FAST & FURIOUS 5- Review

So, Fast & Furious 5. Sorry, er... Fast & Furious 5- Rio Heist. Or is that Fast Five? I'm pretty sure it was Five Times Faster and Furiouser, right? Well, the BBFC says Fast Five. You can call a duck a goose, but it's still the fourth sequel to The Fast and the Furious. I'm not going to fucking quack any more about the title, when the main matter of my quacking lies elsewhere.

What can be distinguished of the plot at this point finds criminal siblings Dom and Mia Toretto, and their habitual lapdog, Brian O'Conner, escaping to Rio in order to avoid a federal manhunt. Incapable of lying low, they begin to mount a daring heist on a corrupt businessman who double-crossed them on a job. When a couple of DEA agents are caught in the crossfire, federal agent and supercop Hobbs is put on the criminals' trail.

If you're easily affronted by dodgy physics in films, you should know by now that these are not the films for you. In case you had forgotten since 2009's de-infinitived sequel Fast & Furious, we open on a resolution to that film's cliffhanger, with our heroes liberating Dom Toretto from a bus bound for prison by crashing into it in a muscle car, causing the bus to flip over and roll several times, squashing it to about half of its original height. Even a newsreader in the film has the dignity to be astonished that there are subsequently "no fatalities" in this pile-up.

In the larger pile-up that is Fast Five, the main casualty is Paul Walker. Having found a modicum of box office success starring in the awful heist movie Takers between sequels, he almost seems to realise for himself that the series that started with him as a protagonist has gotten away from him. In any scene with Vin Diesel and someone else, he almost seems to be trying to remind us that he's still there. Walker is such a bland actor that he's even overshadowed by Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson, never mind the enormity of Dwayne Johnson's role.

Johnson injects some energy into a franchise that has been running on empty for a while now in his role as Hobbs, but he serves to make Walker even more redundant. The roots of this series are in Point Break, with the first instalment closely following the formula of Kathryn Bigelow's surfer action movie par excellence. If they had made Point Break 2, Point Break 3, etc, do you think they would have been the further adventures of Keanu Reeves' Johnny Utah? No, we'd have followed Bodhi, if he survived that fucking wave like the badass we all know Patrick Swayze was in that film.

Still, this is a film that reunites racers from various separate instalments of the series, making Walker slightly less superfluous. The issues with the script remain the same, but there are some differences this time. Fast Five is an unabashed heist movie, and just as existing original scripts were repurposed for successful properties with Die Hard 4.0 and Ocean's Twelve, it feels like the same thing happened on this one. An "original script" can't take long to write for these characters, but to look at the scale of the production, it's remarkable that it's come together just two years after the previous instalment.

It's clearly had a great deal of money spent on it, not only for the on-location shooting in Brazil, but for the excision of the cheap and nasty CGI effects that negated the point of the car races in previous outings. There's actually a lot of admirable practical effects work here, but it's just a shame that so much effort goes into a script that's mostly guff. There was a point in contention online last week, saying that the Scream series had the most inept screen cops. The cops in the universe of The Fast and the Furious are clearly far worse, because without exception, they're all either going to join Toretto or unsuccessfully give chase as he vrooms around doing wrong.

The signs are that Fast Five is too much of a stretch for even the series' most dogged fans. I saw the film at a pretty packed opening day screening, and several people stuck around for a mooted closing credits sting that paves the way for a sixth instalment. This was in spite of the film's punishing 130 minute running time, which makes this the slowest film ever to feature the word "fast" in the title(s), by my measure. It's overlong, and after the plot twist in this additional scene, the incredulous and unimpressed reactions of the teenage boys sat behind me seemed to eulogise the series' popularity pretty well.

Director Justin Lin brings everyone back in Fast Five, along with the latent hostility towards the laws of physics and the hyper-macho sexual tension. Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson have an entertaining rivalry, dampened by Paul Walker's puppy-dog affection for the guy who's clearly usurped the franchise from underneath him. Not that such story matters are explored in much depth in the cascade of violence, cars and girls- lather, rinse, and repeat. Its impressive practical effects and action sequences make it a step up from the previous instalment, but then being involved in an auto accident is a step up from the previous instalment. Unless you're a fan, give it a miss.

Fast Five is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Fast Five, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

DRIVE ANGRY- Review

Last Friday, we figured out that there is no type of bad movie that I hate more than a bad comedy movie. And today, we rediscover the fact that there is nothing in cinema that disappoints me more than when Nicolas Cage just doesn't put the effort in. And in a trashy grindhouse flick like Drive Angry, when everyone else is doing their best, that's just sad.

Cage dons another of his famous wonky hairpieces to play Milton, a dearly departed soul who has broken out of Hell itself on a mission. Cult leader Jonah King and his followers murdered Milton's daughter, and plan to sacrifice her orphaned baby to Satan. So Milton arrives back in the mortal realm, recruits pissed-off waitress Piper and blazes a trail of destruction as he goes after King, for his granddaughter and for his revenge.

The plot is the kind of thing that usually makes for a better trailer than a whole feature film, as was the case with the recent Machete. And it's the kind of thing that really requires a crazy bastard like Nicolas Cage to actually invest in projecting something for the audience to enjoy. There's a case to be made that he's effortlessly cool. I don't know about you, but I found his turn in Drive Angry to be merely effortless.

Luckily, there's a guy on hand who is effortlessly cool, and frankly, he's everything you want Cage to be in this movie. He's William Fichtner, and he plays Satan's right hand man, the Accountant, who's sent after Milton after he breaks free from damnation. Fichtner is a long-serving fixture from various action movies over the years, and he's more than able to give it all he's got in a larger role like this one, elevating the film in times when it seems like Cage didn't really want to be there. He makes this movie

Likewise, I enjoyed Billy Burke's histrionics as Jonah King- if you're wondering where you might know Burke from after seeing him in the trailers, he's Bella's dad off of Twilight. He breaks out of that more well-known character very well as the over-the-top villain of the piece here. It would also be remiss of me to overlook Amber Heard, who's doing a great job with the least of roles. Piper is another of those strong females who you wish could break the fourth wall and kick the cameraman's arse, as any strong female would in reality, if a guy followed her around leching over her good parts with a camera.

We've been into this murky territory before with me bitching about the alleged appeal of Megan Fox in the Transformers movies, and it follows here that Piper is into cars in a big way. My contention here is that Heard is not only much more attractive, but doing a much better performance, giving it her all in a way that most objectified bimbos in action films can't muster. She's the biggest thing on the poster for Drive Angry, obscuring a bored Cage, so it's a shame that the filmmakers were happier to use her looks to market the film than to use her name. Hopefully, she'll get some fame out of this and get some better roles, but I don't think that's how Hollywood works.

Wow, that's more than I would ever have expected to write about the actors in a film called Drive Angry, but what else am I going to talk about? The 3D? In this instance, I suspect the cinema messed up the projection, because despite all of the marketing trumpeting the fact that the film was "Shot In 3D", it looked like the worst of conversions. Lots of ghosting, which got very annoying, and as I haven't heard these complaints anywhere else, I imagine it's the cinema's fault. It demonstrates that multiplexes are making a killing by charging a premium for shoddy 3D, but should it entirely reflect upon the film itself?

Director Patrick Lussier had one of the first Real-D 3D films out of the gate in 2009, with My Bloody Valentine, so he's developed a box of tricks that he uses to full effect here, continuously chucking things at the audience as he did in his previous film. It's a small shame that he dips into Shoot 'Em Up's toolbox too by ripping off that film's raucous sexfight. More pertinently however, he goes back to the same well as Rodriguez and Tarantino have done with their own grindhouse throwbacks, and doesn't end up with a bucket of shitwater. It does have a mild odour to it though- I'd recommend you boil it before drinking it down.

It's a requirement of viewing that you know what you're getting into with Drive Angry, not only in terms of the goofy and old-fashioned plot and the prehistoric attitude to women, but also so that you're not too disappointed when you see Nicolas Cage sleepwalking through it. Amber Heard struggles against the casual misogyny to prove herself as a likeable action heroine, and William Fichtner just owns the entire film whenever he steps on screen. There's already talk of a sequel to this film, but what we really need to see is a spin-off for his character. This one was enjoyable enough, but more of the same would try my patience.

Drive Angry is now showing in 3D at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Drive Angry, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.