139. Fast Five

Song - Don't Stop Me Now (Queen)

Movie: Fast Five (Justin Lin, 2011)

Well, that was a surprising disappointment. The best thing you can say about Fast Five is that it set up Furious 6, maybe the most purely entertaining blockbuster of the last decade. That film took the franchise' idea that all the matters in life is family, fun, love and fast cars and turned it up all the way to 11, infusing every frame of the film with such hyperactive joy that I actually decided not to see the other movies in the series until the next film came out. Though I had seen the first film by that point, I wanted to remember the characters as they were in Furious 6, and the filmmakers as the people who had made that film. Now that I have seen 1,4,5,6 and 7, this one is by far my least favorite. 

As I remember it, Fast Five was the film that turned the critical tide in favor of the franchise, which may well be the main reason for the differences between 5 and 6. Furious 6 seems made by people who have gotten over themselves, who are so comfortable with making gloriously silly action movies that they couldn't care less about what anyone thinks of them. Fast Five feels made by people who are trying way too hard to prove themselves. It's filled with empty juiced-up posturing, overdetermined 'grittiness' and the most humorless Dwayne Johnson performance ever; he seems to have been given the task to put as much edge as possible on even the most banal command he gives. After the opening scenes we have to wait over an hour for the next car chase scene. 

For some reason the film even makes it a point to skip its street race scene; Diesel and Walker approach the Rio street racers for a bet, and then the film cuts to them returning to their base with the car they've won, without showing the race. That's again a decision that becomes even more disappointing in the context of Furious 6. There, the street race in the London night culminating in the meeting between Vin Diesel and Luke Evans, is one of the absolute highlights in the film, and the first sequence to point to if you want to convince someone of the genuine visual artistry of these films. If you want to teach film students how a director's craft evolves with experience you could do much worse than showing them Fast Five and Furious 6. In the process they might also learn something about Hollywood's Orientalism. It's not a coincidence that a car chase set in London is filmed with more clarity and visual splendor than a car chase set in Rio De Janeiro. This film is dominated by that ugly orange-greyish look American filmmakers like to give to Latin American places and of course a foot chase across the favelas is edited as if the film tries to out-Greengrass Greengrass. And yet, the sheer ridiculousness of the long final sequence almost makes up for the rest of the film. Stealing an entire bank vault by chaining it to two supercars racing across Rio creates the kind of gloriously silly imagery that more Hollywood blockbusters should strive for, and that Lin perfected in Furious 6.