there last
week) is very positive and clearly lets audiences know that even after six
films, this series isn’t done yet. “More?” you say. Yes apparently. I’ll try
and get the scoop on that after seeing FF6.
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