I also think that while Houdini might have been able to make a bank vault disappear from the stage of the New York Hippodrome (and escape from it in the process), bank vaults in general tend to be hard to mess with, as may occur to you during "Fast Five."

But you know what? It sort of doesn't matter. The movie is made of sheer, preposterous and nonstop impossible action, muscular macho guys, hot chicks and platoons of bad guys who are eliminated by the dozens while the leading characters escape certain death so easily, it gets to be a habit.

This is the third of the "Fast and the Furious" series starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster, and here they're joined by Dwayne Johnson, making it a sort of convention of reckless drivers. Apparently some of these characters have had, in the past, long conversations about their goals, dreams, abilities and values, saving time at the present for terse verbal shorthand. When you hear as many as six words in a row, you suspect it's a tagline for a trailer ("We need to assemble a team").

Justin Lin is emerging as a first-rate director in this second-rate genre, having shelved, temporarily I trust, the ambition suggested in his remarkable "Better Luck Tomorrow" (2002). Unlike a certain other maker of Crash-Crash-Bang-Bangs, whose name I trust you to summon effortlessly, he devotes attention to a storyline that devises ingenious new things to do instead of obsessively blowing up things.

He storyboards his impossible actions sequences, instead of editing them with incomprehensible speed. And he hauls in fresh faces (played by such as Tyrese Gibson, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Matt Schulze, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Elsa Pataky and Joaquim de Almeida) gives them a specialty and a chance to demonstrate it. You couldn't say the supporting characters are developed beyond their defining labels, but at least they're in the mix.