Rated PG-13

It’s been 10 years and four sequels since “The Fast and the Furious” premiered, but watch “Fast Five,” the latest entry in the cars-babes-and-explosions series and you’ll barely register the passage of time. Sure, Vin Diesel looks a little older, but he’s just as muscled, if not more so. The cars, meanwhile, are as shiny and fast as ever, and thanks to improvements in special effects, the explosions are more explosive. The attractive women are still attractive in that Maxim way—they look more like robots than real women and barely say anything. “Fast Five” plays out exactly like you’d expect it might: loud, ludicrous and, at times, laughable. 

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We’re approaching summer, after all, a time when the cumulative box office IQ drops a good 20 points. And, if you’re in the market for dumb fun, there are worse options than “Fast Five.” Don’t be put off by the fact that we’re now five movies deep into the franchise: there’s no complicated back story or interesting characters to remember from other “Fast” installments. Instead, it’s all about the basics: car chases, dudes punching each other, and lots of property damage. It’s a formula guaranteed to bring box office success, so why mess with it?

Diesel and co-stars Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster reprise their roles from the previous “Fast” flicks. Since this is the fifth movie, everything has to be five times as big, and so director Justin Lin (who also directed “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” and “Fast & Furious”) starts things off with a decent pair of action sequences: a high-speed jail break on a prison bus and a higher-speed robbery on a train. The jail break goes well and reunites Dom Toretto (Diesel) with his sister Mia (Brewster) and her boyfriend/ex-cop-turned-master-criminal O’Connor (Walker). The train robbery is a bust, though, and Dom and company find they’ve made an enemy in Rio de Janeiro’s most dangerous drug kingpin. Meanwhile, Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), a hulking, no-nonsense federal agent, arrives in Rio determined to arrest Dom.

All that leads into a heist plotline that draws heavily from “Ocean’s Eleven” and serves as an excuse to bring back characters from previous “Fast” movies. Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Sung Kang, Tyrese Gibson, and a bunch of other bit players you may or may not remember all return for what they believe is one last job, even though we all know the “Fast” crew will be condemned to job after job so long as summers keep happening. 

In some ways, the thought of an eternal parade of “Fast” sequels is comforting. Diesel is a perfectly fine action star, and though this is Johnson’s first appearance in the franchise, it’s easy to see him showing up as Diesel’s foil in future entries. They have far more chemistry together than Brewster and Walker, who are supposed to be the movie’s central couple yet wind up being the most boring people onscreen. 

And Lin is a capable director—at least, he’s capable of directing “The Fast and the Furious” movies. And while smashing together a heist movie with a string of car chases seems hilariously terrible, Lin makes it work. The climax seems like a dare: how can we make this car chase movie as ridiculous and destructive as possible? The answer: have Diesel and Walker tow a bank vault through downtown Rio and, in doing so, demolish most of the city. No matter what future cinematic summers may bring, there could always be some new movie featuring Diesel, Johnson, and a series of cars destroying exotic cities.

Then again, the thought of an eternity of “The Fast and the Furious” movies is also disheartening and, at this point, there’s no place for the franchise to go without descending into intentional self-parody. The franchise can’t possibly get any better, but it can’t get any worse, either. If anything, “Fast Five” is proof that perpetual motion does, in fact exist, if only in the form of mediocre movie franchises.