Fast Five: In the City of God...

Pic courtesy: okmagazine.com

Watching Fast Five, the latest installment of The Fast and The Furious franchise is pure fun. The movie is total adrenalin rush, chases, superb locale, well choreographed action sequences.. a viewer's pleasure. Some may complain of wooden acting of the cast, but that was expected. Even, in this movie, there is no great scope of exhibiting any great skills other than some very emotions like rage, angst, sorrow, which all the concerned actors does somewhat convincingly.

This time Vin Diesel and party have absconded to Rio, capital of Brazil. They take up a job of  stealing cars from a moving train. They screws up badly causing the death of some American DEA agents. Now Brazilian police and a gang lord of Rio (Joaquim de Almeida) are behind them . To add masala to the proceedings, a tough American DSS special agent (played by Dwayne Rock Johnson) arrives to apprehend Diesel and Paul Walker. They decides to take up one last job, robbing Almeida of all the cash he earned illegally and recruits a team, consisting of guys from the previous installments of the movie (Remember Tyrese Gibson from the second part, 2 Fast 2 Furious?). Rest of the movie is a superb cat and mouse game involving all these players. 

The best thing about the movie is that it never strays from its basic premise, providing some raw action viewing pleasure. The refrain from depending totally on car chases is notable, may be due to the introduction of Rock's character. And that has to be accepted as a masterstroke. Rock totally dominates the scene whenever present. The confrontation scenes with him and Diesel are electric. Another strong point is visuals. Rio is vibrating, beautiful and threatening at the same time. One cannot, but remember that masterpiece City of God, though there is no comparison between both. One weak point I feel is the anti hero, who is never threatening nor convincing. And also the similarity it shares with similar movies like Italian Job and Ocean's series. 

The director Justin Lin should be given credit for making this one with enough explosions and breakneck speed so as the audience never tries to think what is wrong with all these men committing such absurd things.