The Fast and Curious 5: The Fast and the Furious Franchise Curiously Found Itself in its FOURTh Sequel, 2011's Transcendently Silly Fast Five

Things get a little bit ridiculous here but in a fun way.

I am forever amused by people who finally get around to seeing Saturday Night Fever and are shocked and horrified to discover that it is a blisteringly dark, pessimistic and despairing look at toxic masculinity, rape culture and capitalism rather than a nice movie about a handsome young man who loves to dance and aggressively pursues his show-business dreams.  

There is a nice movie where John Travolta’s Tony Manero is handsome young man who loves to dance and aggressively pursues his show-business dreams. It’s Saturday Night Fever’s 1983 sequel Staying Alive and it is an utter abomination and a betrayal of everything that makes the iconic original so brilliant and essential. 

Staying Alive is a terrible movie but it fits the public conception of what a blockbuster should be more than a bleak character study of a hateful misogynist and bigot who happens to be handsome and good at dancing. 

On a similar note, when people think about Rambo they almost invariably see him as a machine-gun-toting super-patriot single-handedly re-fighting and winning the Vietnam War on our behalf. 

That’s how Rambo is portrayed in 1984’s Rambo: First Blood Part Two but it most assuredly is not how he behaves in 1982’s First Blood. In the first film in the Rambo franchise the character is very overtly a countercultural figure, an emotionally shattered Vietnam veteran who goes nuts when he’s harassed by bully cops and brings the war home.

When people think of the Fast and the Furious franchise they tend not to envision 2001’s The Fast and the Furious. They don’t think of 2 Fast 2 Furious or Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift or even Fast & Furious, the sequel that brought Vin Diesel back into the family for good. 

In the public imagination the Fast and the Furious movies look and feel an awful lot like 2011’s Fast Five. The series kept shifting and recalibrating its focus and its characters until it found itself with Fast Five. 

With Fast Five the series embraced excess as a core virtue. The films got bigger and more ridiculous until they leaped deliriously into a realm of pure fantasy.

With Fast Five size matters. In an anecdote that makes me way too happy, the filmmakers apparently created the character of hard-ass lawman Lucas Hobbs with Tommy Lee Jones in mind. 

They even got Jones to sign a waver to sanction any and all buffoonery that might happen on the Fast Five set. Then, and this is the beautiful part, Vin Diesel read a comment on Facebook from a woman named Jen Kelly that read, ‘I would love to see you (and Dwayne Johnson) work together on screen.’”

Diesel had a Eureka moment. He figured that if this Jen Kelly woman would like to see him fight Dwayne Johnson onscreen then it stood to reason that other people might enjoy that pairing as well. 

So Diesel called up Jones and told him to eat shit and die because his role was now going to be played by a former professional wrestler because of a random internet comment.

I hope this Jen Kelly woman does not go mad with power. The character of Lucas Hobbs bears an unmistakable resemblance to the stoic, no-nonsense lawman Tommy Lee Jones played in his Oscar-winning turn in The Fugitive. 

The problem is that Jones, while a fine actor, is not fucking jacked. He is not swole. He does not have a six pack, let alone a twelve pack. When you look at Jones you do not think, “Holy shit. That monster of a man has really been hitting the juice hard.” 

Jones is a big star but he is not as big a man or as outsized a presence as Dwayne Johnson and in a movie like this that’s all that matters. 

Fast Five opens with the family rescuing Dom from a lengthy prison sentence for all of the various crimes that he has committed by running the prison bus he’s in off the road. 

By my count, the bus flipped over something like twenty times. I naturally assumed that Dom died a violent death along with everyone else OR Dom was freed by the bus crash but so were thirty eight rapists, murderers and kiddy diddlers who, unlike Dom, are NOT a powerful force for good in the universe. 

I was wrong! In what can only be deemed a literally unbelievable development, nobody died when a massive bus flipped over a million times and only Dom managed to escape. 

Being on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List alongside Brian, Dom obviously needs to lay low for a while so he heads to Brazil for a change of scenery. 

Diesel’s absence from 2 Fast 2 Furious and almost the entirety of Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift forced the filmmakers to get creative and find ways to get the audience’s mind off Diesel’s absence. A change in latitude did not result in a change in attitude when the action relocated to Florida for 2 Fast 2 Furious, Japan for Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift and Brazil for Fast Five. 

I suspect that part of the reason these films are so popular is because they are truly multi-cultural and reflect the ever changing and evolving nature of our crazy-making modern world. 

I know folks on the right think that making movies or TV shows or writing books with anything other than straight white Christian Americans in all of the important roles is a form of cultural genocide but I would actually argue that people outside of the United States might actually enjoy and appreciate characters who look and sound like them. 

A newly free Dom heads South to help family member Vince, who has been AWOL since the first film, in a heist that goes fatally wrong and results in Dom and his family being framed for even more murders that they did not commit. 

At this point the franchise has only the fuzziest connection to the original film and a much greater connection to the Mission Impossible series. Like the Mission Impossible series, the Fast and the Furious is a terrific delivery system for stunts and some of the flashiest driving ever committed to film. 

Twenty minutes into Fast Five Johnson roars onto the scene as Luke Hobbs, a bullet-headed bruiser and exceedingly worthy antagonist to Diesel and his family. 

I like Johnson actor best when he is either spoofing his tough guy image by playing lost and confused fools in outliers like Be Cool, Southland Tales and Pain and Gain or playing the living personification of macho male certainty here. 

Johnson’s presence elevates Fast Five creatively as well as commercially. Director Justin Lin, returning for his third outing after helming Fast Furious: Tokyo Drift and Fast & Furious and screenwriter Chris Morgan give Johnson an iconic introduction and an iconic character to play. 

Johnson slid so easily into the Fast and the Furious universe that it’s easy to see why he thought he’d be just as perfect a fit for the DCU. 

Hobbs is Javert to Johnson’s Jean Valjean, Deputy U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard to his Dr. Richard Kimball. Diesel was clearly intimidated by the newcomer to the franchise in a way he understandably never was by Walker or Gibson. 

When Fast Five was released age and experience had given Walker a certain gravity. In Fast Five the franchise stopped trying to impress us with the actor’s non-existent coolness and wisely cast him a role that suits him as Diesel’s adoring sidekick and a core member of the family. 

Walker still isn’t anywhere near as charismatic as his costars but he’s convincing here talking about his life and impending fatherhood in a way that he hasn’t been in previous entries. 

Fast Five operates on the principle of escalation. The set-pieces, stunts and heists keep getting bigger until it seems like the series can’t possibly top itself, until it inevitably does. 

Late in Fast Five’s third act, the film realizes the fervent wishes of Jen Kelly and all of us by having Diesel and Johnson square off in an all-out battle of the quarreling Colossuses. 

Diesel and Johnson are human Rock Em Sock Em robots living out the fantasies of countless pre-pubescent boys, and also Jen Kelly, by finally determining who would win if Diesel and Johnson were to fight. 

The absurdly jacked action heroes get so heated and so close that for a good twenty seconds it seems possible, if not likely, that they’ll enjoy a nice, long smooch. 

I like to imagine that there is at least one cut of Fast Five where Johnson and Diesel make out for a couple of minutes. 

Now that a precedent has been set for randos typing words into the internet that Vin Diesel makes a reality I’d like to personally address the Guardians of the Galaxy VoiceOver artist and say that I’d love to see Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson have a fun friend date where they maybe play miniature golf and grab coffee. I’m not shipping or anything. They don’t have to do anything sexual. I just think we need more representations of gentle male friendships in action movies. 

Johnson is so impressed by Dom that he decides to fight by his side. Villains and heroes alike have a curious way of changing sides in these movies.

Fast Five has a Marvel-style mid-credit sequence where Eva Mendes returns to inform Hobbs that Letty, whose violent death was the catalyst for Fast & Furious is not actually dead. 

BUM BUM BUM! In Fast Five family is so powerful that it transcends death. This is not the first time the Fast and the Furious movies have killed off a character, then cavalierly brought them back to life. 

Poor Han sure seemed to meet his maker in a fiery crash in Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift only to come miraculously back to life for the sequels. Perhaps those crisps that Han is always eating make him immortal. That’s no more far-fetched than the rest of the movie. 

The Fast and the Furious movies have gotten so out there that if dragons and wizards were introduced as a major element of the franchise nobody would question it. 

I’m here for it! It’s very rare for a series to find itself in its fifth entry. It’s even more unusual for a fourth sequel to be the best movie in a film series but Fast Five accomplishes that curious feat. 

That consequently makes everything to come a letdown but isn’t that just the way life is? It fucking sucks but at least there are movies in the Fast and the Furious franchise to distract us from the inexorable horror of existence.