Fast X has the Fast and Furious franchise spinning its wheels
Theonly deceptive thing about theFast and Furious movies is that the people behind them pretend they’re still movies about cars. Don’t let the talk about torque and fuel-injection systems fool you: This series shifted into a different gear a long time ago. Specifically, it pivoted in 2011 with Fast Five, the movie that made Fast and Furiousthe hybrid superhero/superspy/super-heist franchise it is today. Since then, what was once a fresh (and, honestly, pretty funny) pivot has spun its wheels into the dirt. Which brings us toFast X.
The villain in this latest chapter of the saga is Dante Reyes (once and future Aquaman Jason Momoa), the son of the Brazilian drug-dealer antagonist fromFast Five. Fast X opens with recycled footage from Fast Five showing Dante’s dad Hernan (Joaquim de Almeida) meeting his end in that film’s climactic bank heist/car chase. It’s a telling choice, because it reveals where the current incarnation of the series really began. It also reminds longtime fans what these movies used to be about — the car chase at the end of Fast Five is awesome, better than anything in Fast X — and what they’re ostensibly about now.
The answer to that last bit is — say it all together now —family. Fast X could not underline this theme any more clearly. This is a film with zero subtext, where characters state their motivations and explain what they’re about to do in the clearest of terms right before they do it. (“It’s a big-ass bomb!” a character says at one point, upon the reveal of said big-ass bomb. “I’m going to go kill the guy who’s trying to defuse my bomb,” Dante tells a flunky a few minutes later.) This bluntness is mostly just giggle-inducing. But it is helpful in the sense that, if a viewer happens to miss
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