Fast X hits a multitude of creative speed bumps

 

Early in Fast X, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) wistfully notes to longtime buddy Han (Sung Kang) that there’s a problem with people “these days…they don’t listen.” When the Fast & Furious saga began, Toretto was the young whippersnapper who defied authority figures and bent the rules to pull off the impossible. Now he’s delivering dialogue bemoaning the state of today’s youth, with this “don’t listen” line proving so important to the modern version of Toretto that it even gets a callback in Fast X’s action-packed climax. There’s really no better distillation of how creaky and overly fixated on the past this franchise has become than that.

The beginning of a two or three-part finale to the Fast & Furious saga, Fast X is about the demons of the past coming back to haunt Toretto and his massive family. Dante (Jason Momoa), the heretofore unseen son of the villain of Fast Five, wants revenge against Toretto for killing his dad. But Dante isn’t just here to slaughter Toretto, oh no. He wants to make this man suffer, which means putting every protagonist of the Fast & Furious franchise through the wringer. Characters like Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) get framed as criminals, mercenaries are sent after anyone who so much as lifted a finger to help these car-fixated heroes, and Toretto’s son Brian is in constant jeopardy.

Dante’s nefarious plot eventually entails splitting the primary cast of these Fast & Furious movies across the globe into a wide assortment of subplots. Roman and friends spend forever wandering around London, Letty is brought to a secret prison, newbie character Tess (Brie Larson) tries her hardest to help Toretto, there’s so much going on. It eventually feels like homework trying to keep up with where everybody is and what they’re up to. The Fast & Furious saga has been weighed down by overly dense narratives before (like the overabundance of flashbacks in F9), but rarely in this franchise has it taken so much effort to stay engaged with what’s happening on-screen.

There’s just not nearly enough excitement amidst all the noise to justify the overstuffed screenwriting. It’d be one thing if these characters kept hopping to different locales to engage in unforgettable hand-to-hand skirmishes. More often than not, though, Fast X is enamored with just throwing out a bunch of random half-sketched concepts at the wall and seeing what sticks. A barrage of celebrity guest appearances (including Jason Statham and Helen Mirren reprising their roles from earlier Fast & Furious movies) try to give viewers jolts of serotonin, but they just come off as hollow retreads of the cameos in better blockbusters like Avengers: Endgame. Meanwhile, extremely strained attempts at comedy (like Han ingesting a “special” cupcake) take up way too much screentime and keep undercutting attempts to lend real dramatic stakes to Fast X’s storyline.

Despite Fast X’s insistence on throwing everything but the kitchen sink at moviegoers, it’s shocking how this installment misses two key ingredients that defined the high points of this franchise: heart and action. After all, with the Fast & Furious characters split up for so much of the runtime, the endearingly earnest camaraderie that defined the best moments of this saga are absent from Fast X. Creating gratuitous cliffhangers and cramming so many scenes with references to obscure pieces of Fast & Furious lore have replaced any trace of humanity in this series. All the globe-trotting and celebrity cameos don’t matter if none of these people are engaging to watch!

As for the action, in a post-RRR and John Wick: Chapter 4 world, the big spectacle sequences of Fast X are quite forgettable. A bomb shaped like a massive ball bouncing around Rome has its moments of preposterous excitement, but it and other major stunt-heavy scenes are undercut by poorly incorporated pieces of CGI. The few hand-to-hand skirmishes aren’t dismal in terms of choreography, but they are poorly edited, which dilutes their capacity to thrill. The lack of thrills ensures that the 148-minute runtime feels much longer than that.

If there’s any aspect of Fast X that keeps the movie from being the nadir of the franchise alongside The Fast and the Furious and Fast & Furious, though, it’s Jason Momoa’s performance as Dante. The character is eventually too overexposed to be genuinely intimidating, but Momoa’s commitment to playing Dante as such a flamboyant and campy figure is tremendously delightful. Too much of Fast X is flatly going through the motions, but Momoa’s performance has some real energy and creativity to it. How wonderful that this franchise finally delivered a villain distinctive enough in both personality and fashion sensibilities (Dante’s various costumes are a riot) to be an inevitable cosplay fixture at every convention in the near future.

If Fast X had channeled more of the endearingly silly energy of Momoa’s work as Dante, it could’ve been a perfectly pleasant distraction. However, director Louis Leterrier’s competent chops behind the camera can’t save a bloated script desperately lacking in personality and fun. Fast X delivers tons of teases for future Fast & Furious installments but refuses to take some sage advice delivered by Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and live in the here and now.