Fast Five
Genre: Action
Director: Justin Lin
Stars: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson
**1/2
In any conventional sense, Fast Five is a bad movie. The dialogue is laughable, the plot ridiculous, and the acting is over-the-top. Yet, those qualities are part of what people love about cheesy action movies — and Fast Five definitely delivers for that audience.
The whole thing is ludicrous, but hilariously so and most importantly it never winks at the camera. This is earnest cheese and all the funnier for it. The series’ characters are now inexplicably high stakes professional thieves and the movie reunites them for “one last job” with a perpetually greased up and pissed off The Rock in pursuit for the FBI.
Within seconds a bus is flipped and from that point on barely a minute passes without a scene involving a fast car, a scantily clad lady, a gun, an explosion, a one-liner, or all five. It’s all big dumb fun paced for the ADD crowd and would be easy to mock were it not so entertaining. The action defies physics and logic and the script sounds like it was written by a monkey, but every scene is either unintentionally hilarious or genuinely exciting. If you have a taste for high-octane trash, Fast Five offers your drug of choice.
