By Javier Cabrera / Editor in Chief
By Javier Cabrera / Editor in Chief
And the story continues.
“Fast Five” is the latest installment of the “Fast and the Furious” series of movies.
The story picks up from “Fast and Furious” where Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) is sentenced to life in prison without parole as Brain O’Connor (Paul Walker) walks away in disgust as his efforts as a law enforcement officer fails to limit his friend’s punishment.
“Fast and Furious” ends with the street gang speeding toward the prison bus where Dominic is in and the movie cuts—leaving fans of the franchise in anxious to know what happens next.
Fans flooded movie theaters across the country as the film made $86 million in its first weekend.
Dominic, Brian and Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster) flee to Rio de Janeiro, to hide, where they meet up with an old friend, Vincent (Matt Schulze) who has not been heard from since the first movie.
Vincent tells his old friends he landed in Rio after free-falling through South America until he met his wife and had a son who he named after Dominic.
Before Dominic shows up in Rio de Janeiro, Brian and Mia accepts a job Vincent had set up with the richest man in Rio, Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), where they will assist in stealing luxury cars from a passing train.
The cars are seized by the U.S. and are being transferred but the job goes bad when Dominic shows up on the train and has other plans for what they want to do with the cars.
In the scene three U.S. agents were killed after they tried stopping the robbery. The killings set up the entrance of Dwayne Johnson.
Johnson plays Luke Hobbs, a U.S. Diplomatic Security special agent, who is in Rio with a special tactics force team tracking down Dominic’s crew.
That alone is enough action for one movie but all this occurs in the first 10 minutes of the movie and there is a lot more to go in the next 100 minutes of the film.
Unlike the other “Fast and the Furious” movies, “Fast Five” brings the key actors from all the movies together to do one big job which is supposed to be the final job—which later may seem not the case.
Either way, the three are in a big mess and are being chased by Hobbs and Reyes’ gang because for what Dominic did back at the train.
Dominic and Brian round up a serious crew which includes Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) from “2 Fast 2 Furious,” and Han (Sung Hang), Gisele (Gal Gadol), Santos (Don Omar) and Leo (Tego Calderon) from “Fast and Furious.”
The team is assembled to steal every penny from Reyes, but there is one small problem: Reyes has every cop under his payroll and his money is in a huge secured safe inside the police station.
This is where “Fast Five” returns to its roots: Dominic and Brian turn to illegal street racing to find cars fast enough to pull off the mission and get away with the money.
The downside to this scene is that the director does not show the audience the street races but there is a lot more that makes up for this disappointment including a scene where Dominic, Brain, Roman Pearce and Tej are at a red light with four stolen police cars and they race down a busy street with the sirens and lights on.
One thing that may seem different about “Fast Five” is that as a fan of all the movies, a person may feel as if they are a part of the crew because the characters think back from moments of the past movies.
The crew jokes with one another and do a lot of things where as a fan can pick up on the inside jokes and say “hey I remember when they said that or did that in one of the previous movies.”
“Fast Five” reveals a lot more about the main characters while fans of the franchise leave the movie theater asking more questions and anticipating for what is to come in the next film of the series.
