Review: Fast X

If there’s one thing worse than the Fast and Furious movies, it is the people who hate the Fast and Furious movies. From the hardened car guys eager to drop thousands on a silver Nissan Skyline R34 GT-R, to the physics aficionados whose collective blood boils at the mere thought of the franchise’s increasingly implausible stunts, nearly everyone seems to have turned on the Fast films’ recent excesses. Nearly everyone is wrong. Fast X (2023) – the latest instalment in Vin Diesel’s hugely successful street racer saga – is not a failure because of its outlandishness. If anything, it fails because it is not outlandish enough.

But first… the story. Fast X sees Vin Diesel reprise his role as a street racer/superspy / heart-of-gold family man Dominic Toretto for the eighth time (give or take a few short film interludes). In this one, Toretto and his found family must battle the vengeful Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa, acting his queer-coded socks off) in what purports to be a high-octane, globe-trotting adventure. Families are divided, loyalties are tested and all things fall out of sense and balance by about the thirty-five-minute mark.

The film’s truncated final act leaves an even worse taste in the mouth

The film peaks early. Fast X’s first major action sequence is a joyfully ludicrous heist-gone-wrong; a nos-fuelled chase which features (among other things) a shiny golden Lamborghini Gallardo, the Vatican City and a neutron bomb the size of a family sedan. It’s downhill from here, however, as the film’s interminable second act kicks into gear and Dom’s crew find themselves divided and bickering. The film’s truncated final act leaves an even worse taste in the mouth. Its climax, presumably conceived as an Avengers: Infinity War (2018) style cliffhanger, instead feels like an arbitrary cut-off, bound to send unsuspecting audience members checking under their seats for a missing final reel. As Charlie Puth once said: ‘We’ve come a long way from where we began’.

Despite boasting more colourful characters than your average Keith Haring print, Fast X is undoubtedly the Dom Toretto show. This wasn’t always the case… the Fast films were once a series defined by collaboration: a series in which Diesel willingly shared top billing with stalwarts like Paul Walker and Dwayne Johnson. Now that the opposite is true, Diesel’s frequent insistence on the importance of family rings increasingly hollow. The fish rots from the head: it is Diesel’s iron grip on the movie which ultimately dooms the whole thing.

The film’s evidently troubled production can’t have helped either. After five-time Fast director Justin Lin exited Fast X a week into the sequel’s production, Universal Pictures was forced to scramble for a replacement. Six days later, Now You See Me (2013) filmmaker Louis Leterrier was handed the poisoned chalice. It’s harder to criticise the film given this hasty directorial turnaround, but Letterier’s admirably pacy direction does little to assuage the film’s irrevocably shoddy setup.

There’s an inherent humour to seeing stars like John Cena, Alan Ritchson and Jason Momoa in the same room, their matching action figure physiques giving Fast X the feel of a Fortnite lobby: a feature-length liminal space where action heroes while away the hours. In a very real sense, the Fast franchise has become a sort of last refuge for capital ‘M’ Movie Stars: larger-than-life figures increasingly unsuited to a changing theatrical landscape where marquee characters regularly supersede marquee actors. The film’s theatrical poster alone displays a full fourteen major cast members – I get stage fright just looking at it.

[Fast X] manages to seem both horribly bloated and relentlessly practical at the same time

This is the ultimate flaw of Fast X; a movie which manages to seem both horribly bloated and relentlessly practical at the same time. After all, with this many actors contracted to appear, it pretty much couldn’t have been made any other way. The Fast franchise must be in a fundamentally rotten situation when a 140-minute cinematic rat king like Fast X feels about as lean and efficient as possible. Well… at least John Cena seems to be having fun.

For a film with so much going on behind the scenes, Fast X is strangely underwhelming. When the franchise’s off-screen politics prove more noteworthy than the narrative of the film itself, a major gear shift must surely be necessary.

Verdict:

Fast newcomers will find the film incomprehensible. Long time fans will find it disappointing. Casual filmgoers in search of a fun time at the movies will simply end up caught in the crossfire. With its tenth instalment, Vin Diesel’s star vehicle ultimately runs out of gas.