Hot Wheels

Cine Review: FAST FIVE (AKA. FAST AND FURIOUS 5: RIO HEIST)
15 – 130mins – 2011
Written by: Chris Morgan
Directed by: Justin Lin
Starring: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, Dwayne Johnson, Tyrese Gibson, Chris Bridges, Matt Schulze, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Elsa Pataky, Joaquim de Almeida
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I won’t bullshit you: I had no real inclination to watch this film. The plan was to watch haunted house horror Insidious, but that was showing at a ridonkulous hour, so I gave this boy racer’s wet dream a try (despite being beyond uninterested in modified race cars and having never watched parts one to four in this series), and what d’ya know? I frickin’ loved it!

Sure, Fast Five is little more than a brainless, hammy, over-the-top, logic-defying exhibition, but what undeniable joy this ride is, as former FBI agent Brian O’Conner (Walker) and his girlfriend Mia Toretto (Brewster) use their circuit skillz to bust the latter’s brother, Dom (a decidedly chunky looking Diesel), out of the prison transport bus he was being taken away in at the end of Fast & Furious. And that’s just in the first five minutes!

From then on, the law-evading trio agree to rendezvous in Rio de Janeiro , where they take on various black-market jobs which see them cross paths with old friends (Schulze, not seen since the first film) and make enemies of the lawless (Almeida). Before long they are wanted in Brazil , too, with special agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson; great value) and his crack team of gun-totters drafted in to round our anti-heroes up. With a badass like the "The Rock" on your taillights, you’d just surrender - surely?

Well, no; apparently not. I told you logic wasn’t on this beauty's specifications. Still undeterred, Dom and Brian decide to assemble a band of accomplished and trusted car-mad cohorts including 2 Fast 2 Furious’s Roman Pearce (Gibson) and Tej Parker (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) to perform a “mission in-freakin’-sanity”: steal the laundered fortune stockpiled by Almeida’s Hernan Reyes (Brazil’s most wanted crime lord). I don't even think Robin Hood would have had the balls!

All the men are muscle-pumped Adonis’s and all the women bikini-wearing Venus’s, but sexualised stereotypes aside, Chris Morgan’s script endows these characters with a cocksure invincibility which means they know they’re fit so live with it. After 40-or so minutes, a tremendous sense of humour also kicks in as the heist is formulated between bonding buddies old and new, enlivening the film’s spirit and perfectly complimenting the blockbusting spectacle. Fast Five knows it’s got little fuel in its tank, but you’ll be so busy drooling over the bodywork that you’ll scarcely notice that it’s running on fumes.


In a CR@B Shell: Well blow me down with a tank of nitrous oxide; I had an absolute blast watching a knuckleheaded film about automobiles! Fast Five revs up to top gear and never hits its brakes – I’m tempted to reverse back to the original and re-start this five-piece relay from the grid.
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Angelic Possession

DVD Review: LEGION
15 – 97mins – 2010
Written by: Peter Schink and Scott Stewart
Directed by: Scott Stewart
Starring: Paul Bettany, Dennis Quaid, Lucas Black, Tyrese Gibson, Adrianne Palicki, Charles S. Dutton, Jon Tenney, Willa Holland, Kate Walsh, Jeanette Miller, Kevin Durand, Doug Jones
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God has lost faith in humanity. Again. But whereas the last time he summoned a flood to wash over the land, this time he has charged his legion of Angels with the task of possessing the weak-minded to wipe out those who put up a fight. Only one – Archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) – dares defy the Lord's word, and he is expelled from Heaven and dropped to Earth.

He lands in Los Angeles (where else?), where our protagonist cuts the wings from his own back and raids a Korean gun factory for an arsenal of automatic weaponry. Apprehending a police car, Michael heads to the aptly named Paradise Falls, an out of the way diner cut off from civilisation in the Mojave Desert, to ward off the Apocalypse and save humanity by overseeing the impending birth of mankind's saviour... All in a day's work.

It's a sumptuously mouth-watering cinematic prospect: God's supernatural minions shedding their angelic façades to face off against a pocket of human resistance. Imagine the fun directors could have with that unholy battle to end all battles? Alas, a prospect it remains, as it seems the creative force behind Legion's cameras had far too much fun with the CGI-crammed face-off sequences, that they forgot to string them together with a logical or enrapturing narrative.

Watching an ice cream vendor (Doug “Abe Sapien” Jones) roll up to the diner in his jingle tooting van before his limbs elongate freakishly and he lumbers spider-like towards the holed-up patrons, or a kindly OAP (Jeanette Miller) sprout animal fangs and crawl on the ceiling taking chunks out of people's necks is all thrilling stuff (the granny scene in particular is a real hoot, although that may be because it was the first), but a good movie individual set-pieces do not make.

Particularly not when the plot doesn't make a lick of sense (why do the Angels even need to possess people rather than just attack themselves? Why did God let things end the way they did?) and the ever-diminishing band of human characters do little to evoke our sympathy. Everyone has a mountain of issues and all they seem to do is argue. There's the diner owner Bob Hanson (Dennis Quaid), his naïve-but-loving son Jeep (Lucas Black), the hook-handed, bible-loving cook Percy (Charles S. Dutton) and the everywoman waitress, Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), who is pregnant with the second coming (although the writers don't have the balls to say so outright).

They are joined in the desert by frustrated family the Anderson's – Howard (Jon Tenney), Sandra (Kate Walsh) and their rebellious teenage daughter Audrey (Willa The O.C. Holland) – and single dad Kyle (Tyrese Gibson). The film rambles from eye-popping set-piece to set-piece, killing off the braindead cast in all manner of madcap ways, and there is such an almighty gap between the prologue which introduces Michael and the fallen Angel's appearance at the diner that you've almost forgotten what the point of any of it is and you're just gorging on the spectacle.

By the time Angel Gabriel (Kevin Durand) belatedly turns up to kill Charlie's baby (yep, she gives birth) and finish the job Michael refused, the film is beyond redemption and all logic has been thrown out the window of a speeding truck. The possessed hordes, it transpires, cannot actually harm the baby, allowing Jeep, Charlie, her child and Audrey to walk straight through them and drive away, while the poor new born is able to survive being dropped and a high-speed car crash without suffering a single boo-boo!!

You know what they say, God: if you want a job done properly... don't hire Peter Schink and Scott Stewart.


In a CR@B Shell: Legion's intriguing premise is crucified for the sake of a handful of absurdly wacky independent set pieces, hung together by an incomprehensibly weak narrative delivered through vacuous characters. All in all a doomsday disappointment.
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