Brotherhood of the Traveling Cars

Fast
Five

Directed
by Justin Lin

Runtime:
130 min.

“From where I’m sitting, it looks like you both
could use the pay day,” an underworld thug says to Vin Diesel and Paul Walker.
Sharp viewers will chuckle at them reprising their The Fast and the Furious roles in the sequel, titled Fast Five. Devoted audiences (which
number in the millions) will get the in-joke. The Fast franchise isn’t highbrow, it’s a street-racing series with the
same kind of appeal as the Indianapolis 500. Working-class viewers share
attraction to its virtues—Dom (Diesel) a fearless ex-con teams with ex-cop
O’Connor (Walker) in their outlaw pursuit of fun, family (O’Connor loves and
impregnates Dom’s sister) and “Freedom.”

Installment five finds the two American
roustabouts in Brazil, planning to heist a drug-dealer and net $100 million.
Yet the charm of Fast Five beats the Oceans franchise because this isn’t
materialistic. It’s about brotherhood. Dom and O’Connor repeat the urban ethnic
mythology that started with James Cagney and Pat O’Brien in 1930s gangster
films at Warner Bros. studios, but update realities to include contemporary,
post-Civil Rights-era race-mixing. Their friendship represents the intrinsic
moral codes mutual to cop and criminal—and men-of-all-colors—who feel a common,
desperate appreciation of engines, women, liberty, loyalty and the money it
takes to acquire them.

Those virtues keep the Fast franchise going. It’s certainly not the best-made action
series—after the splendid-looking original, it’s been outstripped by Joseph
Kahn’s stunning, satirical Torque and
director Justin Lin has no real kinetic sense—but each sequel delivers
sufficient thrust and the producers and stars have learned that Diesel and
Walker’s salt-and-pepper teamwork is recognizably iconic. Both actors have
shown more depth in other movies, but their pairing in the Fast franchise proposes something distinctive about urban-ethnic
camaraderie that the mass audience reliably accepts (along with awareness of
the stars’ adequate compensation). It’s a new millennium version of the 1950s
Civil Rights Era’s The Defiant Ones—slightly
subversive with its glorification of outlawry (car-jacking and flouting
international speed limits). Even the Asian-based sequel three (Tokyo Drift) confirms the universal
rebellion and heroism that Hollywood used to reserve only for white performers.

Vin Diesel’s ambiguous ethnicity thus makes him
the series’ star (he enters Fast Five
mid-hijack—as a nearly divine apparition) but Walker’s white surfer dude
sidekick status is not a demotion. One of Fast
Five’s two best scenes flips
racist cliché when bi-racial Dom reminiscences, “I remember everything about my
father,” and O’Connor confesses, “I don’t remember shit—or who my old man was.”
These aren’t the kind of character details middle-class critics notice, but
they speak to mass experience in a frank, unifying way. The big chase sequence
is when Dom and O’Connor drag a huge vault along a Rio De Janeiro highway like
a medieval flail offers minimal thrills; it’s the men’s camaraderie (and their
multiracial, co-ed imported team) is what holds fascination.

Fast
Five’s other
best scene enhances the series’ racial themes: It involves Dwayne (The Rock)
Johnson as an FBI agent stalking Dom and O’Connor with Biblical fury. Like
Diesel, Johnson’s mixed-ethnicity—his blended beauty and prowess—brings instant
contemporary cultural awareness. As agent Hobbs, Johnson’s different (legal)
social orientation opposes our guys’ disorderliness, climaxing in a stupendous fistfight
with Dom. It’s Triple X vs. The Rock—a battle royale of hyper masculinity
(better than all of Sylvester Stallone’s decrepit The Expendables). Diesel and The Rock’s spectacle points out each
character’s righteousness.

This fight—more watchable than Fast Five’s chase scenes—achieves a
milestone in ethnic heroics. It epitomizes the series’ extended ideas about
macho daring. Mano a mano becomes macho a macho, explicating extreme
masculinity for its intensity and complexity. Who wins? The racially-sensitive
viewer who can recall Ralph Ellison’s description of a powerfully anguished
fighter “wiping his eyes with his fists.”

Fast
Five isn’t really about cars or money, but about the
brotherhood of macho—the working action-movie audience’s broadest, simplest
standard of valiant struggle. Dom, O’Connor and Hobbs are fantasy figures but
they realistically represent social options recognizable to the working class
that, yet, are only depicted in action movies with hard-scrabble street
cunning. (That’s the logic behind relocating the series from Southern California
to the favelas of Rio.)

When Fast Five’s villain Joaquim de Almeida boasts, “If you dominate the
people with violence, they’ll eventually fight back, [but give them] that taste
of the better life, and I own them,” he sounds like a cynical Hollywood
producer. Sometimes action audiences are ahead of such venality and can see
through it—as with the various macho/materialist codes on view in Fast Five. Lost in its dust are the
social pieties that earlier interracial buddy movies seem like specious social
bromides; they’ve been traded-in like an old clunker for the true common ground
of speed and courage and skill (qualities that united black, Latino, white,
Asian moviegoers in their love of John Wayne, Bruce Lee, Steve McQueen, Clint
Eastwood). This is the real progress—clarity—in the recent action films Transporter III, Crank 2: High Voltage,
Faster, Takers and Unstoppable. Simply
by complicating the range of masculinity that modern audiences can subscribe
to, Fast Five is part of it.