Fast X (2023) Review
2/10
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’s 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.
Fast X wore me out. It’s a bloated, self-serious parade of characters I’ve stopped caring about, and it has the nerve to end without an ending. The only reason it scrapes a 2 is Jason Momoa, who seems to be the one person involved who noticed how silly all of this has become.
What it does have is Jason Momoa, who’s giving a performance from a different and considerably more interesting film, and who’s 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 wasn’t there, watching events that we’ve seen, establishing a grievance that didn’t previously exist. That’s now standard practice in long franchises and it’s worth naming as a technique because of what it costs. A scene the audience already owns is altered to create an obligation. That means the original scene now means something it didn’t mean when they watched it.
Fast Five is also the best film in the series by a wide margin. That makes the choice of target worse. It’s a clear heist structure, one objective, a real 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 wasn’t there and the audience is told it was.
Readers and viewers can tell the difference immediately, even when they can’t articulate it. The sign is that nothing in the original scene supports the new material, because nothing in it was written to. That choice is the worst of it. Fast Five is the entry I like best, and watching this film pry it open to stuff a new grievance inside feels like somebody scribbling in the margins of a book I own.
Never go back and add. A series can revisit earlier material and reinterpret it, provided the earlier text supports the reinterpretation. If you have to insert a character into a scene you already wrote, you’ve run out of story and are mining your own back catalogue. Plant more than you use in every book, and the option to reinterpret is available later without inserting anything.
The reader’s ownership of a scene is real. Changing what they watched is a breach they’ll feel as a loss of trust instead of as a plot development.
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’s hosting.
It’s a committed performance and it’s 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’s been earnest for two decades has introduced somebody who finds it all absurd, and it’s no idea what to do with him. What it doesn’t do is let him change the film. Every scene he’s in is livelier than every scene he’s not in, and the picture keeps cutting away from him to a plot about a submarine and a hacker.
I’d have happily watched ninety minutes of Momoa and skipped half the globe-trotting. Every cut away from him felt like being dragged out of a party to sit through a logistics meeting.
The Rome sequence is his best material and the film’s only 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. That’s 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.
It 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’s 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’s 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’s an agency contact who provides equipment and he’s a brother who provides comedy, and neither has a position on anything.
A cast that only grows will eventually consume the story. If nobody leaves, every book has to find work for everybody, and finding work isn’t the same as having a plot. Kill people. Retire them. Let them go somewhere and stay there.
The test is whether removing a character would change the outcome. Apply it to every name in your book and cut the ones that survive it.
Parallel strands that never converge aren’t a structure. The reader is being asked to hold four unresolved situations and is given nothing that ties them together.
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 the ninth brought him back alive with an explanation nobody needed. After that, nobody can believe any death in the series.
The Han business is where I gave up on the stakes for good. Once the series undid the death it had spent two films grieving, every explosion in this one landed on me like a screensaver.
It Does Not End
In the 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’s not a cliffhanger in the traditional sense. That’s a suspended moment resolved shortly afterward. This is a film that’s 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. That 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, and you can see it in a film that never settles on a tone, a pace or a scale. I spent the whole running time feeling like two different people were steering, and neither of them knew where the road went. Three hundred and forty million dollars produced a film that doesn’t conclude. That figure is worth thinking about, because it’s the clearest statement available about what the money was buying. That wasn’t a story.
It took around seven hundred and fifteen million worldwide. That sounds considerable 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.
A work that doesn’t end hasn’t been written. Serialization is legitimate and each installment still has to resolve something. The Empire Strikes Back is the usual defense and it’s a bad one, because that film resolves a great deal and ends on a single unanswered question instead of on everything.
Ask what’s settled when your reader closes the book. If the answer is nothing, you’ve delivered part of a manuscript.
Never rely on the next book existing. Publishing schedules change, series get canceled, and the reader who was left holding an unfinished story doesn’t come back.
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’s not one. The 2 exists because of Momoa and that bomb rolling through Rome, the only stretches where I felt awake. The rest is a franchise stalling for its next installment, and I resent being charged full price for the stalling.
