Possibly the best entertainment value this year

Rating: Null/10 (12 May 2011)

I'm not sure if this being my first exposure to the "Fast" franchise makes any difference to my reception of "Fast Five" (dropping of "Furious" duly noted). Somehow I doubt it would.
The movie starts with the couple Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) and Mai Toretto's (Jordnan Brewster) rescue (choice of word, while politically incorrect, is deliberate) her brother Dominic, or "Dom" (Vin Diesel) on his way in a police vehicle to serve a 25-year jail term. Next comes a fast cut to Rio de Janeiro (where the rest of the movie takes place), a quick establishing scene, and then the couple at work again, teaming up with some local gangs to steal a handful of mega-dollar cars from a train. What this amounts to is that in less than 15 minutes into the movie, the audience is entertained with two separate sequences of fast and furious action. And the movie hasn't even really begun! This is what I mean by best entertainment value. The meat of the movie is a heist yarn, robbery of a top-security vault in a police station, multi-millions held on behalf of the top local gangster king pin! Outlandishly incredible? Obviously, the movie makers don't think so, at least not in Brazil.
I wouldn't bother trying to list the movies in this genre but I cannot recall a single one in which assembling of the "team" takes place only after 45 minutes into a 130-minute movie. The team of about ten people, a colourful multi-ethnic mix, is only one of the four power groups involved. There is the most powerful local gangster, together with the corrupt local police, as mentioned. Not quite "an American in Paris", there is an American in Rio, the toughest guy found anywhere in this universe – one Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), vowed to hunt down Dom and bring him to justice. The Titanic duel (including one scene in a very literal sense) between the two is something to behold. There is one more group, albeit with little screen time, of local criminals who are Dom's friends.
Taiwanese director Justin Lin is getting really good with his craft. Car chase is obviously the top draw. Just as you wonder what else he can give you that you haven't seen before, he comes up with things that take you to yet another level of mindless pleasure. He also does exceedingly well in handling an almost unmanageable proliferation of characters. The 130-minute length helps but most of it is devoted to sequence after sequence of exciting action scenes. What is left, however, he uses deftly to make each character stand out from the blur, but without overdoing it.
Rather than taking another page to go into all these little niceties this movie offers, I'd just say that "Fast Five" is the best entertainment value money can buy so far this year.