Fast Five (2011)

If testosterone were a movie, it would be called Fast Five. Depending on who you are, that means it's really going to excite you, or else really annoy you. There is no in-between. This is a movie that doesn't even try to go beneath the surface; what you see is what you get. For comparison to film in general, that's bad news. For the beginning of the summer blockbuster season, that's really good news. I don't think anybody's expecting a masterwork of American cinema here or anything, but here's a run-through of the basics. The plot: vroom vroom; bang bang; boom boom. The acting: Vin Diesel is awful; Paul Walker is awful; Dwayne Johnson is really, really awful; the whole supporting cast looks like they came out of the catalogue of racist/sexist stereotypes. The direction: wholly uninspired; no surprises here. The action: absolutely spectacular; some of the best, most exhilarating sequences of the kind I've seen in a while. There you have it.

You should know by know exactly how much you would like Fast Five. Director Justin Lin had already directed the third and fourth movies in the Fast and The Furious franchise and here he is again for the fifth, and what he gives us is a very conventional and by-the-numbers movie. It really doesn't feel made as much as it feels processed, like it was churned out of some "instant popularity" machine from a George Orwell novel. Everything about the movie is lazy cinema, so why is it so popular? Better yet, why is it so entertaining? The answer is simply that action is too exciting. There's no way around the fact that there are things that happen in this movie that take place well beyond the realm of logic and yet are somehow very cool. When Diesel and Walker drive a car off a precipice and fall out of the vehicle into a very long drop into water below, reality would prove fatal or at least very harmful. In this movie, they are barely out of breath, but that's looking into it too much. To name every little flaw in this movie would not only take WAY too long, it would just be a waste of time. Nobody is going to notice these things because they're too busy being entertained, and there's nothing really wrong with that.

There is no way to compare Fast Five to other films as a whole because it wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Put it up next to other recent action movies, though, and it's one of the best of the bunch. Frankly, the whole genre has become so predictable that they have actually become boring to me. Action movies also have a tendency to treat the American public like they have the attention span of a small child, and that they may not stay in their seats if the speed goes under 100 mph. On that last point, Fast Five still holds true; it doesn't slow down for more than two minutes tops. However, it does bring some of its own techniques to the table. As I said, the action scenes are extraordinary and make the low points easy to overlook. The point of this movie is to have fun. You just can't look too far into it. In fact, it's better if you just don't think at all. Ignoring the extreme lack of originality and logic, Fast Five is great entertainment. It is nowhere near a good movie, but it is great entertainment nonetheless. Basically, the whole movie is in the trailer. If it looks like something you'd want to see, go for it. If not, you're not really missing anything. Only one question persists: does a roller coaster need a great plot to be fun?

6/10