Not a Five Star title, but definitely Fast

Rating: 7/10 (8 May 2011)

The producers / distributors / makers (call them what you may) behind this movie have decided to transition The Fast And The Furious Series of movies from a street racing franchise into an action / heist one with car chases at its helm instead of the notorious street races that governed most of the previous movies. Had I not watched any of the past movies, I would have certainly welcomed this move. But after seeing all four of them (in anticipation of this one), I believe that leaving out street racing from this movie was not a pretty good idea - there's just one race in this movie and that too, is a friendly sort of no stakes race. Although I can understand the studio's motives behind doing so, The Fast And The Furious series of films deserve at the least one race per film.
Anyways, enough of the complaining already. Coming to the point, which is Fast Five, the movie is surely fast and equally furious. The fourth movie ended with Paul and Mia attempting to bust out Dom from prison with an animated escape shown in the end. The fifth movie begins just at that point with a live action escape sequence replacing the animated one at the end of the previous installment. After a job that goes awry, the trio are then on the run since they're wanted by two factions of people - the crew of a businessman Reyes and the team of a DSS agent Luke Hobbs. After running around for some time, they decide to pull one last job to buy out their freedom with fake passports and start life afresh. But with these two powerful men on their tails, it ain't gonna be that easy.
Fast Five is more of an action movie and so, for it to work, there has to be action. And there is - plenty of it. Without spoiling most of it by describing it in detail, I'd say the high points of the movie are the train job at the start that goes awry and sets up the events of the movie, the trio's escape from both teams who get to them simultaneously over rooftops, a fight between Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and of course, the finale which is absolute madness. And perhaps all of the sequences have been shot without any use of CGI which is what makes the action even all the more exciting and brings back memories of the past era of action movies where all sequences were filmed rather than digitally created.
The cinematography is top notch as well. Although there are a lot of cuts in action sequences, we still get some long continuous areal views of the action (long meaning lasting around 5 seconds or so) which helps understanding what's going on and where it all fits into the surroundings. This ensures you're with the action. Performances are decent and for a mostly wooden Paul Walker reprising his role as Brian O'Connor, you have a surprisingly flexible Dwayne Johnson playing Luke Hobbs - the new entry in the franchise. His character is exactly what he told it would be in the behind the scenes featurettes - strong, efficient at nabbing criminals and a worthy antagonist to Dominic Toretto and his team mates. I'd definitely want him to return in the next installment. And although this ain't a movie about characters, we get some dialogs which actually help us understand the characters a little better giving us some insight into their lives. Nothing deeply psychological - just a tinge of what's hidden beneath the surface. Nice.
On the whole, Fast Five is solid entertainment provided you're willing to suspend your disbelief and forget the laws of physics. But then, we always do suspend our disbelief to some extent in movies - that's what they're for. And none of us really does remember the laws of physics so they're irrelevant for the most part. In which case, the movie comes highly recommended and even more so for an action movie buff. This is the definitive action movie of the year. And do stay for some time for a nice post credits surprise which unlike many meaningless sequences, is a critical post-credits scene that might set up the next installment in the series.
Score: 7.0 / 10