Fast Five, more like Ocean's Eleven?

Rating: 5/10 (13 April 2017)

Fast Five, more like Ocean's Eleven?
Well that was disappointing, and when a Fast and Furious film disappoints, that's pretty bad.
Brian O'Conner is on the side of the thieves now as the film picks up where the last left off with him, Mia and others rescuing Dominic from prison. Now they all have the law's worst, most ruthless officer hunting them down The Rock, I mean Dwayne Johnson I mean the The Rock never mind. To finally get away from the law and live free, the team must assemble all of their allies from previous films into a group to rob from the richest Brazilian drug cartel leader.
The potential for ridiculous amounts of car racing and chasing could never be higher; the franchise's deliberate step to make things before Tokyo Drift and having all noteworthy characters involved in a heist has to pay off. Well, that does mean we get Tyrese Gibson again.. But on top of that, it really doesn't work.
The Fast and the Furious has now officially stepped over the line from being relatively easy going, entertaining racer films, to becoming a never-ending series of "serious business". The series has literally forgotten about the cars and instead feels we like the characters enough now to base the entire focus on them (to the point of having Brian and Mia about to have a child)
That isn't an overstatement either, asides an opening act train heist, the film takes an hour, an hour, to get into what the series is good at. Street racing. But we don't even see the race, we just get a cheeky cut away since Brian and Dom are obviously going to win it. The assembled team spend most of their time sitting around chatting and being their individual selves from other films (Avengers Assemble, this ain't) and nothing gets done. Most of the film appears to gear towards the two big, burly bald men (Diesel and Johnson) fighting each other which I don't care for, where is the y'know, car racing?
The finale is fun to watch as well as ridiculous, and the Ocean's Eleven reference earlier is not unfounded (seems like any film can get away with twists like that nowadays) but it takes so long to get there it doesn't feel particularly tense. This is the first film in the series to go over the two hour runtime, and it did not need it!
It isn't precisely a bad film, but it has lost its identity as a niche piece of entertainment and instead settles into generic action movie zone. Sad really, but when you try to stretch "street racing" into multiple films, it'll happen.
And no, it isn't as bad as the second one.