Eagerly anticipating this week ... (5-24)

Eagerly anticipating this week ... (5-24)
Alex Garland's Civil War (2024)

5/19/2015

Fast & Furious 5/Fast Five/Fast & Furious 5: Rio Heist (2011) - Dwayne Johnson refuels the world's probably most ridiculous franchise



1 Time Film Excess Nominee:

Best Practical Effects (lost to Haywire)

+ Best Car Chase of the Year (Bank vault through Rio car chase)

Jesus of Rio lurches in the background of this poster for Justin Lin's Fast & Furious 5

QUICK REVIEW:

After a 'simple' job goes wrong, our heroic racer clover wind up with a chip that belongs to Rio's most powerful man. While they get hunted by an enormous government agent (Dwayne Johnson (Faster (2010))), they gather a team and plan to rob the Brazilian gangster, Reyes.

Johnson, with his huge corpus, intense stare and sweaty arms, is the best character addition to this the 5th film in the Fast and Furious franchise.
Besides him, the film's script (by Chris Morgan (47 Ronin (2013)), based on the characters created by Gary Scott Thompson (The Fast and the Furious (2001))), ruminates in seriously lame sentimental scenes of Vin Diesel (The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)) and Paul Walker (Flags of Our Fathers (2006)) talking about fatherhood, and a foolish subplot about a third 'brother', who is unpopular, then popular, and then dying...
Tyrese Gibson (Flight of the Phoenix (2004)) and Ludacris (Max Payne (2008)), however, top the idiocy in their buddy scenes, wherein the humor culminates with the explosion of a row of toilets.
Although the action scenes are outrageously improbable physically, they work for this franchise; especially the sound design and the fight between Diesel and Johnson kicks ass.
The task in making Fast Five was to give the franchise a new direction, taking it away from the relatively small world of racing and car culture and into the heist-action genre. Taiwanese director Justin Lin (Fast & Furious 6 (2013)) did this with tremendous success and is therefore set to helm countless coming, huge prestige projects: a Shaolin Temple remake, the third Star Trek film (2016) and another Bourne sequel (2016). He has also directed two episodes of the coming second season of True Detective.
Trivia: More than 200 vehicles were destroyed during the making of the 'vault through Rio' action scene. 

Related post:

2011 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III] 


Vin Diesel and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson get down and dirty in Justin Lin's Fast & Furious 5


Watch the trailer for the film here

Cost: 125 mil. $
Box office: 626.1 mil. $
= Huge hit
[Fast Five, shot mostly on location in Brazil and Puerto Rico, beat the box office performance of the four preceding movies and broke the record for biggest April opening weekend. It became the 7th highest-grossing film of 2011 overall. It made 209.8 mil. $ in North America (34 % of the total gross) after a great 86.1 mil. $ US opening weekend.]

What do you think of Fast & Furious 5?
List the films in the franchise and make your appraisals

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