Fast X (2023)
Directed by Louis Letterier
Written by Dan Mazeau, Justin Lin
Starring Vin Diesel, Jason Mamoa, Tyrese, Charlize Theron, Paget Brewster, John Cena, Michelle Rodriguez, Ludacris, Sung Kang, Jason Statham, Helen Mirren
Release Date May 19th, 2023
Published May 19th, 2023
What is there to say about Fast X? If you aren't fully onboard with the utter nonsense that is the Fast and Furious franchise at this point, why are you bothering? I happen to be fully on board for this nonsense. I fell in love with the silly, testosterone fueled nonsense in 2001 and have remained in love with this nonsense as it morphed from being about street racers pulling small scale criminal heists -they literally stole DVD players and VCRs out of semis in the original- to today when everyone is basically an immortal superhero.
You have to accept a lot of B.S when you accept the Fast franchise. Take, for instance, where we begin in Fast X. Dom (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) begin the film back in L.A, back in what may be their old neighborhood. These are people who still live with a deep, paranoid fear that people are trying to kill them and they are living exactly where anyone trying to find them will find them, very easily, with little to no effort.
The movie openly admits this as the plot kicks off with the person who has hunted them for the past two films, Cypher (Charlize Theron), finds their house and knocks on the door. Cypher is battered and bruised. She's bleeding from some sort of wound to her abdomen. She tells Dom and Letty that she sought them out because the person who did this is even more evil than herself. He's so evil that she wants to join their side to fight him.
That man is Dante Reyes (Jason Mamoa) whose father, Herman Reyes (Joachim De Almeida) was killed during Fast crew's heist of a vault full of cash in Rio De Janeiro, as seen in flashback here and in full in Fast Five. Dante doesn't want to kill Dom, he wants to make him suffer. That means targeting Dom's family and trying to kill anyone who has ever help the Toretto family. Why he doesn't just roll into the L.A suburbs and do his business, I have no idea.
Instead, Dante, being all kinds of extra, decides to blow up the Vatican and frame Dom's crew for the crime. It's as brazen and silly as that sounds. A portion of Vatican City is destroyed but exposition newscaster, one of the unsung heroes of this franchise, tells us that no one was killed. A giant bomb took out a portion of a massive tourist destination and no one was killed. Everyone in the Fast universe is a superhero. I don't know if this 'no one was killed' nonsense extends to the cops chasing Dom and his crew through the streets of Rome but if they didn't die, there is no death in this universe.
This sequence is utterly bonkers and I loved it. I did. I loved it. It's total, non-stop, nonsense but it's so much fun. The bomb is a giant ball that rolls out of the back of a semi-truck and will not stop rolling as if Rome were nothing but a tilted table. At one point, the bomb rolls over a gas pump and the pumps explode. Dom uses his car to shield people on the street from the explosion. The bomb continues to roll but is now on fire as Dom chases it in his super-car. It's gloriously stupid and I love it.
If Fast X lacks, it's due to director Louis Letterier who leans too far into the dour, sourpuss, self-seriousness of Dominic Toretto. Where Justin Lin and F. Gary Gray got how silly this series is and embraced the giddy stupidity, Letterier takes things in the direction that Diesel wants to go, treating the nonsense seriously and threatening to upend the strength of this franchise, how it is embraces its own nuttiness and leans into the criticism of it being the loudest, brainless franchise in Hollywood.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
