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This episode of Revisited was Written by Cody Hamman, Narrated by Travis Hopson, Edited by Juan Jimenez, Produced by Adam Walton and Chris Bumbray, and Executive Produced by Berge Garabedian.

INTRO: Dominic Toretto and Brian O’Conner head down to Rio for the fifth entry in the Fast and Furious franchise. This is the most popular sequel, reuniting Dom and Brian with friends from previous movies. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson joins the ensemble. The series is taken in a different direction. The movie is Fast Five, and it’s about to be REVISITED.

SET-UP: Justin Lin thought he was done with the Fast and Furious movies after directing two of them. While doing press for the fourth movie in the series, in 2009 he met many passionate fans who made him reconsider his plan to step aside. Universal promised the filmmaker that he would be able do something different with his fifth film, and demanded it. Adam Fogelson, who was appointed Universal’s chairman in late 2009, was joined by Donna Langley, the co-chair. They could see that the Fast & Furious franchise was important for Universal… but that it also had limited appeal. There was a limit to how many people could be attracted to the movies if they continued to focus on racing on the streets. By making this more of an action franchise, they could draw in a larger audience.

Fogelson told Deadline, “We wanted to see if we could raise it out of being about racing and make car driving ability just a part of the movie. Like those great chases in The French Connection, The Bourne Identity, The Italian Job.”

The first step in this transition would be to make Fast Five a heist film. Lin liked the idea that this franchise would never stop changing. He was ready to make a sequel with more action. More action. Included some sequences which would not even feature cars. He also wanted to stay true to the core theme of the franchise, which is family. This sequel would focus on the family that was at the core of the story, and their quest for freedom. They wanted to bring back as many of the family members as possible. After two sequels in which characters from the original film had gone separate ways, the fourth film was a reunion. Vin Diesel returned as Dominic Toretto, a criminal street racer. Paul Walker returned as the conflicted policeman Brian O’Conner. Jordana Brewster returns as Dom’s sister Mia and Brian’s love-interest Mia. All three of them sharing the screen once again. Fast5 would bring them together with more of their co stars. Matt Schulze reprises his role as the short-tempered Vince of part 1. Tyrese “Ludacris ” Gibson and Chris “Ludacris ” Bridges return as Brian’s friends from 2, Fast 2 Furious – Roman and Tej. Sung Kang returns as Han. Who was introduced in TokyoDrift, and was seen riding along with Dom in Fast & Furious. Han was indeed killed in Tokyo drift but we still needed more time to get to know the character. These movies are now happening before the events in the third film to accommodate him. Tego Calderon and

Donomar are back in the role of Leo and Santos who were introduced as the comedy duo in Fast and furious. Gal Gadot, who played Gisele in the fourth film, is also back. She was working as a heroin smuggler, but she really had a heart full of gold. He wrote the heist tale that brought all the characters together… and while doing so, was able use an idea he came up with while writing part 4. He had imagined a scene where Dom and Brian would drag a bank vault in front of their vehicles. This visual wouldn’t have fit in the fourth film, but would have been perfect for the sequel to the heist film. Walker learned early on that the film would be set in Europe. As the story progressed, the setting changed to a new continent. The film picks up where

Fast & Furious ended. Dom is sentenced to prison and his cohorts decide that they will rescue him from the transport bus. In doing so, they cause a crash that is reminiscent of the scene from Another48 Hours. Jump forward a little bit and Dom, Brian and Mia are on their way to Rio from California. They are on the run, and they need cash. Vince, a Rio resident, has a task for them. They were hired to retrieve three cars seized by DEA. The problem: the cars are on a train. The situation gets worse when it is revealed that they are working for a shady patron. Who is the benefactor who has DEA agents murdered on a train and plans to kill his own car thieves? Our heroes escape with their lives… and with a chip which is vital to their employer. Revealed to be rich and powerful drug lord Hernan Reyes, played by Desperado villain Joaquim de Almeida. Dom and Brian gather a team to strike back at Reyes. They plan a heist in which they will steal 100 million dollars from Reyes’s illegal gains. They manipulate the situation to get Reyes to empty his cash houses, and consolidate all of his money into one place. They just didn’t expect that location to be a vault inside a police station.Causing more trouble for our street racing thieves is the fact that they’re taking the blame for the deaths of those DEA agents. A task force from the Diplomatic Security Service has been sent to Brazil in order to find them. They’re led by Luke Hobbs, the legendary tracker who never misses a mark. This role was initially developed with Tommy Lee Jones’s input. This would have been too obvious, as he was basically reprising his role in

The Fugitives. Diesel’s character was reworked when Diesel saw fans on Facebook requesting a Dwayne and Diesel movie. Johnson worked out even harder, gaining 30 pounds of muscle to make his character look intimidating. Hobbs is a far more formidable adversary than the bad businessman Reyes. But he is not a bad person. He believes Dom and Brian are cold-blooded criminals. He is tasked with bringing these criminals to justice. When Hobbs arrives in Brazil, he adds local police officer Elena Neves to his team as an translator. Elena is trusted by Hobbs because her husband, a police officer who died in the line-of-duty, was a former officer. She cannot be bought. Elena, played by Elsa Pataky, only needs to meet Dom once before she begins to doubt that he is a villain. She starts wearing the necklace that he lost, establishing a romantic relationship between them. Giselewas initially attracted to Dom, but he rejected her in the previous film. So, while the film builds up a different love interest for Dom, Gisele and Han begin their own romance.

Although most of the movie is set in Brazil, only a small portion of filming took place there. The cast and crew took a lot of exterior shots while in Brazil. Lin flooded the film with images of the Christ the Redeemer Statue to assure the viewers that this was all happening in Rio. A lot of the action in the movie was filmed in Puerto Rico. Like the favela chase scene and the climactic vault drag. The production team said that filming in Puerto Rico was easier. Logistics of getting the equipment to locations. Controlling the area better. It was also helpful to have wider streets on which to race. It also helped that Puerto Rico offered tax incentives worth eleven million dollars. The abandoned auto shop where the team is set-up was actually a railroad yard in Atlanta, Georgia. And the train robbery was filmed in California… Which is glaringly obvious, because there aren’t any deserts anywhere near Rio.

REVIEW

: Although the fourth

Fast and Furious had been a reunion film, there was very little joy to be found in it. The plot was that Dom and Brian had to reunite because Dom’s ex-girlfriend Letty (played by Michelle Rodriguez) had been murdered. It wasn’t a happy event. After that gloomy installment, Fast five was a welcome pick-me up. This movie is great to watch. It’s great to see Dom and Brian interact again. It’s great to see them sharing so many scenes with friends from other movies. Everyone is bouncing off each other. Enjoying yourself. Making new friends. Finding love. And hoping to be rich at the end. It’s very entertaining to spend some time with these characters. They all had their moments before. Now they have some awesome moments together.This is also a bigger movie than any of the previous installments. It’s jam-packed with action. While there is still a lot of vehicular chaos, there are also other sources of adrenaline. Shootouts. Explosions. A unique foot chase in a favela, which required Paul Walker to train in parkour. Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnston engaged in a spectacular brawl. Ludacris stated, “There’s been nothing this big since King Kong vs. Godzilla.” Diesel, Johnson and their stunt doubles filmed the fight for a week. It’s even better that they managed to work in some character work within this fight. Years ago, Dom was sent to prison for beating someone with a wrench. A fact that Hobbs throws in his face during one confrontation. At the end of their fight, Dom has the chance to beat Hobbs with a wrench as well… And chooses not to.The action starts early and comes frequently. The most expensive set piece was the train robbery. Which took up twenty-five million dollars of the film’s budget. Because the production had to buy their own section of a railway line. And then buy their own train. But this film had the highest budget of a FAST movie yet. One hundred and twenty-five million. Forty million higher than the previous film. So, Lin still had around one hundred million to work with once the train sequence was shot.

Of course, the most memorable sequence is the vault heist. Surprisingly, this was accomplished without ever needing to create a CGI vault. There were six different versions of the vault made to bring the sequence to life. Sometimes it’s a reinforced stunt vault that really is being dragged. Other times, it’s actually a four-wheel drive vehicle that’s just following the Dodge Chargers that appear to be dragging it. It was so hot inside that thing, well over one hundred degrees, that the stunt driver had to wear a special temperature-controlled suit. For some shots of the vault smashing into vehicles, it was a facade built onto the front of a semi truck. Around two hundred vehicles were destroyed during the filming of

Fast Five

. That vault is responsible for most of the destruction. And it’s very cool to see that destruction on the screen.There’s such a wide variety of action in this movie, franchise producer Neal H. Moritz seemed to have some concerns. In his audio commentary, Lin said that Moritz kept telling him, “‘This doesn’t feel like Fast and Furious

!’ He would say that a lot as we were making this film and part of my reaction is, ‘That’s good, because in a way Fast and Furious is evolving. If I feel like it’s appropriate for the movie and it’s good for the characters, it’s good for the story, then that’s great. That means we’re not the same Fast and Furious as we were ten years ago. We weren’t the same as six years ago, as two years ago, and that’s a good thing. He’d be like, ‘Is this Fast and Furious?’ I just kept saying, ‘Look, let’s redefine what that means. We have the core of what Fast and Furious is, but why can’t we grow?'”LEGACY/NOW:

Fast Five is where the franchise truly enters the world of blockbuster spectacles. Some would argue that it went too far with the spectacle in future sequels – but Lin really hit the sweet spot with this one. It’s still recognizably Fast and Furious, it’s just revved up a bit. Blockbuster event movies tend to have longer running times these days, and so does Fast Five. While all four of the previous films fell right in between an hour and forty and an hour and fifty minutes, Fast Five surpasses two hours. Landing at one hundred and thirty minutes. But there’s so much happening, you don’t feel the extra time. It goes by quickly.This was also the first time Vin Diesel started talking about sequel potential before the movie was even released. He had a history of turning down sequels. When they got him to come back for the fourth movie, it wasn’t certain he’d be back for Fast Five

. But he agreed to return – for a producing credit, as he got on the previous movie, and a fifteen million dollar payday. He said he envisioned the story of Dom and Brian playing out as a trilogy. With Fast Five being the final chapter. But he and Moritz started plotting out a sixth film early on. And they also started planning to produce a Hobbs spin-off. Months before Fast Five was released, they already knew exactly what part 6 was going to be. Which is evident in the finished film. Fast Five has a mid-credits scene that sets up the next sequel: Eva Mendes makes a cameo as her 2 Fast 2 Furious character Monica Fuentes. Who has discovered that Rodriguez’s character Letty is still alive somehow. And she’s in Europe.Of course, there was a chance that Fast Five

could flop. Which would have put a stop to the development of part 6. But that didn’t seem likely. This scored higher with test screening audiences than any of the previous Fast and Furious movies. Universal had been planning to give the film a theatrical release in June of 2011. But just like they did with the fourth movie, they decided to move it forward. They’d get a jump-start on the summer movie season by releasing Fast Five in April. And once again, an April release date paid off in a major way.The fourth movie had been the most successful film in the franchise. One hundred and fifty- five million at the domestic box office. Two hundred and four international. A total of three hundred and fifty-nine million. Fast Five

‘s box office haul blew those numbers away. This one made over two hundred and ten million domestic. It more than doubled the previous movie’s international box office. Ending up at almost four hundred and twenty internationally. For a total of almost six hundred and thirty million. In addition to the financial success, Fast Five was also a critical success, receiving more positive reviews than any of its predecessors. It was the biggest Fast and Furious movie ever, in more ways than one… So yeah, part 6 was guaranteed after all.One movie later than originally intended, Fast and Furious

did go to Europe… To some degree… For a movie that has the on screen title of Furious 6. Because 2 Fast 2 Furious set it up for the whole franchise to have wacky titles. Dom and Brian would be back, and so would most of their friends. Including Letty, living out a storyline that feels like it was lifted directly from a soap opera. Fast Five was only the biggest Fast and Furious movie until Fast and Furious 6 reached theatres two years later… And we’ll be talking about that movie in the next episode of REVISITED.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxoO6AF_1dA

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