In the fifth instalment, Justin Lin retools the Fast and Furious racing car film franchise. My question is – why did it take so long? Aside from its great soundtracks, the series hasn’t exactly spawned any merchandising or spin-off racing games on the Xbox360 or Playstation 2. Even for a workmanlike director like Lin who helmed the last 2 FF films, it must get tiring to find new angles on movies about car racing. And perhaps out of frustration necessarily comes a creative urge. In Fast Five, the principal protagonists of the series return in the first ever instalment with an actual plot that is actually clever.

Fast Five is essentially a heist film. On the run and low on cash, the trio of Paul Walker, Vin Diesel and Jordanna Brewster are made an offer they cannot refuse – exercise their carjacking skills for profit for a local shady businessman. But like all crime films, the team is set up for a fall and plot a daring revenge that involves a multi-million dollar heist.

We have two sets of criminals at each other but what makes a good heist film is a bounty hunter/cop character who goes at everyone! Here, former pro wrestler Dwayne Johnson provides the badass law enforcement, complete with armoured trucks, big guns, and an ever bigger scowl.

If you hadn’t been able to take Justin Lin seriously as a director in the past five years, this heist film shows off his serious chops. Action sequences (i.e. aside from car races) are interspersed reasonably with obligatory character development moments and the entire package is paced well enough. As an action director, Lin approximates in the film’s many set pieces the loudness of a Michael Bay with the visual flair of a Joel Schumacher.

If Ang Lee proved that he is as good as any serious American director in Woodstock, Sense and Sensibility and Brokeback Mountain, Justin Lin proves he is as good as any pulp film director in America with Fast Five.