The Fast and Irate franchise has been about many things since it started as a comparatively humble road racing thrill ride back in 2001. It's been about cars, clearly: cars that go fast and float around corners and, in later films, substantiate themselves capable of launching into space and carefully catching individuals on their hoods as however cradling them in padded catcher's gloves. It's about family, in both the biological and the discovered sense, with the latter gradually sucking in such countless past antagonists that the motion pictures occasionally take a beat to acknowledge who has recently attempted to kill whom.It’s about the lingering allure of Hollywood bombast, and about the successful exporting of the kind multiethnic ensemble that same Hollywood used to insist the rest of the world didn’t want, and about gyrating butts in close-up. But now that the Fast & Furiouses are firmly in their dotage — Fast X is more self-referential remix project than film, an idiot 2046 for a series out of new roads to zoom down — what they’re especially about is the state of stardom. No actor seems able to escape the gravitational pull of these movies, and it doesn’t feel like a spoiler to note that some well-known ones make unannounced appearances in this latest installment.
Between all the returning cast individuals and the new ones, Fast X is insanely awkward. It's barely able to attend to all the huge names included — like, who required Brie Larson to be in this and why? — and the way it hoards them transforms the film into an accidental treatise on how much power has tipped from stars to brands. The big names need this aging blockbuster saga an overabundance them, and the ones who attempt to leave come crawling back eventually, with their characters' deaths or departures retroactively explained away. Vin Diesel himself took off after The Fast and the Irate, which alongside Totally dark aided vault him into unmistakable quality.But by 2009, after The Chronicles of Riddick flopped and he’d starred in a fish-out-of-water babysitting comedy, he wasn’t just back in the role of Dominic Toretto, he’d been promoted to producer as well. If you can’t leave the series, you may as well become it, and Diesel’s fused himself to this IP so thoroughly that, mid-production on Fast X, he managed to chase away director Justin Lin, who alongside writer Chris Morgan was one of the franchise’s main architects (Lin retains a screenplay credit). The Transporter’s Louis Leterrier took over, though the film plays more like it was made by an AI versed in the existing movies but not quite up to spitting out something coherent itself.
It is, despite all this, a decent diversion, though watching it feels like sustaining a head injury. Not far into the run time, a bloody Charlize Theron shows up at the Toretto house (remember how Charlize Theron is in these now?) as yet another villain looking to turn ally. “There’s a war coming. Sides will be chosen and everyone you love will be destroyed,” she gasps out; these are basically evergreen words for this franchise that would have fit into at least four past films. Theron’s cyberterrorist Cipher has had a run-in with ascendant baddie Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa), who in classic fashion has been retconned into the series as the son of Hernan Reyes, the Rio de Janeiro drug lord played by Joaquim de Almeida in Fast Five. Momoa does not attempt a Brazilian accent, but he is — how to put this — doing something like a femme affectation? Dante wears flamboyant outfits, paints his dead victims’ toenails, and trills “Buongiorno!” while tumbling a neutron bomb through the streets of Rome like a giant pinball. He jokes about looking to tone down the masculinity and is vaguely reminiscent of the gender-dissident revolutionary played by Silvero Pereira in Bacurau, though that’s surely overthinking things. Mostly, Momoa is going big, though given how outsize Fast X is, it just ends up registering on the same scale as everything else. I didn’t hate it!
Fast X finds the family getting framed by Dante and attempting to track down him while being sought after by the Agency (previously headed by Kurt Russell, the main actor on the planet not in this film), the mysterious organization Dom and Co. have taken care of responsibilities for in the past. The characters get separated and bunched into their own subgenres — Nathalie Emmanuel, Tyrese Gibson, Sung Kang, and Ludacris are doing light satire, while Michelle Rodriguez and Theron are in a dirty escape flick, John Cena and Leo Abelo Perry (playing Dom's child) embark on a pal road-trip film, and Larson is in a girlboss spy drama alongside Reacher's Alan Ritchson as new Agency supervisor Aimes. Flipping between all these tones is bewildering, however the film settles down at whatever point Diesel is onscreen, for the most part because Diesel is acting harder than anyone has at any point acted in their life, and also because the film is for him.Every line he delivers feels engineered to be clipped and used without context for promotional purposes. Shots linger for a beat too long on his face, which has begun accruing the vague unreality of a CGI creation. When he, say, jerks his head around at an unexpected sound, it’s so dramatic it can startle a laugh out of you. Fast X may treat movie stars like they’re a dime a dozen, but it’s an altar for its lead, lifting him up like a minor deity fallen to earth. The series may be running on fumes, but as it coasts toward what’s promised to be its final episode, you can at least count on it doing everything it can to make Diesel look larger than life and sound twice as gravelly.
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