Cinema Dispatch: Fast X

Fast X and all the images you see in this review are owned by Universal Pictures

Directed by Louis Leterrier

Fast & Furious as a franchise has been quite the ride with one of the more bizarre gear shifts that any franchise has gone through. Sure, the series was always ridiculous, but the change in scope from simple street racers to international super spies has given the series a lot of room to experiment and hone in on its core appeals. For all the jokes we make about Vin Diesel’s bottomless well of familial aphorisms, the cast is really what keeps it compelling enough for audiences to return year after year. Still, all good things must come to an end and it’s been stated that this is part of a two-part finale for the main series before it gets spun off into side projects like the already-released Hobbs & Shaw and the long-awaited female-led movie. Does this penultimate feature set us on the path to a graceful ending, or will the series crash and burn right before it hits the finish line? Let’s find out!!

Life for Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his family has been going smoothly since they saved the world and turned his brother Jakob (John Cena) back to the good side, but after living such an extreme life and crossing so many paths, can he ever truly hope to live peacefully with his wife Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and his son Brian (Leo Abelo Perry)? Well not if Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa) has anything to say about it! Yes, it looks like the criminal mastermind that Dom and his crew robbed and killed back in Fast 5 had a son and he’s come back after all this time to exact his revenge and starts by taking on Cipher (Charlize Theron) and stealing her tech which allows him to play with Dom and his crew like a cat plays with its food. After orchestrating a disaster in Rome with Dom and his crew in the center of it, they all end up on the Most Wanted list, and Roman, Tej, Ramsey, and Han (Tyrese Gibson, Chris Bridges, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Sung Kang) are forced to go into hiding while Dom tracks down this new threat to end his reign of terror and clear his family’s name. Can Dom reckon with his past and come out the other side unscathed? What does Dante truly want out of all of this, and is the answer more terrifying than Dom could ever imagine? Will we ever learn the secret to Dom’s barbeque chicken, or does that come with its own convoluted backstory as well?

After so many movies, this franchise is a well-oiled machine and knows how to competently crank one of these out every few years, so trying to critically differentiate one from the other is becoming increasingly difficult as I read over my review of Fast 9 and it all more or less applies to this one. The action scenes are well shot with fun concepts for set pieces, and the filmmakers continue to make the implausibility work in their favor. The giant ball rolling down the streets of Rome is somehow one of the most physics-defying things in a franchise that has had cars swinging on ropes, but the staging of this and every other big action scene allows the drama and tension to take center stage which keeps them engaging despite the silliness. The needs of the plot will always outweigh the needs of plausibility with momentum and mass having no earthy relationship to reality, but the scenes are still executed with phenomenal stunts and effects work so it hardly becomes an issue. Still, the action and story manage to curb the upward trend that the series has taken which I think works out for the best. There really wasn’t much use in trying to top the last movie where they went to space, so pulling back and making the violence much more personal gives it just enough gravitas to stay engaging for yet another entry in this long-running series. Where the movie starts to falter, and where things start to get interesting from a critic’s perspective, is the way that it hands its best asset; its likable cast of fun characters. While the last two movies have been rather Dom-centric, they take it up a notch here as he’s practically the only member of the Fast crew with anything to do. He’s the focus of the villain’s ire, he’s the character that the rest of the new cast gravitates around, and he even makes a conscious decision to separate himself from everyone else fairly early on which frankly feels like the direction we should be heading in for something like this. A more personal and focused Fast movie would be great as the scripts have only continued to sprawl with each sequel, and a finale shouldn’t be about bigger explosions but about bigger emotions as we say goodbye to these characters. However, the attempt here falls somewhat flat for two reasons. First, the attempt at focus ends up being rather half-hearted as the rest of the Fast Crew is still here and is simply relegated to unimportant meandering in between the story beats with Dom. Roman, Tej, Ramsey, and even Han whose return was such a big deal in the last movie, are relegated to the B-Team and arguably get in the way of the main plot instead of contributing anything to it. The other issue is that, well, if we’re going to make a more focused Fast movie, Dom’s the last character I would want to do it with. For a while now I’ve felt that he’s been outshined by the ever-growing cast and his larger-than-life persona just doesn’t feel as big in a world so large. Hanging so much of the film’s emotional weight on his shoulders ends up stifling the drama as Vin Diesel is still not leading man material outside of this very specific niche, and even then he’s usually got more help with carrying the plot than he does here. There’s almost no one for him to interact with other than the villain, and even new additions like Brie Larson don’t contribute much in thankless supporting roles. She’s the new secret agent to replace Mr. Nobody, but there’s a reason that minor roles like this are saved for unexpected stunt casting such as Charlize Theron as Cipher or for aging stars like Kurt Russel where the nostalgia for the actor fills in a lot of the gaps. The only one of the good guys who gets both enough screen time and plot relevance to make the most of it is John Cena who gets to loosen up from how he played his Jakob in the last movie and manages to wring a bit of heart out of his subplot with Dom’s son. On the other side of things, however, we have Jason Mamoa as the villain who is certainly approaching the role with enthusiasm but doesn’t quite nail the part he’s asked to play. He’s certainly trying to ride that chaotic goofball line that makes characters like The Joker compelling in certain circumstances, but his performance just doesn’t have the menace to pull it off. Despite his size and presence, Mamoa just doesn’t induce fear or anxiety in the audience which is perhaps why he’s going so far over the top to try and make the character fun to watch. Still, I will give the writers credit for the interesting idea they had for a villain and he’s certainly the kind of bad guy you should capstone a series with. Unlike everyone else who either saw the Fast Crew as a means to an end or severely underestimated them, Mamoa is on their wavelength and in a sense is fighting fire with fire. His Batman-tier preparedness for everything the Fast Crew tries to throw at him is certainly implausible, but it’s no more implausible than what the crew has pulled off in the past and it’s interesting to have a villain that genuinely understands his foe to the point of countering goofy nonsense with even goofier nonsense.

The movie’s biggest flaw is the one that’s been creeping up on the series for the last few sequels as the scope of it all just kept on growing. The characters are the reason we come back after each installment, but because of how much the cast has grown and the amount of lore that carries from film to film, the stories have started to sag under the weight of it all which is felt the most in this latest entry. We know that there is at least one more film to wrap up this piece of the franchise, so perhaps the uneven nature of the storytelling will be less noticeable once everything is together, but for now, it feels too much like a TV series whose next episode isn’t airing for another year. It’s definitely worth seeing if you’re invested in this series, though I think they’ve picked just the right time to close the book on it as it’s starting to feel like we’ve peaked and that there’s only so much gas left in the tank.