(Author’s note: Per usual, I have kept to my principal of having this review be as spoiler-free as possible. For the most part, if it isn’t in the trailer, I won’t talk about any specifics in the review.)
With the 11th film in The Fast & Furious franchise (ten stand-alone films plus Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw), it would be easy for director Louis Leterrier’s debut in this series to be very paint by numbers. All he would have to do is let Vin Diesel be the ultimate driving and fighting machine (and family man) that he is and let the other supporting players support him. But Leterrier, replacing Justin Lin (who left the film citing creative differences) shows us that he has a few tricks up his sleeve. His Fast X features four Oscar-winning actors, a ton of new characters (for better or worse), and the most fun and exciting new addition that Fast & Furious have given us since their best film (more on that later).
But perhaps the most impressive thing Leterrier has done was to realize that the last film, F9, was severely flawed. And you can see him making the effort in Fast X to fix those problems. Which is not to say that this film doesn’t have issues: it’s bloated (while, somehow, not giving most characters enough to do), too absurd, and has some moments that are laughable, and not in a good way.
It’s also a whole ton of fucking fun.
Before I get into the movie, I want to tell you one of my favorite things about this whole franchise. And, as much as I hate doing, I will credit comedian David Sitko for pointing this out: The Fast & The Furious movies are an amazing franchise in terms of gender equality. Like, they’re even better than The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants.
From the first film, this series has always allowed female characters to have major roles not just in terms of acting, but in what they’re given to do in the universe of the film. And, in these films, it’s not a surprise. You’ve never heard a person say, “You’re a pretty good driver… for a girl,” or any of the bullshit that you would come to expect considering what our culture is. And it’s not just the characters; it’s also the actresses playing them. Remember how I told you that Fast X has four Oscar-winners in it? They’re all women, and they’re all badass. The film trusts Charlize Theron (playing Cipher, badass hacker and woman bent on world domination) with the film’s first major action sequence, and she fucking crushes it.
They should really be calling these films The Fast & The Feminist.
I promise we’ll get to the plot soon (or, maybe we won’t- who cares?), but one of the things I loved was how much that Leterrier (working on a script from Dan Mazeau & Justin Lin) paid homage to Fast Five, the best film in the series. For this site, I’ve written about the final action sequence in that 2001 film, a heist through the streets of downtown Rio de Janeiro where two cars are pulling a goddamned vault. This sequence is where Fast X begins, only showing the scene from the perspective of a character who we are not meeting until this film.
Ok, you know what? Fuck it. Let’s get into the plot. That character we’re getting the perspective of is Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa), son of Fast Five bad dude Hernan Reyes (Luis Da Silva), and Dante has a near death experience and has to watch his father die at the hands of Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew, and he is out for revenge. That’s it. That’s the plot. And you know what? I fucking love that.
Some people, including myself, have gotten frustrated that the stakes have gotten too high in this franchise. In the last five films (including Hobbs & Shaw), Toretto and his team have had to stop a villain who, if they had won, would be able to dominate the world. As a reminder, in the first film, Dom ran a crew that stole DVD players. It was so refreshing to see a bad guy who wasn’t trying to run the globe; he was just trying to hurt the dudes who killed his dad.
And with a powerhouse performance, Jason Momoa gives us the best bad dude this series has ever had. I have always liked him in the DCEU, where he made the interesting decision to play Aquaman as a bro-y frat doofus. With Dante, Momoa gives us the closest thing we have seen to Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight: a truly unpredictable psychopath just trying to burn the world down. This is a performance that goes from silly to terrifying in a split-second, which makes its unpredictability so engaging. In a franchise which has felt so paint by numbers the last few films (not always in a bad way), here we have a fresh new character to shake things up and make things engaging. Just on the addition of Dante Reyes, Fast X becomes one of the better films in this series. Momoa for Best Supporting Actor. I’m not kidding.
I had two major complaints about F9. One of those got addressed in Fast X and the other didn’t… kind of.
John Cena is back as Dom’s brother Jacob, and while I love Cena as an actor and feel like he is an engaging presence (as shown by what he did in HBO’s Peacemaker series), F9 was unable to do anything interesting with him. Cena spent that movie basically grimacing through every scene and you could just see all of his personality trying to come out. Thankfully, Leterrier has allowed the former wrestler to show us a lot more of his charm and joy, and that is a good thing. As the team is split up all trying to work their way back to each other, Jacob is tasked with protecting Dom’s son Brian (Leo Abelo Perry). Perry is certainly a serviceable actor, but he needs someone to make those scenes pop or I would have fallen asleep in my seat. With Cena allowed to be charismatic, he brings a care and joy to Jacob, while also showing how much he cares about his family.
Speaking of family, I guess we should probably talk about Vin Diesel, whose every line of dialogue could have been Chat GPT’d and it just would have spit out, “Family family muscles family.” Diesel’s Dom has become very one note since the franchise lost the captivating Paul Walker (who passed the filming of Furious 7) and F9 showed that Diesel was either too unwilling or unable to have Dominic be anything other than invincible. This is not hyperbole: in F9, Dom uses chains to pull down a brick silo on top on him and not only is he physically uninjured, the only effect it seemed to have on him was that he, somehow, gained more empathy.
Diesel seems unwilling to change, so Leterrier and the script has created a three-prong attack to counteract this. The first is that Diesel’s screen time is severely limited. This may be the Fast & The Furious movie in which Dom is onscreen the least. The second is the casting of Momoa, which allows there to be a dynamic and exciting character onscreen most of the time. But it’s the third prong which is the most telling of how little the filmmaker trusts Diesel with this film: he doesn’t really talk to anyone. He spends most of the time driving and is maybe onscreen with maybe two other actors for a total of ten minutes. Most of Diesel’s dialogue is instead done in close 1-on-1’s with people like Helen Mirren, Brie Larson, or Michelle Rodriguez. But even those scenes feel few and far between. And, perhaps tellingly, we don’t really miss Diesel. It’s not until the final action sequence where he gets a lot more screen time, and that is everything you have come to expect from him.
At two hours and twenty-one minutes, Fast X is the second longest film in the franchise. But if Diesel isn’t onscreen for a lot of that, what is Leterrier filling the time with? The answer is: everything. And that’s bad and it’s good.
It’s bad in that this film is so jam packed with actors that there’s no real time for any of them except for Momoa, Cena and Diesel to really do anything. Tyrese, Ludacris, Sun Kang and Nathalie Emmanuel spend the entire film together as a foursome, but don’t really have enough screen time to do anything except argue with each other and crack a few jokes. Larson and Alan Ritchson are covert government agents each trying to find Dom by their own methods and for their own reasons. Rodriguez and Theron have a few scenes together, and their chemistry really works, but there’s just no time for them. There are some returning old friends and surprising cameos, but it basically feels like they’re saying hi. And Jordanna Brewster seems to have been forgotten in this movie as Dom’s sister Mia, nor do we ever see the two kids she is supposed to be raising.
However, one of the reasons why its good that Leterrier is throwing everything at the wall is that we get some amazing action set pieces. Driving scenes in Rome and Portugal show what this franchise does better than anyone else, which is ratchet up the speed and adrenalin. The fight scenes are well-choreographed and expertly shot. Every moment we are focused on action is something good the movie is doing, and so it’s a good thing there are a lot of moments like that. Add in what Momoa brings and the joy of Cena, and this is a wonderful popcorn flick.
There have been some great Fast & Furious films, some bad ones, and some in-between. Here are the rankings of these silly, silly movies:
- Fast Five
- Furious 7
- Fast & Furious 6
- The Fast & The Furious (film #1)
- Fast X
- Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
- 2 Fast, 2 Furious
- The F8 Of The Furious
- The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift
- F9
- Fast & Furious (film #4)
Fancy Boys Club 