Fast Five: The Furiousest of the Five

Puneet may have already beaten me to this movie, but I wasn't able to see Fast Five until today as that's just when my friends' schedules lined up. Seems like it turned out for the best though from the sounds of his showing. My theater, unlike his, was quite sparse since we choose to see an earlier time to avoid the crowds. I'm actually curious what this movie would be like in a packed house to get that big crowd reaction. Could be really fun. Anyways, I'm probably going to have a lot to say, so I'll just jump right into it now.


What I loved about this movie right off the bat is that it picks up exactly where Fast & Furious (the fourth film) left off clearing up the cliffhanger we were left with. From there we jump forward in time, perhaps a few months, and we find Brian and Mia have found their way to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They're scrapping the bottom of the barrel of funds and Brian decides to get them involved in a "simple" heist to get some quick cash. Things don't go so smoothly and it gets them in trouble with the most powerful and corrupt man in Rio named Reyes. To make matters worse, they get blamed for the deaths of some DEA agents and this gets the FBI's top man-hunter on their tail too! The rest of the film is focused on sticking it to Reyes while avoiding both the law AND the criminal element of all of Rio.

It's an all-star cast for Fast & Furious fans, and this is even all of them!

I have to say, having just recently finished watching all the movies in the franchise, I got so much more out of this movie. Sure a lot of my friends thought it was cool, but I was on such a high from all the throwbacks to all four of the previous films. If you'd permit me, I'd like to do a quick rundown of the characters and what movies they were first from, excluding Vin Diesel and Paul Walker. From The Fast and The Furious, we have Jordana Brewster as Mia and Matt Schulze as Vince. Back from 2 Fast 2 Furious we have Tyrese Gibson as Roman and Ludacris as Tej and an uncredited cameo by Eva Mendes. From The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift we get the glorious Sung Kang as Han. Returning from Fast & Furious we see Don Omar as Santos, Tego Calderon as Leo, and the gorgeous Gal Gadot as Gisele. And guess what? Not satisfied with just that, then they go and introduce some brand new totally awesome characters Elsa Pataky as Elana, a local police officer who works in conjunction with FBI agent Hobbs to bring the massive 10 man crew down.

As hugely massive as this cast is, they somehow manage to balance all the characters and give them all their time to shine on screen. I'm sure it helped that I already had an idea of who they all were already, but they all had scenes that further extended them as characters and even some real character development for a few, however small. And I didn't even list any of the corrupt law and criminals that work for Reyes which also have some time on screen. This movie is grand and over the top in every way.

A high speed thrilling foot chase takes our heroes through the hills of Rio

This brings me to the action. In all the previous movies, any and all action was car related, but in Fast Five there's actually a really good on foot chase and some hard hitting and great hand-to-hand fight scenes. The feel of the movie was far grittier and realistic feeling to me compared to some of the previous movies. Sure they still do some awesome and crazy things, but nothing felt stupid like Tokyo Drift's midnight train of high end cars drift turning through the hills and forests of Japan in perfect synchronicity. Instead we get a cool heist movie with just a sprinkling of the insane car culture that the previous films were all about. We still get high stakes races and chases, but it's less about the flash this time around which really worked for me. I could take the movie much more seriously while still having a crazy blast of a time.

The massive cast from across all the films planning what awesome thing they're going to do for a finale

This movie knocked my socks off and I had an insanely great time! This is by far the best movie in the "Fast Franchise" and I'm already eagerly awaiting news of a 6th movie. This would be a good movie to end the whole thing on, but considering what I saw after the credits, I have a pretty good idea we'll see another movie, and I CAN'T WAIT! Everyone should run out of their houses right now and go see this movie! However, if you can stomach it, I'd recommend you watch the previous movies. They're cheesy, but they're still pretty fun, and it'll make Fast Five all that much better. Now if you don't mind, I think I'm going to toss the first movie back into my dvd player.

You didn't think I'd post this article with out at least 1 picture of sweet cars, did you?