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.

Insert Gag Here- TAKERS Review

Getting to number one at the US box office isn't always a badge of honour. Making the top spot in the dying days of August, heist flick Takers isn't likely to have left an impression on many. I'd forgive you for having seen it on release and forgotten about it already, cos I'm having to strain to remember it from yesterday.

As far as I can surmise, the film is about a crew of professional bank robbers whose meticulous planning and scheduling is thrown into the disarray by the return of an old member of the gang. Ghost has just been released from prison after being caught on the job and left behind by his friends, and he comes to the gang with a heist plan, but can they trust him? Well, what do you think?

Even putting aside how predictable the "Curse your sudden, yet inevitable betrayal!" moment is, and how formulaic the story is, Takers is just bad. Not one of those films that I'd say is without redeeming features, but good golly, I still wish I hadn't bothered with it. The tail wags the dog to such an extent that the entire film spasms at the behest of heist movie conventions. Nothing of any real importance unfolds, and all of it seems to unfold only because the filmmakers have gleaned that it should from other films, not because they know the story they're telling.

That's never more apparent than with the central dichotomy. We open on Matt Dillon's jaded and underpaid detective, and his partner, played by Jay Hernanadez. We sporadically return to them, and yet the main characters are, apparently, the unappealing douchebags for whom the film is named. That's Takers, as in "of the piss". What's annoying is that while Dillon is hardly on top form, I'd much rather have seen the film about his character than the one about this sub-Hustle gang.

Let's allow for the fact that two of the stars are singers, not actors- Tip 'T.I' Harris and Chris Brown. Harris also produced the film and Brown is seemingly there as a combination of a known "name" musician and a parkour expert. That said, what Takers offers as parkour looks more like You've Been Framed- Brown knocking over everyone in the crowded street that he can in a scene where he runs from the cops- and in my boredom, I actually started awarding him points for every startled woman he wiped the fuck out during his escape.

But then there are the so-called real actors. Paul Walker and Hayden Christensen actually make perfect bank robbers, because their faces are so blank and non-descript that neither of them would ever require to disguise themselves to take up a life of crime. Recognising that it might be difficult to tell them apart, and in the absence of any personality where Christensen is concerned, the former Anakin is embellished with a pork-pie hat that's too small for his noggin, which gave me much needed levity all the way through at just how stupid he looked. Oh, and he still can't act for toffee, but does that surprise anyone?

With The Town still playing in cinemas, Ben Affleck is serving up a meaty and entertaining heist movie, so I don't know why you'd go to the soup kitchen instead, for this vacuous non-event of a film. It has lofty aspirations, but it definitely ain't Heat. Ever wondered how shit would Heat have been with rappers and shit actors sitting in for Al Pacino and Robert De Niro? It would have been precisely this shit with tiny hats, funny parkour, Genghis Khan quoting and all. Director John Luessenhop has none of Michael Mann's finesse, and instead he trots through cliche after cliche.

The result makes Takers little more than a prolapsed music video, dragged out to 107 minutes and packed with every heist movie trope in the book. The experienced actors are there to make Harris and Brown look better by comparison, and only Dillon crawls out of the hubris without a scratch on his credibility. Paul Walker and Hayden Christensen somehow manage to look even worse than usual. Presumably Zoe Saldana's extended cameo in here was pre-Avatar, because goodness knows she's better than this colour-graded daylight robbery. Don't let it waste your time.

Takers is still showing at selected cinemas nationwide. I'm amazed it made it past the first week- I never would have seen it otherwise.
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If you've seen Takers, why not share your comments below? This film does hold the distinction of having the worst Photoshop job ever performed on a film poster. No, that really is the real poster. Kind of representative too- it's a slipshod mash-up of shit actors and colour grading. Bloody poster is doing my job for me.

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