I’ve been licensed to drive for nearly 40 years now and like most Americans of my generation, automobiles are an integral part of my life.  I cannot imagine living without a private car, I relish the freedom and flexibility that automobile ownership conveys to a resident of this extremely large, not very public-transportation-friendly nation.  Yet I’m not a “gear-head,” I don’t know an awful lot about automobiles (despite a youthful stint working in a gas station), NASCAR means nothing to me, and if I won the lottery and could own any car in the world, I’d have to do a lot of research before I made a decision.  So the Fast and the Furious films haven’t registered significantly on my radar screen before now—I was aware of them, but had no desire to see any of them.

            But, in a slow film week, I gave Fast Five a chance and to my mild surprise, I came away entertained by a fast-paced and fun—albeit formulaic and highly illogical—product.  The script is superficial, with dozens of plot holes, and the action sequences are outlandishly, preposterously unbelievable (even given the context)—if there were penalties for violating the laws of physics and logic, the Fast Five filmmakers would be serving life without parole.

            However, the film moves so quickly that most people will forgive these lapses—if they notice them at all, even in retrospect.  Cars driving fast, outrageous stunts, lots of shooting, plus a fair amount of fighting, trash-talk, attractive women, interesting locations (the majority of the movie is set in Rio de Janeiro: in case one forgets, we’re reminded by about a dozen shots of the giant Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking the city), and things blow up real good, and there’s Brazilian music on the soundtrack, what’s not to like?

            (Please, if you care about my feelings, don’t tell me the car stunts were CGI—especially the stupendous, logic-defying but breath-taking final rampage through Rio, as Dom and O’Conner tandem-tow a huge metal cube (a bank vault) behind their speeding cars, with dozens of police cars in hot pursuit.  It would break my heart to learn I was watching a damned cartoon.)

            Actually, at the risk of sounding like a conservative curmudgeon (that’s only half accurate), Fast Five is yet another contemporary film with a skewed sense of morality.  The protagonists are a gang of criminals, and the script works extremely hard to cast them in the “good-guy crooks” mode of light-hearted heist films (cf Ocean’s Eleven, To Catch a Thief, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Italian Job, etc.), versus the “real, bad-guy crooks” seen in The Asphalt Jungle, Reservoir Dogs, and so on. 

            First, their target is an evil gangster’s drug money, so that’s fair game.  “Ladrón que roba a ladrón, gana cien años de perdón,” as the dicho says.  Especially since the greedy, sleazy, vicious Brazilian gangster tricked Dom (Vin Diesel) and his pals, framed them for murder, and then ordered his henchmen to kill them.  By showing such criminals—who are much worse than “mere” career car thieves—the filmmakers make the protagonists seem heroic in comparison. 

            Furthermore, Dom’s gang consists of his pregnant sister (+1 sympathy point), her boyfriend, his brother (who has a Brazilian wife and adorable infant, +2 sympathy points), and a multi-racial, multi-national group of friendly, wise-cracking guys (and one sexy woman).  They only want to pull “one last job” so they can retire and enjoy life.  One of them even wants to get a real job and earn an honest living! 

            To stack the deck even more, the protagonists are also being pursued by a ruthless, arrogant super-S.W.A.T. team of ugly-American agents led by the brutal, bulky, black-goateed, bald Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson).  Talk about underdogs! 

            The film (of course) doesn’t show the hundreds of people (not all of them criminals or corrupt policemen, one would assume) who were probably killed and injured by the gun-shooting, car-crashing, bus-flipping, building-wrecking antics of our “heroes.”  Why would it?  Collateral damage is so irrelevant.

            But as noted earlier, the beauty of Fast Five is that one doesn’t think about these things.  Having seen none of the previous films in the series, I had no backstory on the characters.  So, Dom is this bald guy who drives real fast?  And he’s got a sister Mia, whose boyfriend is ex-cop O’Conner?  Plus Dom has the aforementioned brother-with-a-wife-and-baby (*cough—dead meat—cough*)?  And they all like cars and driving fast and breaking the law?  But now they’re on the run in Brazil, since Dom was sentenced to 25 years in prison in the USA for something, but Mia and O’Conner helped him escape?  And, despite needing money so badly that they accept the “mission” of stealing some fancy cars from a train speeding through the Brazilian desert (who knew?), after the job goes badly Dom has enough money to fly in a bunch of his best buds, purchase a considerable amount of high-tech equipment and install it in a gigantic warehouse, so they can plan the epic robbery of the aforementioned gangster’s ill-gotten gains?  Alright, I’ll buy that premise (brain officially on vacation for the duration).

            So, the action scenes are quite good, the script is silly but serviceable.  Despite a relatively large cast—Dom’s posse, Hobbs and his agents, the actual bad guys (the Brazilian drug kingpin and his gang)—everybody gets a little tiny bit of characterisation, a catch-phrase, a snatch of backstory, a distinguishing shtick (except for the federal agents who work for Dom, they’re quite anonymous, just a multi-racial—of course—group of muscular guys).  No one has to “act” very much, though.  That’s not a problem. Need we critique the performances?   Fists, guns, and cars will do the acting in this movie!

            Seriously, Fast Five is fast film fun.