Fast Five (2011)

**Fast Five brings the action, beloved old characters, exciting new ones, and a whole lot of fun to the Fast franchise and the heist genre.**
Fast 4 and Fast 5 are the best of the Fast & Furious franchise. Fast 4 redeemed the series after the failure of Tokyo Drift by bringing back Vin Diesel and the cast and family of the first film. Then Fast 5 expands and adds to the crew with fan-favorite characters from across the series, including Han (Kang), Roman (Gibson), Tej (Ludacris), Gisele (Gadot), and more. The Toretto family plans a massive heist to buy their freedom but hot on their tale is Dwayne Johnson’s Hobbs, a perfect foil to Diesel’s Toretto. The face-off between these characters is epic! Fast Five’s bonkers action is a little more grounded than later entries, but it’s still outrageous fun. It feels kind of like The Italian Job, directed by Michael Bay. Fast Five launched the Fast Franchise into another decade of insane stunts and stories with great characters and commitment to embracing its cheesy awesomeness.

Picking up hot on the heels of the last film, the newly escaped "Dom" (Vin Diesel), his ex-FBI pal "O'Conner" (Paul Walker) and "Mia" (Jordan Brewster) have to keep skipping one step ahead of the pursuing law led by "Hobbs" (Dwayne Johnson) and, whilst cornered in Rio, they must assemble everyone with driving skills so as to thwart the ambitions of drug lord "Reyes" (Joaquim de Almeida) whom they have seriously hacked off. This effort sacrifices a little of the pace and speed of the other films and tries to focus on a slightly stronger story with some better characterisations - that does mean that it can be a bit on the slow side at times and maybe we get just one thoughtful pose from Diesel too many, but as we head towards a fairly predictable denouement this easily (for my money, anyway) tops the list of F&F films before clearly teeing us up for number 6. I think it's closer in quality and standard to the first film - and still has plenty of burnt rubber and lively stunts to keep it watchable.