Vintage and Clunker

Rating: Null/10 (29 April 2011)

Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson): "Alright, listen up. The men we're after are professional runners. We find them; we take them as a team and we bring them back. And above all else, we never ever let them get into cars."
Fast Five is all about cars as it was with the similarly-named Fast and Furious and The Fast and The Furious--muscle cars and muscled men pulling stunts like this improbable heist in Rio. The car chases are fun to watch, but the dialogue and acting are strictly clunkers.
It's amusing to watch the film's beefiest heroes, Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, go face to face and mano a mano for a few minutes, and the helicopter shots of Rio make an interesting travelogue, notwithstanding some time is spent in the grim favelas.
But it's not even close to the cool of Danny Ocean's capers. The heist, involving a drug lord and a very safe safe, is a rehash of existing B movie capers with the racially-mixed characters coming from around the world to pull off the impossible . Brainless it is, with brawn aplenty and a few spectacular car scenes such as at the beginning when vintage cars are removed from a speeding train. If you like the chases, high testosterone fights, and hot babes: ENJOY!