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.

FASTER- Review

The tagline for Faster goes a little like this- "Justice is swift. Vengeance is faster." If anything, that serves to remind me of the episode of The Simpsons where Homer changes his name and duly informs his kids that there are three ways to do things- the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way", the latter being the same as the wrong way, "but faster."

The plot itself does little to dispel any expectations you might have going in. Dwayne Johnson plays Driver, a man who gets out of prison for good behaviour and promptly goes on a killing spree. Driver wants revenge on the men who ambushed and murdered his brother's gang a decade earlier, and he'll stop at nothing, not even the best efforts of the cop or the contract killer who have each separately been tasked with stopping him.

Everything about it seems to scream that it's a big, loud and audacious action film along the lines of Drive Angry, from the title, and the casting of Johnson, to the naming of all the characters for their most obvious trait, like Driver, or Cop, or Killer, or Evangelist, or Woman. No, really- a woman in this film is credited as Woman, despite actually having a name in the context of the story.

Those who are given names have names like Baphomet or Detective Cicero- to wit, names that carry heavy symbolic significance. If the naming of the characters seems blunt, you've got a decent idea of the blunt force trauma that Faster is all about. What's surprising is that the impact isn't always the result of a cheap shock or an audacious fight scene, but also from what seems to be an attempt at proper character development.

If Driver isn't carrying a gun, his hands are occupied wringing over the various moral and ethical implications of his rampage. It's a film that's more self-conscious than self-aware, and the internal discussion of Driver's actions falls apart with the general sort of hypocrisy that winds up being a staple of any full-blooded revenge film. Violence is bad, but some bad violence is good if you do the good violence to bad people. And "vengeance is faster" apparently.

You can argue that family fare, like The Tooth Fairy and Race to Witch Mountain, has been holding Dwayne Johnson back from becoming the big action hero that he's clearly capable of being. Coming back around to action in both this and the upcoming Fifth Fast and the Furious Film For Which I Don't Know The Fucking Title, Johnson isn't exactly challenged. There's more time for tearful contemplation that there has been in any of his other films, but it carries no weight when we're so separate from Driver.

The rest of the cast is generally rather good, with Billy Bob Thornton's tortured and drug-addled Cop making a nice counter-point to Carla Gugino as his frustrated colleague, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje showing up at a pivotal point in the film to give Johnson a final obstacle. The major bum note is the casting of Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Killer, a role that Clive Owen might have got if he were shit. The character is precocious, and the acting is not much better.

You can't particularly measure Faster by what it has given the world in terms of moral debate and scrutiny of revenge movie archetypes. However, there's still a hell of a lot of value in a film this blunt that still bothers to think about this kind of thing, even if its ponderings don't quite reach a satisfying conclusion. For a film called Faster, it's remarkably pedestrian stuff, but it has at least one good plot twist to its name and it's more consistently engaging than the usual assaults upon cinema.

Faster is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Faster, why not share your comments below?

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

And That's Funny, Right?!- THE OTHER GUYS Review

Did you lose your job during the recession? Has your credit rating plummeted? Then you know there has to be comedy in that, right? Right?! This is the pandering central conceit of The Other Guys, from the creative team behind Anchorman. After a blistering action-packed opening starring Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, we're introduced to the titular other guys, played by Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg.

Pen-pusher Allen Gamble and disgraced detective Terry Hoitz get their big chance to go up in the world when they stumble upon evidence of a Ponzi scheme orchestrated by a devious CEO. Working around the fact that they're utterly incompetent and have to have their balls busted every other day by their long-suffering boss, they go on a journey of... oh, look, it's just a buddy cop comedy, right?

Let me remind you of a film that limped in and out of UK cinemas earlier this year. It was called Cop Out, and people seemed to hate it. As a big Kevin Smith fan, it disappointed me- I found it to be lacking in his usual earnestness and humour, muddled in the plot department and all in all, it felt way too self-indulgent. I'm baffled by all the great reviews The Other Guys is getting, because the difference between Smith's film and Adam McKay's film is six of one and half a dozen of the other.

If anything, the plot in this is even more muddled than Cop Out. While that one at least had some motivation for our protagonists, this is merely a series of comedy sketches strung together by some vague political implications. It's like the filmmakers are breaking the fourth wall and saying "Will Ferrell is a geeky cop! And that's funny, right?!" Sadly, the answer is mostly no! I like Ferrell, but so much of his ad-libbing here utterly missed the mark for me.

Luckily, he's played against Mark Wahlberg, a natural comedy actor, as anybody who has seen The Happening will testify. His infuriated yelling for Ferrell to shut up is often a lot funnier than whatever tangent Ferrell is off on. They at least have a decent dynamic going, and I'd happily have watched any number of short sketches with them riffing on one another. The plot in this one just doesn't work, and it drags the film out to 107 minutes. Not a long film, but a film that feels really, really long.

It does have more than a few belly-laughs, an area in which Cop Out was definitely lacking, but come on! This one's surely only getting such a good buzz because of the goodwill towards Ferrell and McKay. This is by far the weakest film they've made together- I enjoyed Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers and so my expectations were high. Were they met? Fuck no!

Individual elements of it are great, but I wanted to see most of those elements more than we saw Will Ferrell. Exempt from that are Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, whose extended cameos are the most perfectly pitched comedic roles the film has to offer. Also, Steve Coogan- either he doesn't ad-lib well or they just gave his character really crappy dialogue. But I'd happily have seen more of Michael Keaton or Eva Mendes, dammit!

The Other Guys is a film that almost felt calculated to alienate me as it went along. I laughed a lot in the first half hour, but that's not enough to give the whole film a pass. It's only sporadically funny and sadly more concerned with throwing in Blues Brothers style car chases than being consistent and coherent. Wait until DVD if you're a fan of Ferrell. If you're not, then don't watch Cop Out either, but to those trumpeting this as the second coming, they're both different shades of the same disappointing colour.

The Other Guys is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Other Guys, why not share your comments below? Incidentally, even though I like Step Brothers, I'm going to slap the next person who yells "It's the fuckin' Catalina wine-mixer" in public. Unless we're actually at the Catalina wine-mixer. Which seems unlikely.

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