Fast five

Soderbergh, Clooney and Damon may never assemble Ocean's gang again, but Vin Diesel and Paul Walker can look forward to making a few more Fast films before Vin gets too pudgy and Walker's hair goes grey. They are Stallone's deserving successors in the craft of milking a winning formula. Fast Five, their latest (2011), eschewed the 3-D format and used IMAX. It could give the movie an above-average shelf-life.

It's the third film in the franchise written by Chris Morgan; executive producer Gary Scott Thompson wrote the first two Fast and Furious features (and Hollow Man, TV's Las Vegas and more). Taiwan-born director Justin Lin also signed on for a third time, and the multi-racial semi-comedic team of tough, sexy or silly sidekicks was reassembled.

A happy new ingredient was Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson as a cool, gungho FBI chieftain hunting down the pair of hi-octane his-peed auto-racers in Rio. That city's hillside favelas and downtown thoroughfares are the scene-stealers when Johnson not in focus, clearly having the time of his movie-making life while showing Diesel how a real action star acts.

The plot is irrelevant of course. Vin meets a new action-woman, his buddy affection for Paul grows, there's an amoral Brazilian drug tsar, a couple of gratuitous races, lots of gunfire and a finely-edited chase scene that defies all laws of physics, mechanics and probability when a ten-ton safe is towed around Rio by the pair of super-fast daredevils.

The best of its bunch so far, Fast Five is a cartoon caper to watch, enjoy and not think about.