Review: 'Fast Five' is a muscular, boorish, refreshing addition to a bad franchise.

The Fast and Furious franchise returns with its globalized cast of long-legged women and hulking, barrel-chested brutes - all of whom, with their gorilla physiques and carelessly (or carefully) fitted shirts, appear abnormally engorged.

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But the noticeable uptick in brawn soon becomes an apt physical quality as the thriftily named Fast Five, not five minutes in, reveals itself as a far more able-bodied and robust rubber-and-steel actioner than any of its four boorishly base predecessors.

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Which isn’t to say that this latest installment – which welcomely makes the transition from attitudinal, neon-colored street racer to exotically-framed heist film – isn’t meat-headed, doltish or crudely written, but that it’s an almost inarguably smoother and more agreeable package.

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Picking up where we left off, cop-turned-criminal Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) rather inconceivably busts Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) out of a prison bus and the two suddenly find themselves, along with O’Conner’s girl Mia (Jordana Brewster), Dom’s sister, on the run in Rio de Janeiro.

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The trio soon find themselves in hot water after a botched train robbery involving a Ford GT has the country’s supreme drug lord, Hernan Reyes, plus a bulging super-soldier, Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) on their trail as they gear up for a 100-million-dollar heist.

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The mid-section of the film is rather doughy and undercooked –with the usual team-building and game-planning more taxing than stimulating with a glamorous-yet- limited cast – but once they get behind the wheel, the results are nearly intoxicatingly addictive. (The final car chase is expertly done and exhilaratingly free from exaggerated digital effects.)

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By film’s end, (predicated by an impromptu toast by Dom, the sleeveless patriarch) the seemingly impossible has been attained – Fast Five has turned these macho boors and flimsy, tanned beauties into a goofy, curiously likeable family of misfits, both on and off the screen. [C+]