Fast X (2023) Review

A flashback reinserts a new character into the vault heist from Fast Five. The son of that film’s villain has been planning revenge for twelve years. He now attacks the family in Rome by rolling an enormous bomb through the streets.

The 2 is for a film that has stopped being about anything at all. Fifteen named characters, four parallel plots, no resolution, and a running time of two hours and twenty-one minutes that concludes with nothing decided.

What it does have is Jason Momoa, who is giving a performance from a different and considerably more interesting film, and who is the only person on screen appearing to enjoy himself.

The Retcon

The film opens by returning to the 2011 vault heist and inserting a character who was not there, watching events that we have seen, establishing a grievance that did not previously exist.

That is now standard practice in long franchises and it is worth naming as a technique because of what it costs. A scene the audience already owns is altered to create an obligation, which means the original scene now means something it did not mean when they watched it.

Fast Five is also the best film in the series by a wide margin, which makes the choice of target worse. It has a clear heist structure, one objective, a genuine antagonist and a vault dragged through Rio, and this film reaches into it to extract a grievance.

The difference between this and good serial writing is planting versus inserting. A planted detail was always there and gains significance. An inserted one was not there and the audience is told it was.

Readers and viewers can tell the difference immediately, even when they cannot articulate it. The tell is that nothing in the original scene supports the new material, because nothing in it was written to.

Momoa Is in a Better Film

Dante Reyes paints his nails, talks to corpses, dresses like a Roman emperor, and treats the destruction of a city as an event he is hosting.

It is a genuinely committed performance and it is entirely at odds with everything around it. The rest of the film is serious about family, loyalty and sacrifice, and Momoa is playing a comedy.

That mismatch is the most interesting thing in the picture. A series that has been earnest for two decades has introduced somebody who finds the whole thing absurd, and it has no idea what to do with him.

What it does not do is let him change the film. Every scene he is in is livelier than every scene he is not in, and the picture keeps cutting away from him to a plot about a submarine and a hacker.

The Rome sequence is his best material and the film’s only genuinely inventive set piece. A bomb the size of a building rolling downhill through a city, with a man in a convertible steering it by ramming it, which is at least an idea somebody had.

Fifteen Leads

Dom, Letty, Roman, Tej, Ramsey, Han, Mia, Jakob, Little Brian, Cipher, Shaw, Mr Nobody’s daughter, Aimes, Elena’s son, and a new agency.

The film has to service all of them and consequently services none. The plot splits into four strands that never converge, each one following a group through a location, and the film cuts between them for two hours.

That is the structural endpoint of a series that never removes anybody. Every entry adds characters, nobody permanently dies, previously killed characters return, and the cast accumulates until the film is a logistics exercise. The 1960 Magnificent Seven had seven people and four of them died.

Compare the first film. Four principals, one location, one relationship, and a question about whether a man will betray somebody he has come to like. That structure is legible and this one is a spreadsheet.

Brie Larson and John Cena are the most recent additions and both are given functions instead of characters. She is an agency contact who provides equipment and he is a brother who provides comedy, and neither has a position on anything.

The Physics Stopped Mattering

The series went to space in the ninth film. This one rolls a burning spherical bomb through Rome, lands a helicopter on a moving car, and has two vehicles stop a helicopter mid-air with cables.

The escalation problem is now terminal. Once a car has been in orbit, no stunt on Earth can raise the stakes, and the films have nothing left to threaten anybody with. The earlier entries worked because a car could crash and a person could die.

What the series lost is weight. In the first four films vehicles have mass, tires lose grip, and a crash is an event with consequences. Now they behave like objects in a game with no friction.

The most telling detail is that nobody is ever injured in a way that persists. Characters walk away from impacts that would kill them, and after ten films the audience knows nothing on screen can hurt anybody.

Han is the clearest case. He died in the sixth film, the death was the emotional center of two entries, and he was returned alive in the ninth with an explanation nobody needed. After that, no death in the series can be believed by anybody.

It Does Not End

The film stops with the protagonist and his son in danger, several characters presumed dead, an antagonist victorious, and a post-credits scene introducing somebody else.

That is not a cliffhanger in the traditional sense, which is a suspended moment resolved shortly afterward. This is a film that has declined to have a third act on the basis that another film is coming.

The sequel was delayed repeatedly and the series’ future was publicly uncertain for a considerable period afterward, which means an audience was left holding an unfinished story for years.

There was also a reported directorial change during production, with Justin Lin leaving early and Louis Leterrier taking over, which is visible in a film that never settles into a single approach to tone, pace or scale at any point across the whole of the two hours and twenty-one minutes that the finished film ends up occupying on the screen in front of you.

Three hundred and forty million dollars produced a film that does not conclude. That figure is worth sitting with, because it is the clearest statement available about what the money was buying, which was not a story.

It took around seven hundred and fifteen million worldwide, which sounds substantial and is well short of what a budget that size requires. The previous two entries each took over seven hundred and the series has been declining domestically for a decade.

Should you watch Fast X?

No. Ten films from a picture about stealing DVD players, three hundred and forty million dollars, fifteen leads, four plots that never meet, a retcon of a scene from 2011, and an ending that is not one. Momoa is having a wonderful time in a better film nobody made.

Frequently Asked Questions