The Dukes See a Movie: Fast Five

Another Wednesday was upon us with nothing to do so we turned to our staple, the movie theater.  It seems that our motto is when in doubt watch something. This time we ended up seeing Fast Five. (See Pirates review to see our stance on overhyped movies and strung out franchises.) Usually this wouldn't have made our list of movies to see, but it managed to get decent rating from critics and the public so we decided to give it a try.

As the movie starts out you find out that all the main characters are on the run. As to why we don't know. That is mainly our fault since none of us had seen past the second movie. Personally I only ever saw the first one. Needless to say we were a little confused but we pushed past it in hopes of action. Paul Walker and his lady agree to do a job boosting some cars but it turns out that there was more behind it than just the cars. 100 million dollars more in fact. One of the cars belonged to a drug lord that was running the city of Rio de Janeiro. Inside the car was a chip that included information about all of the routes and locations of his fortune. Vin Diesel shows up and says they need a crew so they start gathering up people that had been in all of the Fast and the Furious movies.

Here is where Ricky and I hit a little snag. The Brazilian drug lord talks about how he would like to take the Portuguese approach to expansion which involves gifts and being nice as opposed to the Spanish model of violence. Ricky argues that the Spanish method works better because there are more people that speak Spanish. Here is my argument. Spain has a population of 46 million. Portugal has a population of 10.6 million. There are 431.6 million Spanish speakers in the world (according to Wikipedia) and there are 245.8 million Portuguese speakers in the world. Using a simple ratio there are 9.4 Spanish speakers in the world for every person in Spain but on the other hand there are 23.2 Portuguese speakers for every person in Portugal. Therefore the Portuguese method was more effective based on the ratio of each country's population compared to the total amount of people that speak each language. In other words Ricky and Spain can choke on those numbers.

Back to the movie. If you have seen any of the movies I am guessing they all have similar ideas. The main characters are bad but in a lovable rogue type of way. They do illegal things but they have semi-pure motives. In this particular one they are attempting to steal the drug lord's money while evading the Under Armour sporting Rock. They make a plan and are about to put it in motion when the Rock shows up talking about how they are ninnies for putting a tracker on his car because he is the man. This set up what we had been waiting for, a fight between the Rock and Vin Diesel.

Bald people are so angry. ( I am looking at you Spencer)

The fighting is intense but it ends with all the car jackers in custody. As they are heading out of town there is an ambush and the Rock loses his entire squad. Because of this loss he decides to help the criminals so that he can get revenge on the man who killed his men, the drug lord.

All in all I found this to be an enjoyable movie as long as you suspend your belief that the laws of physics apply in this  movie. It even had some decent Portuguese speaking which is nice for those of us that miss it from time to time. (Jordana Brewster spent part of her childhood in Brazil so that helps.) Sadly it doesn't have as much car racing and fighting as I was hoping, but it had a lot of eye candy for the men as well as for the ladies. That last part has pushed the Dukes to contemplate moving to Brazil because I can in all honesty say that it is a fairly accurate representation of that wonderful country.

Rating 3 stars