'Fast Five' best of franchise

By James Hill III

By this point, the formula for each film in "The Fast and the Furious" franchise seems relatively set in stone: fast cars, buff actors and beautiful actresses.  

"Fast Five" successfully manages to keep the formula intact while also being something more, possibly making it the best entry in the decade-old series.

In many ways, "Fast Five" does for this series what next year's "The Avengers" will do for Marvel superhero movies; it reunites nearly all of the most memorable characters from the previous four films, but goes way over the top in scope. The explosions are bigger and the stunts more massive. More importantly for the film's quality, however, the dialogue is crisper and the plot is better handled, including an intelligent twist.

Dwayne Johnson, aka the Rock, makes for an entertaining secondary antagonist. He plays a U.S. agent tasked with hunting down Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) and Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster), though his role is mostly to pop into the film and add even more ridiculously entertaining action to the mix.  

While watching the movie, I realized that "Fast Five" might be the best bad movie I've seen in a long time. The movie is insane: many of the stunts stretch suspension of disbelief even for an action movie and it doesn't try to be much more than a mindlessly fun flick.

And it works; for the first time in series history, the critics and fans agree. Fast Five has 81 percent approval rating from the top critics on aggregate review website Rotten Tomatoes and the film made a whopping $86.2 million on its opening weekend, the largest April opening ever.  

Considering the other two major car-related movies coming out this summer are "Cars 2" and "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," I'd say if you're a car fan then "Fast Five" is probably the best you're going to get in the immediate future.

Contact James at jhill@scu.edu or at (408) 554-1918.