"You two stirred up quite a bit of trouble today."
If only all fourth sequels in low-end franchises could be built this way. Following on from the unexpected success and indeed entertainment value of the fourth entry in the series, Fast & Furious 5 is a gloriously dumb, huge popcorn action movie that delivers completely for its target audience and is great fun to watch. Bookended by two of the most ridiculous, exciting and mesmerising action set pieces in ages, Fast & Furious 5 is mostly a basic heist movie with a couple of interesting narrative twists along the way, but it is carried by a uniformly terrific 'family' of actors who clearly understand what they are doing in this movie and have a ball with the action and the material. Dialogue is mostly functional, but listen out for three killer one-liners in the gang's first warehouse meeting. The ace played this time is Dwayne Johnson as the federal agent on the trail of the anti-heroes, in a spectacularly unbelievable but quite brilliant character role; for action fans, a smackdown between The Rock and Vin Diesel is worth the ticket price alone. The main characters have sufficient development in this entry to keep it interesting without ever really stretching the core cast. It is a shame that the race for the 'Papa Smurf' car is elided - it would have provided more much-needed car action in the mid-section of the movie - but the film is never too far away from the next gun-fight, Rio provides a spectacular and visually interesting backdrop, and Justin Lin directs with an efficient, kinetic style. Stay in your seat at the end; a mid-end-credits scene sets up the next movie in a potentially interesting way.
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