Coming Soon has the just-released plot details for the upcoming Fast Five, via Universal:
Vin Diesel and Paul Walker lead a reunion of returning all-stars from every chapter of the explosive franchise built on speed in Fast Five. In this installment, former cop Brian O’Conner (Walker) partners with ex-con Dom Toretto (Diesel) on the opposite side of the law. Dwayne Johnson joins returning favorites Jordana Brewster, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Tyrese Gibson, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Matt Schulze, Tego Calderon and Don Omar for this ultimate high-stakes race.
Since Brian and Mia Toretto (Brewster) broke Dom out of custody, they’ve blown across many borders to elude authorities. Now backed into a corner in Rio de Janeiro, they must pull one last job in order to gain their freedom. As they assemble their elite team of top racers, the unlikely allies know their only shot of getting out for good means confronting the corrupt businessman who wants them dead. But he’s not the only one on their tail.
Hard-nosed federal agent Luke Hobbs (Johnson) never misses his target. When he is assigned to track down Dom and Brian, he and his strike team launch an all-out assault to capture them. But as his men tear through Brazil, Hobbs learns he can’t separate the good guys from the bad. Now, he must rely on his instincts to corner his prey… before someone else runs them down first.
I’ll cop to enjoying the franchise (most of it any way). But the middle paragraph of that description sounds an awful lot like 2 Fast 2 Furious, which was, well, not the best film in the series. It’s basically like the producers said, “Okay, let’s do a 2 Fast, redux, set it in Rio and toss (a hulking) Dwayne Johnson in for the kiddies.” Ever since Diesel made that appearance in Tokyo Drift, and Sung Kang reprised his role of Han in Fast and Furious, and they’ve obviously played a bit with the timeline of the series, I wondered if they’d attempt to bring everyone in the series together. Fast Five looks to be doing that mostly, although I thought I saw somewhere at some point that Lucas Black was also going to be in it. But looks to not be the case now. Maybe he’ll be back for Fastest, Furiousest.
Fast Five opens next year on June 10th.