Fast Five

 Fast & Furious 5

Picking up exactly – and I mean exactly – where the fourth one ended, “Fast & Furious Five” begins with Dom being busted out of the prison bus by his crew. With their leader back in the game, they all high-tail it to South America, realising their home country is no longer safe for them to be in.

Despite being wanted criminals on the run, Dom, Brian, Mia and a few other still pull off extravagant crimes to fund their lifestyle – and purely because I think they just like doing crazy shit with cars. In an impressive scene where the gang try to steal cars off of a moving train, the operation goes sour when two of the crew try to double cross Dom. He and Brian take care of them, while Mia flees in one of the cars. All the while, some DEA agents are on board the train and hear the action happening in the last carriage. Brian and Dom manage to escape, driving off a cliff and plummet a long way down to a river. Like they’ve done it a thousand times before, they casually leap out of the car just before it hits the river’s surface and splash safely into the water. But they’re apprehended by some thugs and taken hostage.

Escaping that situation as well, the two join the rest of the group in Rio where Dom’s sister Mia reveals she is pregnant with Brian’s child. Now if this was FF1, Dom would have beaten the shit out of the skinny-as-a-rake Brian, but they’re good pals now, so no harm no foul.

Cue Special Agent Hobbs (Dwayne “Don’t You Dare Call Him The Rock No More” Johnson) with his own team, ordered with the task of bringing down Toretto and his team. Hobbs means business; he’s built like a brick shithouse, talks fast and rough and always gets his man. Dwayne Johnson was a big surprise here, given the former WWF wrestler is still new to acting in many ways. He takes on his role as an unstoppable agent with pure class.

As Hobbs and his team close in on our heroes, they go on the run, again and decide they need to pull of one last job to pay for the rest of their lives on the lam. Brian finds out about the secret locations of stacks-of-cash belonging to the crime boss who tried to kill him and Dom earlier. The crew discover that within the Police HQ of Rio, Brazil sits a vault filled with $100 million dollars cash. By this point, no street racing has occurred, which went to show that FF5 was firmly establishing itself as a heist movie with cars, not a car movie with just some action in it. This was a whole new direction for the series, which many original fans threw their arms up about in complaint. Seriously Fanboys? Embrace some change once in a while. Losers! So, off in this new direction it went and it’s safe to say the new approach paid off for the film. Fast and Furious 5 went on to be not just the best film in the series to date, but one of the best action films in years.

Some characters from previous films made a return, such as Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej Parker (Ludacris) from “2F2F” and Han (Sung Kang) from “Tokyo Drift”. With great organisation and planning, Dom and the gang figure out how to get that $100 million dollars out of the police station and out of Rio itself so they can all live long, happy and rich lifestyles. But Hobbs isn’t done with them yet. He crashes the party and dukes it out with Dom, in one of the greatest fist fights in movie history. These two huge, bulking, angry men smash, bash and thrash the hell out of each other and destroy half the building in the process. Seeing these two tough guys occupy screen time together was great fun.

In a surprising twist, Hobbs joins up with Dom and his crew as they proceed with their plan to pull of the greatest heist in the history of Brazil, and probably the world for that matter. Believability and reality are pushed to the limit in how it’s all done, but you won’t care because it’s just so entertaining.

And towards the end of the film, it looks like all is well and the story of these characters has finished. But stick around during the closing credits for a short scene that leads right into FF6…

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