Fast X review: This franchise is running out of gas

Anyone sitting down to watch Fast X is surely a fan of Fast Five… or at least, that's what the makers of the newest installment are counting on. The 2011 blockbuster still stands as the peak of this franchise, the one that turned things up a notch by uniting all the stars from the disparate first four Fast & Furious films into a globe-trotting Avengers-like super-team. The four sequels since then, alas, have gotten more than a little repetitive with their constant cyber-heists and celebrity cameos, so Fast X begins by trying to remind fans of past glories.

The new film from director Louis Leterrier literally reuses footage from the climax of Fast Five, where Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and pals stole a bank vault by dragging it through the streets of Rio de Janeiro. This time, new character Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa) is clumsily inserted in the background. He's the son of Fast Five antagonist Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), you see, and was there the whole time! This is a cheap way to make a new villain seem menacing and meaningful. Though having Momoa glower and grimace through one of the high-octane highlights of 2010s action cinema is not quite as sacrilegious as Ghostbusters: Afterlife digging up the CGI ghost of Harold Ramis, it's definitely annoying.

It would be one thing if Fast Five director Justin Lin were at the helm, as he was originally supposed to be after returning to the franchise for 2021's F9, but Lin mysteriously dropped out as director of Fast X less than a week into filming. That makes the recycled footage feel a bit too much like stealing valor by ripping off the work of a master action filmmaker to make this less-stellar successor seem more important.

In any case, the plot of Fast X (out this weekend) follows Dante's revenge scheme against Dom for killing his father. This isn't "eye for an eye," though; Dante believes that he should "never accept death when suffering is owed." So rather than kill Dom, Dante seeks to hurt him by targeting his beloved family that you've heard so much about. First introduced in 2017's The Fate of the Furious, Dom's son Brian Marcos has grown from a baby into a young teenager (Leo Abelo Perry) who's inherited his dad's love of cars. Naturally, he is Dante's primary target.

Momoa plays Dante like a flamboyant Disney villain, which is a cute change of pace but fits uneasily in the world of the movie. No question this franchise is silly — remember when Tej (Ludacris) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson) went to space in the last one? — but having one character constantly ridiculing the others and making mockery of everything feels maybe a little too on-the-nose.

After that opening retcon flashback, Fast X employs another tired cliche to artificially inflate Dante's menace. Within minutes, the franchise's former top villain Cipher (Charlize Theron) shows up at Dom's door, beaten and bloodied, to moan about how Dante is "the devil" and way worse than she ever was. Okay.

Fast Five's main competitor for "best 2010s action film centered on cars" was Mad Max: Fury Road, so it made sense to slot that movie's star into this franchise starting with The Fate of the Furious. Yet it's alarming how little they've utilized the greatest action star of our time. After two movies of mostly sitting around in glass boxes and performing hand-wavey feats of "hacking," Theron finally gets a couple Atomic Blonde-worthy fistfights in Fast X, but the actress who played Imperator Furiosa still hasn't been allowed to drive a car. What's that about?

Dante isn't the only new character introduced for Fast X, either. Reacher star Alan Ritchson arrives as Aimes, who has taken over the spy agency once led by Kurt Russell's Mr. Nobody but is a lot less friendly to Dom and pals than his former boss. Brie Larson, meanwhile, shows up as Mr. Nobody's daughter Tess, who does want to help the Toretto crew. With so many faces new and old squeezed into one 142-minute runtime — we should also mention that another former villain, Jakob Toretto (John Cena), is back in a more heroic role — it's hard to get a handle on who exactly Tess is or why we should care about her. There sure are a lot of references to the absent Mr. Nobody, though.

It doesn't help that one of Tess' introductory scenes is set in a biker bar, which feels a little too much like a similar scene from Captain Marvel. In fact, whenever Fast X isn't trying to coast off the highs of Fast Five, it's desperately trying to be a superhero movie. Dom spends most of the movie trying to save lives, which is always nice, but at one point he literally deflects a hail of bullets with a car door like it's Captain America's shield.

Several moments are so reminiscent of Christopher Nolan's Batman movies that they feel intentional. Fast X's first action setpiece involves Dom trying to save a city from a gigantic bomb like the one that threatens Gotham in The Dark Knight Rises. When one character pleads "you've done everything you could," Dom even replies "not everything." You can practically hear Christian Bale's voice completing the quote with "...not yet." Later, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) tries to break out of an underground prison fortress like she's scaling Bane's pit. It's these seemingly serious stakes that sit oddly alongside Momoa's over-the-top campiness. Are we supposed to feel threatened, or is it all just in good fun? Why so serious, Dom?

Obviously our culture is drowning in superhero movies, so it's hard for other stories to escape their gravitational pull. But one nice thing about the Fast franchise used to be how it could deliver a similar type of blockbuster spectacle as the Marvel Cinematic Universe while also doing something distinctly different. Those lines have now blurred, and Fast X has even echoed the most annoying aspect of the superhero genre: The endless serialized storytelling. "The end of the road begins" is a fitting if nonsensical tagline for the new film, because it literally ends on a cliffhanger. Fast X wants all the grandiosity of finality while not actually ending anything. Grade: C

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