Fast and Furious: Slow Witted and Brain Dead

One of the good things about doing reviews a little later than most reviewers (and two weeks can be long enough for a movie to be forgotten in today’s age) is that you get a chance to measure a movie after the first wave of critical reception. You can survey the damage of how right or wrong the initial reviews were, and in the case of this piece of shit, the reviews were very wrong. “Fast Five” (giving the Saw films a run for their money in unnecessary sequels) was given a pass by most critics, a B-to-B+ overall review that seemed to say “Shit, we can’t fight these movies so we might as well endorse them.” They called the movie “fun” “exciting” and “an enjoyable summer flick.” Problem is, it’s none of those things, so much as a great excuse for Universal Studios to make money–this franchise is their biggest–and for the leads to get paid. This is a very stupid man’s Ocean’s 11, and it shows more in this than ever.

What Works: When Paul Walker is your most accomplished actor, you have a problem. After this and the similarly poorly cast Takers (Chris Brown and T.I.’s film debut lol) I’m wondering if Walker looks for piss poor ensembles he can shine in instead of, you know, actually becoming a better actor.

What Doesn’t: The cast is probably the worst I’ve ever seen in a major movie. Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, The Rock, Ludacris, Tyrese, some random Asian guy, Jordana Brewster, and Eliza Patacki (most known for being Adrien Brody’s former girlfriend) who looks better suited to soft core porn than movie roles. This looks like the cast The Expendables didn’t want. I never thought I would miss Michelle Rodriguez, but I did in this movie. The dialogue still has that weird mix of awkward sincerity and phony sounding trash talk, enough that I wondered if the “writer” was just a tape recorder laid down in a high school boys locker room. And the actual action–what people come to these things for instead of characters, plot, acting, or functional script–is weak this time. The first movie you could tell used stunt drivers and real people instead of CGI, and even if this movie uses the same (I don’t know one way or the other) it’s never looked more fake.

What I Would Have Done Differently: There are ways you can do good guys movies (The Hurt Locker showed you can even be so good you can win best picture) but the action has to be more realistic, the dialogue can and should be funny if someone is making a joke, the characters can do things that make sense (The Rock’s motivations in this movie are brain dead), and you can just generally deliver a fresher experience than Fast Five does. I also wouldn’t have had the ONLY character who died be the white guy married to a black woman. This is a big time Hollywood cliche that just generally makes my stomach turn.