To me, this movie is perfection.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Fast & Furious 5 steers the series even further away from 'car-porn' and into more accessible over-the-top summer blockbuster territory. This one even has The Rock in it!The film opens as part four closed, with Dom's team rescuing their friend while he is en route to prison by orchestrating a bus crash that, in reality, would kill everyone inside. Of course, by now, reality has nothing to do with the Fast & Furious franchise: this is a preposterous slam-bang spectacle that would have left me with a big grin on my face if it hadn't been so drawn out. At well over two hours, part 5 is at least thirty minutes longer than it needed to be. Trim the fat and it might have been the most enjoyable one so far.Anyway, with Dom free (and somehow devoid of any injuries), the action moves to Brazil where the team decide to pull another car robbery (from a speeding train, no less). Lots of mayhem ensues, with more death defying stunts, after which the crew discover a computer chip hidden inside one of the vehicles that details the activities of Rio De Janeiro's top crime lord. Armed with this information, the gang decide to pull one more heist: steal the bad guy's money - all $100million of it. Meanwhile, top US agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) is on their trail.Unfortunately, the preparation for the daring raid is where things tend to drag (although we do get to see Gal Gadot in a small bikini, so it's not all bad). The film does, however, eventually culminate in one of the craziest heist scenes in cinema, with Dom and Brian dragging a humongous metal safe around the streets of Rio, laying waste to buildings and cars in the process. Oh, and there's a car with a mini-gun that pops out of the sun roof! All of this is mindless popcorn fun if you can check your sense of logic at the door on the way in - it's just a shame that getting there is a bit of a slog at times.

** MINOR PLOT SYNOPSIS (MINUS ENDING)**Vin Diesel is busted out of prison and is reunited with his sister Jordana Brewster (who I fell in love with in D.E.B.S.) and her bf Paul Walker in Rio, the most recognized skyline in the world. They are bad guys stealing cars off a train. As things turned out, these were cars seized by the Brazilian DEA, who for some reason unlike their American counterparts don't disable the vehicles. Due to infighting, the effort is partially botched and Vin Diesel and Walker end up as captives of a Rio mobster. They discover he wants one of the cars back real bad. After they escape they dismantle the car to find out way.Meanwhile Dwayne Johnson comes down from the US to take back Vin Diesel. It seems the US has jurisdiction in Brazil, but hey its a movie. From a chip in the vehicle, Vin Diesel discovers that the crime boss has money stored in various cash houses throughout the city. Walker and Vin Diesel assemble a Mission Impossible team to go after the cash. They attack the first cash house and burn the money which forces the mobster to relocate all his eggs into one basket. As it turns out, that basket is inside the evidence safe at the police station, making the task of that one last hit a bit more difficult. At this point the movie takes a few interesting twists and turns.The plot contains numerous implausibilities as does most Mission Impossible action movies, vehicles that can bust through concrete walls (that never use rebar), and don't even scratch the head lights. The ending will keep Myth Busters busy for a season.

The acceleration period of the "Fast & Furious" franchise is officially over. Now it's all pure speed. "Fast Five" pretty much blows the roof off of all previously held notions of what these movies are and could be. The action, the stunts, the cast — everything is bigger. With director Justin Lin and writer Chris Morgan returning from "Fast & Furious," the creative sensibilities are all the same, so clearly the $40 million in additional budget had a big role to play in the finished product.Audiences handsomely rewarded "Fast & Furious" at the box office; in "Fast Five," they reap the benefits. Never before have so many cars, trucks and trains been pulverized into scrap metal on the big screen. The stunts are simply huge. (I'd say grandiose, but this is the "Fast & Furious" franchises after all.) Morgan and Lin get the green light to do whatever they can imagine. Even if what they dream up doesn't make sense, it's fun to watch.Other than financial freedom, Morgan in particular has a lot more freedom of story. The unusual circumstances of the franchise's beginnings (i.e. Vin Diesel turning down the second film) created a recovery period of sorts. "Fast & Furious" had to bring Diesel's Dominic Toretto and Paul Walker's Brian O'Conner back together and reenergize fans of the 2001 original; "Fast Five" had a blank canvas. The usual tropes of these movies have been minimized and some passed over completely. It's a much looser and more fun movie.Surprisingly, the entire movie takes place in Rio de Janeiro. O'Conner and Mia (Jordana Brewster) have fled there after breaking Dom out of federal custody by flipping a bus of prisoners on a desert highway. That's the film's quick open. Dom is in Rio as well, and they all meet back up to pull off a job that will keep them on their feet. Only the job (boosting cars off a moving train) doesn't go quite as planned, and they have irked another powerful drug lord named Reyes, who "owns" Rio. They've also caught the attention of the FBI, who's sent its best man-hunter, Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to bring them in. Morgan can't quite free these movies of the criminal good guys vs. law officer bad guys dynamic. On the plus side, at least it's no longer about whether or not O'Conner is going to do his job or throw it all away to help Toretto and co. He's firmly on their team now. On the other hand, you can imagine that the same war of conscience might befall Johnson's Hobbs and the woman he's picked as his sidekick, Elena (Elsa Pataky)."Fast Five" also brings back some old faces: "2 Fast 2 Furious" stars Tyrese as Roman Pierce and Ludicrous as Tej, as well as Matt Schulze, who played Vince in the original "The Fast and the Furious." Add Sung Kang as Han from "Tokyo Drift," and Gal Gadot, Tego Calderon and Don Omar from the last movie and you have a massive ensemble with which to play-act "Ocean's Eleven." That's essentially the model for this movie; all the characters have special talents and they're going to pull off a heist to take down the biggest boss-man in Rio. The characters also fit certain stereotyped roles, but that figures.Pretty much all criticisms of the plot and story mechanics become meaningless once Dom and O'Conner start speeding through the streets of Rio towing a gigantic safe in grand finale. The physics are questionable, but the movie stands out on the ingenuity of this action sequence alone, one that serves as an apt metaphor for this film series' reckless, bulldozing, couldn't-give-a-damn attitude. The "Fast and Furious" movies continue to ride comfortably in the seat of mediocrity, but they get to do it on the grandest stage yet in "Fast Five," and that ratcheted-up entertainment factor helps sway this movie into more favorable territory.~Steven CThanks for reading! Visit Movie Muse Reviews for more

Well, I have now finished watching number five in what appears to be turning into a never ending series (though how it is going to continue now that Paul Walker has passed on, ironically due to a motor vehicle accident, of which the movie warns at the end not to do due to them being performed by professional stuntmen in a controlled environment, is yet to be seen). Actually, this film is probably the one that has moved to set the standard of how the next two movies were to evolve. First of all you have Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson now making an entrance, particularly since Brian O'Conner has decided to throw his hat in with the bad guys and has once again left the FBI. Mind you, with the friendship that he has built with Torretto over the series it is not surprising that he has once again become a crook.Anyway, O'Conner and his girlfriend, once again wanted by the authorities in the United States (for breaking Toretto out of goal no less), have surfaced in Brazil where they are offered a job to attempt to steal some cars off of a train. Toretto, who has disappeared, returns to assist in the heist, however decides that instead to returning the car to the drug lord of Rio, decides to take it for himself. In all of the confusion two DEA agents are killed, which brings Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to Rio in an attempt to capture them. Of course, despite the fact that Toretto and O'Conner are basically small time crooks, they are still the heroes of the film, so what we have is a three way tussle where they have unfortunately been caught in the middle.As I have mentioned, this film has taken a different course to the previous films in the series, and while I am yet to watch the next two, I suspect that they are going to start to follow this format. First of all we have our two main characters, who happen to live in the shadow world but aren't necessarily bad guys – small time crooks would probably be the best way to describe them. Not Robin Hood characters – they don't rob from the rich to give to the poor, they rob from the crooks to give to themselves. Actually, if it wasn't for the fact that they landed up on the wrong side of the Brazilian drug lord they probably would have left him, and his riches, alone.This is the thing with the film – they upset the drug lord who then decides to attempt to shut them down, and despite the fact that he has pretty much all of the security apparatus of Rio on his side, he still isn't able to stop a handful of determined thugs from taking down his empire and scooting off with his money. Mind you, this is Hollywood, so I probably wouldn't expect to be able to get away with this in real life, though I probably wouldn't be surprised if such people did have their claws into the political and security apparatus of the state. Sure, they might have little influence over the American government, but corruption seems to happen in another, more legal, way there through the revolving door system of political appointments, campaign financing, and K-Street lobbyists. However the suggestion is that in the countries south of the border it is the drug money that controls the government and the security forces, and the gangs are armed much better than the police.Anyway, this addition to the franchise seems to have moved away from car racing and more towards the action. Sure, they have the occasional visit to an illegal drag racing circuit, but the focus, despite the name, is no longer street racing and now more on the action. Mind you, of the five films that have been released up to now, three of them have involved drug lords, one of them purely about racing, and of course there was the first one. It also seems as if Vin Diesel is the star of the series, and even though Paul Walker also plays a major role, he still seems to play second fiddle (though I have to admit that when he died, I hadn't even heard of him).