A white bus full of prison inmates ambles down a lonely desert road. Three fast cars zoom in behind it. Then beside it. Then in front. You know what's coming: One flipped prison bus later, outlaw street racer Dominic Toretto is a free man again.
 Free, that is, to get out of Dodge, so to speak. And fast. And probably in a Dodge. High on the FBI's Most Wanted list, Dom, ex-cop Brian O'Conner and Dom's sister, Mia (O'Conner's girlfriend), head south. Way south … to Rio de Janeiro's favela slums, where they hope to lie low until the heat subsides.
But sitting still isn't a strong suit for Dom and his crew. Especially when they're dead broke. So when Dom's childhood friend, Vince—who's been holed up in the favelas for years—suggests they score some quick cash helping a shady local pinch three exotic cars being transported on a train, they're game. After all, it's just a little job …
… that goes wrong in a big way. Three dead DEA agents later—taken out by lackeys of the aforementioned shady local, a man named Reyes who runs Rio's crime syndicate—Dom and Co. quickly graduate to the top of the FBI's stack of personas non grata. And the fact that they didn't commit the crime they're being accused of matters little to Agent Luke Hobbs, a Terminator-minded emissary dispatched to hunt them down.
"Above all else," Hobbs tells his team, "we don't ever, ever let them get in the cars." It's a good command. Of course, it's also impossible to enforce. With Hobbs in hot pursuit of his fast-and-furious quarry, Dom and O'Conner decide it's time to disappear again. Forever. And that takes money.
As luck and the scriptwriter would have it, a GPS chip in one of the cars they stole tells them exactly where Reyes launders his $100 million drug fortune. So Dom recruits some old friends for one last brazen heist, Brazilian-style.
Did I already mention that they're being systematically tracked by the guy formerly known as The Rock?
:: Review
Movie No. 5. Just like movie No. 4. Etcetera. This 2011 installment is exactly what you'd expect: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and their supporting cast—which now includes Dwayne Johnson—doing absolutely insane things with cars and looking very cool doing it.
According to the movie's production notes, the filmmakers bought—and destroyed—nearly 300 cars making Fast Five. And if close-up shots of hood ornaments are any indication, the vast majority—not counting your requisite Nissan GT-Rs, Ford GT40s, DeTomaso Panteras and Porsche 911 GT3 RSs—were new Dodge Chargers.
No doubt the filmmakers hoped to do nothing more than give audiences what David Letterman calls "More 'splosions! More 'splosions!" It's an adrenaline-charged "good time" for giddy gearheads. But it's also chock-full of intense violence, profanity and titillation.
And beyond that, at the risk of sounding like a broken flywheel, this latest F&F film once again delivers a dubious, self-contained and subjective morality. At one point, Brian says the money they steal from Reyes will be enough to purchase "new passports, new lives." Then he adds, "We'll buy our freedom."
It's easy to swallow that feel-good line without much thought, because these characters' loyalty and family-like bonds pull at our sympathies. But the film is essentially saying that instead of paying the price for reckless, illegal activity, all you have to do is engage in more of the same, look smooth while you do it, then cash out to beat the system completely.
Absolutely no one who's even remotely interested in this film's fast cars and fearless action is really thinking about what that message does to our worldviews. Which is exactly why I'm bringing it up.
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