Fast Five
Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2015 1:30 pm
The first F&F movie was loud fluff: pretty people diving pretty cars pretty fast (and furious). The second one was pretty bad. The less said about the third one, the better. Didn't bother with the fourth.
But recently I was reading an article about movie franchises that started out sucking and then got good. the F&F franchise was first on the list. So I checked out Rotten Tomatoes and saw that the fourth film (which the article lauded) had a 27% fresh rating. Not so good. But Fast Five had a 77%....Damn, that's pretty good.
So what we've got here is a big, loud action movie that has a decent heist movie buried in it. Sure, it's ridiculous, but it's not shy about being ridiculous. The big action set-pieces are all present and accounted for, but the story doesn't revolve around them....They actually do serve the plot, and the plot isn't half bad.
Sure, there's the inevitable fight between Vin Diesel and The Rock, as well as plenty of F&F driving stunts and gunplay, but it's all paced pretty well and shot really well, so I never found myself looking at the time going, "just crash something already."
It's not high art. It doesn't revolutionize the heist film. It's not insidiously clever like Inside Man. But it's a surprisingly entertaining diversion given that there's no one in the cast that brings a lot to the table as an actor.
But recently I was reading an article about movie franchises that started out sucking and then got good. the F&F franchise was first on the list. So I checked out Rotten Tomatoes and saw that the fourth film (which the article lauded) had a 27% fresh rating. Not so good. But Fast Five had a 77%....Damn, that's pretty good.
So what we've got here is a big, loud action movie that has a decent heist movie buried in it. Sure, it's ridiculous, but it's not shy about being ridiculous. The big action set-pieces are all present and accounted for, but the story doesn't revolve around them....They actually do serve the plot, and the plot isn't half bad.
Sure, there's the inevitable fight between Vin Diesel and The Rock, as well as plenty of F&F driving stunts and gunplay, but it's all paced pretty well and shot really well, so I never found myself looking at the time going, "just crash something already."
It's not high art. It doesn't revolutionize the heist film. It's not insidiously clever like Inside Man. But it's a surprisingly entertaining diversion given that there's no one in the cast that brings a lot to the table as an actor.