Fast & Furious 5 (2011)

Rating: 4/10 (13 December 2011)

This film lost me in the first few minutes. A rescue operation sees Paul Walker flipping over a bus about ten times to save one person. This stupid scene is followed by a TV news reporter stating "miraculously no one was hurt". This is such lazy writing that it annoys me no end. Why not think of something clever, rather than this moronic idea. I'm all for suspending disbelief, but there's no reason to exploit an audience like that. It happens again later, where characters, inexplicably, have knowledge or skills not previously assigned to them. All the characters say is "I had a life before you knew me!" This isn't good enough, it's just lazy. This basically means that anything can happen in this movie, and the writers are using get out of jail free cards. On top of that the franchise has lost the racing entirely, at one point building up to a race and then cutting to the conclusion. At times I thought I was watching Bourne. It all adds up to a roll call of previous characters, and an ending that sees Diesel using a safe chained to his car as a weapon, and not just one of destruction, he is able to aim this with all the precision of an Olympic archer. It's a bizarre beast, as it takes itself the most seriously out of all the movies, but comes across as the dumbest.