Fast Five (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Justin Lin. Starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson.
It's rarely a good sign when the movie you are about to watch ends with a number like "five." This is particularly the case when the sequels have been creeping up silently because the series has been hemorrhaging talent and most folks have had the decency to just start ignoring it. Then one day, you look and find they're up to The Land Before Time XIII.
The Fast and the Furious-the series in which street racing is both the source of and solution to all conflict-has always been something like The Land Before Time for young males: a colorful, harmless adventure that wives can park their husbands in front of when they don't want to hire a sitter.
But Fast Five is the rare fourth sequel that shows signs of effort. The actors from practically every major role in the series were hired back, although to be fair it's not like most of them were doing anything else. The script shows definite indications that it was read over more than once, and by more than one person. The action sequences-which, in a pleasant surprise, rely mostly on practical effects instead of CGI-are as flashy and polished as those of any summer blockbuster.
Don't get the wrong impression: Fast Five is just as brainless and nonsense-filled as its predecessors. Its physics exist in a world of their own, and its characters don't act out of reason or personal motivation, but based on the probability that their decisions will provoke loud hooting from the audience. But a good action movie carries the viewer along in a tidal wave of glorious stupidity, and Fast Five's "action movie logic"-the logic of gut feelings and Mission Accomplished and damn the consequences-is impeccable.
There is a plot here: the familiar story about reuniting the old gang for one last heist. The group, headed up by Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, needs to pull off a $100 million robbery of a Brazilian crime boss while somehow involving as many tricked-out cars as possible.
For reasons that turn out to be completely pointless, they need to acquire a lot of cars, most of them won in street races-which, in a strange omission for this series, aren't depicted onscreen. Cars just keep getting added to the pile along with other equipment (including a 12-foot safe and a garbage truck, which must have been won in some very unconventional drag races).
But the movie is already nicely paced at well over two hours, while still incorporating reckless driving into its scenes in an impressive number of ways. The film feels complete even without its street racing roots.
It delivers what it promises.
Rated PG-13 for violations of the rules of the road/universe.
4 out of 5
Scream 4 (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Wes Craven. Starring Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette.
Hopelessly moronic shocker film.
What do you do when the postmodern horror movie you created to deconstruct the clichés of other horror movies mutates into a franchise more worn-out and clichéd than the ones you mocked ever were?
If you answered "Hide yourself from the public in shame," you are correct. But Wes Craven's solution is to run the series even further into the ground, maybe in the hope that it will eventually emerge on the other side of the earth. Self-aware jokes about how pathetic the situation has become only make it more pathetic. Scream 4 is self-referential about how self-referential it's being, and then it makes references to that.
The plot is identical to all the other ones. Screamy-face the murderer is back, killing the hot chicks in some high school one by one. The teenagers' only response to the bloodbath is to giggle and make out and talk about how awesome it is that they're living in a slasher film.
Sprinkle with "trendy" chatter about the facebooks and the cyberspaces and you have a Scream bad enough to insult the tastes of a whole new generation.
Excruciating.
Rated R for bringing back the 90s.
1.5 out of 5
