The most important thing in life will always be the people in this room right here, right now

Rating: 10/10 (7 April 2015)

In the first sequence of Fast Five, Brian, (the late great Paul Walker), Mia (jordana Brewster) and a third unknown driver attempt to rescue Dom, who was arrested at the end of Fast and Furious, from a prison bus. To make an cool action set piece short, Brian and Mia flip the damn bus over and get Dom out of it (somehow). I remember when I saw this action sequence for the first time, I realised the absurd hilarity of it all and so I whispered to my closest friend, "we should try that some time." My whole group proceeded to laugh at my remark, and then we shared quite a few laughs throughout the rest of the movie. Now, thinking back on that bus flipping moment, I begin to realise that Fast Five might have been that one movie that made me really appreciate fun, mindless action movies.
After Brian and Mia manage to get Dom out of police custody, the trio meets up in Rio where they're joined by Vince (Schulze) from the original Fast and the Furious. Vince tells them that they need to steal some cars from a moving train and you bet your ass it's as awesome as it sounds. After a glorious action sequence on board a train, Fast Five introduces Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson, who plays my second favourite character of the franchise here), a Diplomatic Security Service agent who wants to hunt Dom and his crew down and bring them all into custody. Meanwhile, Dom and his team (who I'll call "Dom's Ten") create a plan to steal $100 million from a crazy Brazilian guy named Reyes in a much cooler style than Danny Ocean's master plan of stealing millions of dollars from three Las Vegas casinos.
Fast Five has, undoubtedly, a story that drives very far away from those original racing roots that the series was known for back in the day. But this is what I ultimately dig about this series: its ability to evolve with each new sequel. There's something oddly glorious about a franchise that used to be about bros and hungry people racing cars transforming into a franchise about those same people attempting to steal $100 million dollars from a vault by dragging the vault out of a building and through the streets of Rio, putting hundreds of people in harm's way.
Now that is what I call entertainment!
A great addition to Fast Five is Dwayne the Rock Johnson who is one of the most charismatic people on the entire planet. Seriously, you could give that guy a horrible script and he would turn it into gold. With Fast Five, he is given gold and turns it into a damn diamond; the guy is magic. He's one of the few examples (Dave Bautista being a new example) of a wrestler- turned-actor that has actually succeeded as an actor in the long run. With his most recent appearance at WrestleMania 31,Johnson is a figure that can both be a welcomed addition to a movie and then can be welcomed back into the squared circle the very next day. In Fast Five, the Rock steals the show whenever he shows up because he's such a great screen presence. It's almost possible to feel him in the background of each scene (that he's not in), working his way to finding and taking down Dom's Ten.He also gets an awesome fight scene with Vin which is the best fight scene in the franchised only matched by Vin and Jason statham's fight scene in furious 7. Without the Dwayne, I don't think Fast Five would have reached the astronomical heights that it managed to cross.
Fast Five bounces around from action scene to action scene and in between these action scenes is where it fuses its great characters into its fairly entertaining story to deliver what I think is one of the most well-rounded packages of the entire franchise; it might even be the most well-rounded (at least so far). I mean, seriously, you got Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Tyrese, Ludicrous, Jordana Brewster, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Tego Calderon, Don Omar, and Dwayne Johnson in the same movie; it's the Expendables of race car action movies. Fast Five also throws in a small bit of genuine emotion in one particular scene and it reminded me that this bonkers franchise is able to actually be sad from time to time. Who would've thunk it?
The one thing that has always managed to stick around in my brain since seeing Fast Five for the first time, and what has become my group's tradition since then, is picking characters from the movie that we "represent". I, of course, picked Dom because I'm the leader of our group. My closest friend picked Brian, my other friend picked Han because he's cooler than the rest of us, and so on and so forth. Since the Fast and the Furious series has always been about family/friendship, I believe that us choosing the characters like we did gave us a stronger connection to the movie but also a stronger connection to each other; this was the movie that evolved the friendship of my group into a small family that ultimately changed us all forever.
There's nothing stronger than the bond of family, and Fast Five really embraces that concept until it runs out of fuel and plummets off a cliff and into the waters below. It is also a life-changing movie and a damn fine example of how to mix action, characters, and emotion into one rollicking good package.