There's a certain, somewhat admirable quality to Fast Five. In an IM the other day Reuben asked me whether it was 5x as fast as the previous ones. While it may have been a glib joke, the answer, somewhat surprisingly, is yes it is. If the original The Fast & the Furious was Rob Cohen's often hammy and awkward love letter to the burgeoning Los Angeles street car scene, reveling in car porn of all facets (construction, movement, destruction) then by now the series has stripped itself of all that social context and, other than a few sleek rides, much of the car porn in order to transform itself into what hackneyed TV blurbs call "a non-stop thrill ride." Gone is much of the characterization, using slivers of hyper-sentimental platitudes as emotional and relational placeholders. The entirety of the script has been boiled down to that one infamous scene from the first film, when Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto describes the events that landed him in jail, then repeated throughout the film so that nearly every scene with dialogue is a variation on that motif. Platitudes, almost laughably earnest delivery, seriousness. The other characters, notably Tyrese Gibson, show up to try to (fuel) inject the movie with some fun and laughter, but it mostly gets lost in the neck-deep syrup of Diesel and protege Paul Walker.
The purpose for all this condensation, and what I consider admirable about the film, is so the filmmakers could stuff more explosions and action sequences into the movie. I have long been a proponent of the idea that an action movie does not require characterization or political stance in order to be successful. Because a movie is a series of images supplanted to the screen, the interplay of these images through composition and editing can certainly be compelling on their own, and without the need for explicit motivation and character development (the best music videos are a prime example, reveling in their status as visual/audio kinesis). One person wants something, the other person wants to stop them from getting it. A filmmaker, quite honestly, never needs a more compelling conflict than that if they have the skill to put together a great sequence.
The only problem with Justin Lin, despite his returning the series to mostly real crashes and explosions, rather than the overreliance on CGI that has plagued it since 2 Fast 2 Furious, is that he doesn't have the knack. Many of the action sequences feel like watching nothing. There's no reason two cars dragging a flipping, moving, crashing giant steel safe down a road shouldn't be a fantastic action sequence. It's a pretty ingenius conception on its own, so it would almost suggest that even a midlevel hack could pull it off with a bit of panache. And Lin almost does. Despite the fact that it is never quite exciting, it is memorable for its uniqueness, and the sheer amount of creative destruction the safe wreaks as it slides and tumbles down freeways and through crowded metro streets.
Add to this the increase in action apparently means an equal or greater increase in beefy testosterone, as perpetually sweaty Dwayne Johnson faces off with Diesel in two separate Rocky-esque fisticuff showdowns that simultaneously feel a little gross and parodic while also being the closest to a compelling action sequence the movie has. I suppose one reason is that it manages to convey the feeling that something is at stake. The rest of the sequences lack a feeling of improvisation, of mistakes and re-calculation. Even when, narratively, things go wrong, it still feels like, cinematically, everything is going according to plan. There's no push and pull. No feeling that one side has the upper hand, now the other is going to take it back. This, I think, could've partially overcome the fact that Lin fails to make the camera part of the action. Set-ups are rudimentary and cuts seem below the level of utilitarian. The best I can say, I guess, is that it never relies on quick pans and shakiness to obscure, rather than show, the action.
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