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Arts & Entertainment

'Fast Five' is a Out of Gas

Justin Lin's fifth installment of the 'Fast and Furious' franchise excites and annoys.

We are a nation in dire need of diversions. There’s a reason why YouTube clips, “Dancing with the Stars” recaps and endless months of royal wedding coverage clog up our news cycle. It’s because the networks are designed to give the people what they want. 

How else to explain the $83.6 million gross (according to Box Office Mojo) raked in by Fast Five, the fifth installment of the decade-old, increasingly monosyllabic Fast and the Furious franchise? It’s difficult to think of a lucrative series as brainless and uninspired as this one.

The first couple of pictures weren’t just bad, they were borderline offensive. With their romanticized portrayal of street racing, misogynistic objectification of women and cast populated by vain supermodels without a modicum of personality, the Fast films quickly soared to the top of my list of pictures to avoid at all costs.

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Enter Justin Lin, the gifted director who made a name for himself with 2002’s superb crime drama, Better Luck Tomorrow. He signed on to the series after the pathetic sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, substituted stunt work with computer animated vehicles. Lin took an entirely different approach with Tokyo Drift, favoring in-camera effects and near seamless digital work over cartoonish spectacle.

In short, Lin is the best thing to happen to the franchise, and the sole reason why any of these lunkheads still have work.

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Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster are perhaps the least engaging trio in modern American cinema. After multiple films together, they still haven’t evolved beyond their one note of smug detachment.

Yet while Walker and Brewster are thoroughly awful actors, Diesel has a truly magnetic screen presence. He initially left the Fast films supposedly with dreams of becoming a serious performer, and even starred in one of the last pictures directed by the late, great Sidney Lumet (2006’s Find Me Guilty). Though it’s somewhat depressing to see Diesel back in this trash, he proves to be as charismatic as ever.

Sure, the low rumble of his voice is often indiscernible from the revving car engines, but it does have a certain charm. Diesel suggests what Rorschach from Watchmen may have sounded like if he found employment as a smooth jazz DJ. 

After Lin’s fourth installment, Fast & Furious reassembled the protagonists of the original film, Fast Five accompanies them with various major players featured in the sequels. Think Ocean's 11 meets The Dukes of Hazzard, and you have a pretty good approximation of what to expect from this outing, which is easily the most purely entertaining of the bunch.

The film opens as master criminal Dominic (Diesel) escapes from a prison bus, thanks to the speedy assistance of his friends. The bus ends up rolling down the street, but the number of casualties conveniently remains at zero. No matter how much careless carnage the heroes create, they never end up killing anyone other than the villains.

My inability to embrace this story conceit may be due to the fact  that I’ve simply lost too many friends in car accidents and shared the road with too many reckless drivers. Of course, it’s best to leave the real world at the door when entering an escapist lark such as this.

The worst scenes in Fast Five are the ones that involve dialogue, since it functions solely to move along the nonplot. All that needs to be known is that Dominic and Co. end up in Rio de Janeiro, and decide to rob the city’s most notorious drug lord (Joaquim de Almeida), while being pursued by an f-bomb-spewing federal agent (an oddly wooden Dwayne Johnson). Dominic’s sister, Mia (Brewster), breaks the news that she and Brian (Walker) are having a baby, thus inspiring her to avoid alcohol, though she apparently has no qualms about leaping off rooftops.

A great deal of hype has been built around the showdown between Diesel and Johnson, which might have been a big deal in the early 2000’s before both actors were neutered by their kid-friendly Disney vehicles. A duel between the Pacifier and the Tooth Fairy hardly registers as a clash of the titans.

What really makes Fast Five worth seeing are the spectacular action sequences, brilliantly envisioned by Lin and his team led by cinematographer Stephen F. Windon (HBO’s The Pacific) and editors Kelly Matsumoto, Fred Raskin and Christian Wagner. Though they defy all laws of plausibility, Lin wisely injects them with just enough realism to make the death-defying feats all the more visceral.

Few recent set pieces have delivered as many mile-a-minute thrills as this film’s climactic chase, in which two cars drag a massive safe through the streets of Rio. It’s an extraordinary work of choreography, destined to win over even the most skeptical viewer.

And on a side note ... 

For alternative programming, I highly recommend Werner Herzog’s awe-inspiring documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which opened in Chicago last weekend.

Herzog is undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers, and his obsession with the human psyche constantly causes him to explore a variety of fascinating topics. In Dreams, the director guides viewers through France’s ancient Chauvet Caves, and illuminates walls that are covered with the oldest artwork ever discovered.

By shooting the film in 3D, Herzog allows these incredible paintings to literally seem within reach. With one of the year’s best per-theater-averages ($25,000, according to indieWIRE), the film is expected to premiere on more screens in the coming weeks. 

Both Fast Five and Dreams prove that there are some things video on-demand and online streaming simply can’t recreate. Neither film should be seen on anything other than the biggest screen possible.

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