Thanks to our good friends at General and Continental tire, we were invited to an advanced screening of the new Fast Five movie.

Being the fifth in The Fast and The Furious franchise, it ran the risk of stretching the concept to breaking point. However, each of the previous movies all had their strengths, mixing high-octane action with a mix of muscle-bound leading men and beautiful ladies.

The big buzz around Fast Five was it reunited stars from the previous four installments and introduced Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson into the mix.

The plot is fairly predictable: Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) is a fugitive from the police and reunites in Rio de Janeiro with Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel), bringing his sister Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster) along for the ride.

The action starts out promisingly enough. The cinematography is high quality and a shoot-out sequence in a Rio favela gets the blood racing. However, it’s all brought to a screeching halt when Mia blurts out she’s pregnant in order to prevent the trio from separating.

With the entire audience shattering the silence with laughter the director could never have predicted, the crass one-liners follow at full speed.

Even the introduction of previous stars such as Tyrese Gibson, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Sung Kang, Matt Schulze, Don Omar, Gal Gadot and Tego Calderon can’t save what happens onscreen.

Each of the new characters brings some welcome relief and hint at Ocean’s 11-style banter, but The Rock’s chest-thumping desire to “get his man” is overwhelming. Diesel then falls for a Brazilian policewoman in another predictable twist as the movie descends into pastiche.

Perhaps the best thing about previous F&F episodes was they were essentially car movies for car guys. However, that’s no longer a factor in this movie.

We’re not sure who the technical consultant was, but the stunts are more preposterous than ever, the cars themselves are largely unappealing, and it seems more like a Transformers movie than F&F, but not in a good way!

From people standing in the bed of a leaping truck, to a jumping Corvette stunt, the action is incredulous. However, it’s the final scene in which a pair of Dodge Chargers wield a 10-ton bank safe through Rio where the movie descends into what could only be a 10-year-old’s ramblings

Not only are these cars able to find sufficient traction (thanks to the tires, no doubt!!), but they can manipulate the safe to take out cop cars, buildings, etc.

Maybe we like our fantasy to have a dose of reality, but Fast Five lost us at “I’m pregnant!”

The desire to see cool cars and hot women kept us in our seats, but this is definitely one for DVD viewing.

Inevitably, with a franchise of this size, the website (www.fastfivemovie.com) is well stocked with games from the movie, trailers, apps, galleries, etc.

General Tire did bring one of its models to the screening, who kindly posed with two of the movie’s four-wheeled stars. The blue Porsche only appears briefly and god knows what they were thinking when they cast the badly customized ’Vette. Hopefully, it there’s a Fast Six, somebody will think to make it a car guy movie again.