Justin Lin: Fast Five

Just dumb fun: This is the only reason for watching a movie like this. Dumb stunts, dumb big men saying dumb (but funny) things, a dumb plot with many dumb holes and some dumb gunplay to go with it. If you lower your expectations down to the level of grass roots and hastily buried hookers, a movie like Fast Five can be very entertaining.

The movie delivers, but nothing more. Some of its dialogs are so bad you will claw at your ears, some stuff strains the suspension of disbelief right past the snapping point into the realm were physics are replaced by angels dancing on needlepoints and some things make only sense in a moral universe very different from ours (your husband/ the father of your child has gone missing - you must presume that his stupid friends got him killed on their "last heist". As you enter your home deep in Rio's favelas, you see a large heap of cash on your bed - the share of your dead husband...and you are supposed to be happy about that. But maybe that's how they roll in Brazil.) Also, the movie tries to be about family or somesuch, when it should concentrate on the torque and recoil. But some of the banter is snappy and funny, the Rock and Vin Diesel chew up the scenery as completely over-the-top characters and cars are driven at high speeds and crashed into each other with abandon. And that's why I watched it, anyway.

Two and a half of five tattooed G-men

Edit: a psychological perspective on the series as a whole, probably seeing stuff that isn't even there.