Fast Five (2011)

1 year ago

Fast Five (2011)

PUT ON YOUR THUNDERWEAR, IT’S TIME TO GET FURIOUS!

by Chris Cantoni

Reviewing Fast Five requires one to develop previously non-existent words and then introduce them into the English language. How else would one describe “the best movie at being incredible” than by calling it incredibest? After the picture you won’t be dumbfounded by how exciting it all was, you will be dumbexed, a close cousin of flummoxed, but with much more intensity. But perhaps the best way to describe Fast Five would be to try and wrap up in one term all that was represented within. That word would have to be the glorification of all things male, or as I like to call it, mantriotism.

Yes, Fast Five is about manliness, testosterone, and deep voices. Had Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and The Rock been replaced with CGI penises, no one would have noticed. That is how male this movie is. This doesn’t mean the movie is chauvinist or sexist, not at all. In fact I only counted one gratuitous and objectifying shot of women’s asses, which, in the history of the series, is certainly a kind of progress.

No, in Fast Five the woman aren’t objectified or put down as much as they are simply turned into props. When Jordana Brewster reveals she is pregnant, it only functions to justify why they should stick together, and while you’d expect the next scene to be an emotional and frank discussion on the pros and cons of risking their lives driving fast cars with a child on the way, it is instead Vin Diesel and Paul Walker having a beer talking about their fathers. Where’s Jordana Brewster? Who cares! She’s a babymaking plot device, not an emotional character to fuss over. These men have FEELINGZ!

Baby, that’s not true, you know I don’t think of you as a babymaking plot device.

And when the female Brazilian translator (who lost her husband to the cartels) and Vin Diesel end up alone together, it is simply so that Diesel can express, in his growl, his own emotional loss: “I didn’t think anyone could ever understand how I feel, but you do.” Yes Vin, you and this complete stranger are the only people in the world to have ever experienced loss, and now you’re finally together! It puts a whole new ignorant perspective on human suffering (Also, spoiler alert: it turns out Vin’s love is not dead afterall! Stay until after the credits like I did. Secondary spoiler alert: Are you seriously worried about spoilers in a Fast and Furious movie?).

Of course the main reason to go see Fast Five (I mean besides all the other main reasons, like cars and sweet driving and Ludacris), is to finally see the onscreen meeting of Vin Diesel and Dwayne “Can You Smell What” “The Rock” “Is Cooking?” Johnson. Not since the epic meeting between Robert de Niro and Al Pacino in Heat has a movie match up meant so much! From watching the film, it appears Diesel and Rock had a steroid-off in honor of the occasion - each roughly the size of six oak barrels - and the Rock handedly won by applying a seemingly endless sheen of baby oil all over his hulking frame.

Basically the same thing, only with chairs.

For his part, Diesel settles for slurriest deliverer-of-lines in cinema history. I’m actually convinced that Vin Diesel has a wind up key in his back and, if asked to say lines longer than 6 words, he will inevitably run out of juice, the remaining words coming out as if from a drunken de-powering robot. Oddly enough, he enunciated better in The Iron Giant, in which he played an actual robot.

The most amazing thing about the main characters of Fast Five is that they are IMMORTAL! Paul Walker and Vin Diesel fly off a cliff several hundred feet down into a ravine into a river and it’s no big deal. Walker and Brewster jump down about thirty feet through a metal roof and neither one gets so much as a sprained ankle. The Rock smashes Vin Diesel’s face into the hood of a car, crumpling the hood (!) and Diesel doesn’t bruise at all. I’m convinced the Fast series is leading us to the ultimate reveal that they are actually some form of genetic supersoldiers who escaped from a government facility and subsequently had their memories erased but were inevitably drawn to each other for unknown reasons (PREQUEL!).

In fact, every other character in the movie dies! They drag a vault through the city, crushing and smashing cars with real people inside, countless tragic deaths including the vault flying through a bank full of civilians. The complete and utter devastation of Rio is pretty much a sidenote and if anybody pours one out over all the lost souls, it certainly isn’t our heroes.

Oh, you’d like to know what the movie is about? It takes place in Rio de Janeiro, which you will be sure to remember because they manage to fit in an extraordinary number of helicopter fly-overs of the Christ the Redeemer statue that I guess people in Hollywood think is the only way anyone will know what they mean by “Rio.” That and the favelas, of course, the other stereotypical Brazilian imagery in any Hollywood movie.

So the gang are in Rio when they’re double-crossed by the most powerful drug lord in the city. They vow to get revenge on him but are also being tracked by The Rock’s supersquad of soldiers, used whenever the FBI needs to go outside the law to bring in its most wanted. But the Rock joins our crew when his soldiers are killed by the drug lord’s men! Subsequent mayhem and heisting and mayhem etc.

Why you always tricking me into looking at your girl’s ultrasound, Paul Walker?

The drug lord is great, as he’s played by Joaquim de Almeida, who you might remember from Clear and Present Danger. Basically he’s the Latin Harrison Ford (and if you get that reference, you get a brownie!). I wish he was in more stuff. Although it turns out he’s not from Latin America, but Portugal. Oh, and the Rock’s team has technology that can identify people through masks? And a satellite that can find a car as soon as it shows up on city streets? Ok! Movie magic!

Is Fast Five a “good” movie? Or for that matter, is any entry in the series? No. They’re not “good”. They aren’t thought-provoking. They don’t challenge ideas of filmmaking or inspire the audience. But they are undeniably, absurdly fun. Fast Five is two hours and ten minutes of fast and furious fun, and I’m glad I went. You might be too.

Chris Cantoni is a writer living in Los Angeles. He drives slowly, is decidedly unfurious, and has never entered a steroid-off competition with anybody.