A Masterpiece!

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This review contains spoilers.Fast Five is the sequel to Fast & Furious and is the fifth installment of The Fast and the Furious franchise. This movie takes place after the fourth installment and follows the Fast and the Furious crew as they attempt a heist to steal money from a corrupt businessman. The crew are pursued by Luke Hobbs, a United States Diplomatic Security Service agent played by Dwayne Johnson.Fast Five is an incredibly fun movie to watch. The plot is actually comprehensible like the first and the third movie in the franchise. The plot is basic but at the least it does not have seemingly random reasons for events to happen. This movie has a plot and build up to the heist that is fun, coo, and exciting to watch.The action of the movie does require the viewer to suspend their disbelief as impossible things happen on the screen. If the audience can do this, they can watch creative action scenes that are well shot and edited. The finale especially does a good job with making the entire movie engaging as the heist unfolds.The cast in general does a decent job. One typically does not watch these movies for the acting. The highlight in this movie is Luke Hobbs. Dwayne Johnson does a great job playing an indestructible agent that is focused on the mission. This character is played straight which leads him into funny situations. Dwayne Johnson has great delivery as this character. Most of all the scenes that he is in feel as if both Dwayne Johnson and the crew are having a lot of fun.I would recommend Fast Five. This movie is a solid entry in The Fast and the Furious franchise and is an incredibly fun movie.

The fifth installment in The Fast and the Furious franchise, Fast Five is an intensely gripping, thoroughly engaging & relentlessly entertaining sequel that not just brings several upgrades in all departments of filmmaking but by replacing the street racing formula with elements of a heist thriller, it ends up resurrecting this derailed franchise in style and heralds the series' heading into a new direction.Set in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the story of Fast Five follows Dominic Toretto, Brian O'Conner & Mia as they plan a massive heist to steal $100 million in cash from a ruthless drug lord & corrupt businessman and enlist the help of former allies to pull off the job which would buy them their freedom. But at the same time, they find themselves being pursued by a federal agent who's in Rio to arrest both Dom & Brian.Directed by Justin Lin, Fast Five presents the director in much different form as his kinetic work behind the camera keeps the story running on top-gear from start to finish, and the earlier momentum it gained with its explosive opening sequence is never lost. The screenplay at last places more emphasis on its story & characters, adds in a welcome amount of humour and even though the route it takes is new, the old-school formula isn't entirely discarded.The technical aspects exhibit a complete overhaul which is in sync with the transition this franchise itself undergoes through this chapter. Production design team puts up some wonderfully detailed set pieces, Cinematography makes exuberant use of its camera while the applied colour tones are more vivid than before. The events unfolds at breakneck pace, Editing is at its best during the action sequences, and the vehicular carnage it has in store is simply overwhelming.Coming to the performances, Fast Five brings the notable characters from all the previous chapters together under one roof and all of them deliver more confident performances. Vin Diesel & Paul Walker show greater maturity in their respective roles of Dom & Brian but it's the swashbuckling input from Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson that turns out to be the biggest surprise of them all. It's not difficult to assess that he was really enjoying his character and it reflects in his impressive performance.Last but not the least is Brian Tyler's score which packs in some intense, vibrant tracks that never allows the film's charged atmosphere to settle down and actually enhances the whole experience by a considerable margin. The visual effects team also brings its A- game, for the moments of action seem convincing for the most part, even if it's a tad over-the-top on few occasions. There are more thrilling moments to be found here than in all previous chapters combined and every moment featuring Johnson & Diesel together is a highlight, right away.On an overall scale, Fast Five is without a shadow of a doubt the finest chapter in The Fast and the Furious franchise and the first one in the series that manages to find a near-perfect balance between its elements of style & substance. High-octane, full- throttled & immensely satisfying, Fast Five is an action-packed, roller-coaster ride that packs in all the ingredients in just the right dosages to succeed as a genuine summer blockbuster material & a quality entertainer for not just the fans of the series, but newcomers as well. Absolutely worth your time & money.

Ah, the film that kicked off the new breed of Fast & Furious films, Fast Five. The film that gathered all of the fan favorite characters from previous films into one gigantic ensemble. Throw in Dwayne The Rock Johnson and you have yourself what may be the best the franchise will ever be.I've had a hard time ordering which F&F film is actually the best/my favorite. 5,6, and 7 all are tremendous. They know exactly what type of film they are and what type of film they're not. Perhaps Fast Five takes the cake for being the first to truly embrace the ridiculousness of the franchise. Even with the previous film, there was a little bit of tone deaf at times with the writing. However, Fast Five takes the series to a whole new level in terms of tone, characters, and even genre.In many ways, this was a soft reboot for the series. Essentially, the characters become superhuman with qualities they just didn't have before. As far as I'm concerned, Tej was never a tech genius, Mia was never able to hack into police scanners, and Roman was never scared of anything. All of those were added in to service the story they wanted to tell in Fast Five. You know what? That's completely fine by me. A soft reboot was exactly what these films needed. If that was what we needed to do to have the characters pull off an insane heist and have a blast doing it? I'm all in.The Rock (aka franchise Viagra) adds another layer to the film as well. Gone are the days where Dom & Brian are going after one another. Now, you have 260 pounds of pure muscle going after the entire crew, and boy is it worth it. Not only is it mind-blowingly entertaining to watch Diesel and Johnson fight, Johnson actually brings a lot to the role of Hobbs. These movies have always been keen on establishing an inner code/morals for each character, and Hobbs' code works well alongside and against Dom's. Apparently, the role was originally going to be Tommy Lee Jones, but I can't imagine anyone better than The Rock to play him.Much like the previous film, Fast Five does a great job of reestablishing past relationships, developing new ones, and doubling down on the action. This series is half about family and half about how insane each stunt and action sequence can be. By this point, they nearly abandoned the street racing part for the heist angle, and it works. Heck, even the one time they do have a "race", it's entirely off-screen. Fast Five is the epitome of what the series has become and I'm not sure a film has matched the incredible pacing and contagious chemistry between the ensemble.+Enter, The Rock+Dom vs Hobbs+Doubles down on emotion & action+Soft reboot serves the series well-Even if some of the character changes don't make much sense9.5/10

The acceleration period of the "Fast & Furious" franchise is officially over. Now it's all pure speed. "Fast Five" pretty much blows the roof off of all previously held notions of what these movies are and could be. The action, the stunts, the cast — everything is bigger. With director Justin Lin and writer Chris Morgan returning from "Fast & Furious," the creative sensibilities are all the same, so clearly the $40 million in additional budget had a big role to play in the finished product.Audiences handsomely rewarded "Fast & Furious" at the box office; in "Fast Five," they reap the benefits. Never before have so many cars, trucks and trains been pulverized into scrap metal on the big screen. The stunts are simply huge. (I'd say grandiose, but this is the "Fast & Furious" franchises after all.) Morgan and Lin get the green light to do whatever they can imagine. Even if what they dream up doesn't make sense, it's fun to watch.Other than financial freedom, Morgan in particular has a lot more freedom of story. The unusual circumstances of the franchise's beginnings (i.e. Vin Diesel turning down the second film) created a recovery period of sorts. "Fast & Furious" had to bring Diesel's Dominic Toretto and Paul Walker's Brian O'Conner back together and reenergize fans of the 2001 original; "Fast Five" had a blank canvas. The usual tropes of these movies have been minimized and some passed over completely. It's a much looser and more fun movie.Surprisingly, the entire movie takes place in Rio de Janeiro. O'Conner and Mia (Jordana Brewster) have fled there after breaking Dom out of federal custody by flipping a bus of prisoners on a desert highway. That's the film's quick open. Dom is in Rio as well, and they all meet back up to pull off a job that will keep them on their feet. Only the job (boosting cars off a moving train) doesn't go quite as planned, and they have irked another powerful drug lord named Reyes, who "owns" Rio. They've also caught the attention of the FBI, who's sent its best man-hunter, Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to bring them in. Morgan can't quite free these movies of the criminal good guys vs. law officer bad guys dynamic. On the plus side, at least it's no longer about whether or not O'Conner is going to do his job or throw it all away to help Toretto and co. He's firmly on their team now. On the other hand, you can imagine that the same war of conscience might befall Johnson's Hobbs and the woman he's picked as his sidekick, Elena (Elsa Pataky)."Fast Five" also brings back some old faces: "2 Fast 2 Furious" stars Tyrese as Roman Pierce and Ludicrous as Tej, as well as Matt Schulze, who played Vince in the original "The Fast and the Furious." Add Sung Kang as Han from "Tokyo Drift," and Gal Gadot, Tego Calderon and Don Omar from the last movie and you have a massive ensemble with which to play-act "Ocean's Eleven." That's essentially the model for this movie; all the characters have special talents and they're going to pull off a heist to take down the biggest boss-man in Rio. The characters also fit certain stereotyped roles, but that figures.Pretty much all criticisms of the plot and story mechanics become meaningless once Dom and O'Conner start speeding through the streets of Rio towing a gigantic safe in grand finale. The physics are questionable, but the movie stands out on the ingenuity of this action sequence alone, one that serves as an apt metaphor for this film series' reckless, bulldozing, couldn't-give-a-damn attitude. The "Fast and Furious" movies continue to ride comfortably in the seat of mediocrity, but they get to do it on the grandest stage yet in "Fast Five," and that ratcheted-up entertainment factor helps sway this movie into more favorable territory.~Steven CThanks for reading! Visit Movie Muse Reviews for more