‘Fast X’ Doubles Down On Big Bombastic Silliness

I’m perplexed that a brain-dead action film like Fast X, the latest installment in a series of films that began twenty-two years ago with The Fast and the Furious, could give me such existential angst. On the one hand, it’s an absurd soap opera of a film where a fake-looking muscle car falls hundreds of feet from a fake-looking plane to land on a highway where it wipes out an enemy convoy of fake-looking SUVs.

On the other hand, after theaters were shut down for the better part of two summers by a global pandemic, don’t audiences have a right to their big, bombastic CGI silliness with a side of popcorn and Junior Mints? By all means, in this crazy world we live in, feel free to escape to a nice chilly theater and watch this absurd cartoon of a film. All I’m asking is: Do summer blockbusters really have to be this lazy?

After reveling in the adrenaline rush of Top Gun: Maverick in May 2022, it’s hard to watch Fast X without laughing at the ineptitude filling the screen. The entire cast with the exception of Jason Momoa (Aquaman) sleepwalks through the film. The film sags every time he disappears from screen. Is everyone else bored? Or simply playing it far too earnest for a film this ridiculous?

In the opening moments of the film, we revisit the infamous “vault theft” from Fast Five where our protagonists literally hook a steel bank vault to their cars and blow town with the vault in tow. Their escape turns into bloody mayhem as they attempt to elude their pursuers on a bridge. The scene has been re-edited to blend the original footage with new inserts showing that Dante Reyes (Momoa) was present during that caper that killed his father. For ten years, Reyes has planned his revenge, and that unfolding plan forms the plot of Fast X.

Over the years, this franchise has gone from gritty to glossy, and it’s much the worse for it. The Fast and the Furious tapped into the love of an old-fashioned car chase. From Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971) to Ronin (1998) and We Own the Night (2007), movies have long celebrated practical stunt driving. The Fast and the Furious tapped into that vein and was one of the pleasant surprises the summer of 2001 had to offer moviegoers. [For car chases, my personal favorite is found in the lesser-known crime film The Seven-Ups from 1973. How anyone walked away from the end of that scene I’ll never know.]

Since this promising beginning, the franchise has steadily valued CGI-rendered actions sequences over the driving skills of talented humans. The Fast and Furious films have morphed into a combination of video games and cartoons with cars launching out of skyscrapers and plunging off mountains. No one dies and the wheels on the muscle cars keep turning even if they look worse than the Chrysler LeBaron driven by John Candy and Steve Martin in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987). They are spectacles with no stakes, and even the spectacles are computer fakery.

Fast X also feels the need to give every star from the history of the franchise their own action moment. Charlize Theron, Jason Statham and John Cena all have hand-to-hand combat moments that made me think of their far superior work in Atomic Blonde (2017), The Transporter (2002) and The Suicide Squad (2021) respectively. The clunky cinematography and choppy editing certainly don’t help their attempts to beat some life into their, uh, … beatings. The four John Wick films have served to expose every camera and editing trick employed by mediocre action films, and Fast X is no exception.

The bright spot in the film is Jason Momoa who plays Dante the Villain like a male model from Zoolander who can’t help but kill the people who stand between him and what he wants. He’s a fun-loving force of chaos — think Health Ledger’s Joker with painted toenails instead of make-up. Momoa understands the film he’s in and turns the campiness up to 11. This franchise jumped the shark six films ago, and Momoa knows he really can’t go too far at this point.

Fast X was originally promoted as a two-part finale to the series and ends on a cliffhanger. At the film’s international premiere in Rome, Vin Diesel hinted that it may be the first in a three-part finale. A nine-film series that “ends” with a trilogy of films is the perfect meta commentary for this bloated franchise.