Fast X: You Better FasTEN Your Seatbelts

Why wasn't this movie called FastTen?!!  If you're gonna be a stupid movie, please have a stupid title. Well, here we are again.  Another Fast movie.  Unlike the last time, there was no special look at the new Jurassic Park movie and I didn't see it in IMAX.  As I've made clear before, I'm not the biggest fan of this franchise.  I'll go through my history with this franchise again, since it's been a few years.  The first one I saw was 7 back when I was a junior in high school.  It was decent enough, but compared to the next installments, it looked like Shawshank Redemption.  Then, last summer, I saw the original for the first time, and it was like getting whiplash.  In that one, Dom and his crew were stealing VCRs.  It's now a globetrotting saga, where they have even gone to space.  I was always angered by the fact that these movies made so much money even though they were extremely unrealistic and downright cartoonish.  As I've grown older, especially with the previous one and Fast X, I've started to turn a little bit.  I kind of get a little excited now.  With that being said, is Fast X a good movie?  That's what I'm here to tell you.

Fast X is directed by Louis Leterrier and stars Vin Diesel, Jason Momoa, Michelle Rodriguez, John Cena, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Nathalie Emmanuel, Sung Kang, and Brie Larson.   Dom Toretto (Diesel) and Letty (Rodriguez) are living a peaceful life.  This all changes when Dante (Momoa), the son of an old enemy, goes after the family.  Dom must go on a mission to stop or he might lose his family forever.  With all of that out of the way, let's dive into the review!

I will say this about Fast X: It is certainly better than the previous installment.  Is it good? Eh, but there are still some nuggets of goodness to talk about.  Jason Momoa carries this entire movie on his back.  If it wasn't for him, I think I would've disliked this film a lot more.  As mentioned before, he plays Dante who is the son of Herman Reyes, the villain of Fast Five (which I still have yet to watch).  Of course, like most things with this franchise these days, Dante is kinda retconned into the series, but that's besides the point.  Momoa is having the most fun out of the whole cast here and is one of the few who realizes just how goofy this saga really is.  Dante is played like an even more flamboyant Joker and I mean that as a compliment.  He drives a purple car, wears bright clothes, and playfully calls Dom, "Dommie." At one point, he's painting his nails with a bunch of corpses watching him.  So yeah, he's the Joker of the Fast universe.  I wasn't expecting to like him as much as I did, but he genuinely saves this movie from being terrible.  I also really liked Jakob Toretto (Cena), Dom's brother who was the villain in the last movie.  I think why I liked him so much was because Cena looked like he was having a blast.  This isn't the same hardass Jakob from the last movie.  He's the super fun uncle.  Granted, most of the movie, he's driving Dom's son Brian (Leo Abelo Perry) around, making sure Dante doesn't kidnap him.  Character-wise, most of the characters have really good chemistry together.  Tej (Ludacris) and Roman (Gibson) are still the same old goof-balls as always.  Roman even gets the chance to lead the team this time.  What I also appreciated about this movie was that, in regards to action, it was pretty tame.  They don't try to top the whole space thing in the last one, but really how could you?  One of my favorite scenes was when John Cena had bazookas strapped to the sides of his car.  

OK, now onto the rest of the movie.  While Fast X is better than 9, that's not saying a ton.  Vin Diesel is the only one taking these movies seriously, but not to the point like in the last one.  This film is just all over the place.  I actually felt the same way as I did after watching Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: Like I had just had the crap kicked out of me.  There's so many characters spread to so many parts of the globe that it becomes exhausting to keep track of.  Some characters are hopping continents like it's just a little drive to the grocery.  In one sequence, Dom is in Italy.  The next he's in Brazil.  It's never explained how he gets there so quickly.  The movie goes out of its way to tell you that he's being hunted not only by Dante, but by the Agency as well, now being run by Aimes (Alan Ritchson).  Sorry for the slight spoiler, but I think you'll forgive me.  I've never seen a movie so stitched together like this one.  As I mentioned earlier, the characters are all spread out.  Dom is trying to hunt Dante, Letty is in a mysterious facility with Cypher (Charlize Theron), Han, Roman, Tej, and Ramsey (Emmanuel) are doing their own thing, and Jakob is taking care of the kid.  There's way too much going on and I didn't care really about any of it.  It was the opposite of Infinity War, where the characters are spread all over and we get segments with all of them.  I was always interested to see what would happen next.  In Fast X, I just kept forgetting what was going on.  A perfect example is when Letty is trying to break out of somewhere.  She's going through a tunnel.  It's never explained where this tunnel is located, how she's able to get up there, or how she found it.  I turned to my friend and said, "Did they cut a scene?"  To make matters worse, even more new characters are introduced.  Brie Larson plays Tess, the daughter of Mr. Nobody.  She's fine, I guess? She really doesn't do anything.   Theres another character, Isabel (Daniela Melchior), who's in this movie.  She's pretty much just another person for Dom to save and is, of course, related to someone that he cares about.  These movies are like soap operas at this point, which is fine, but at least make it interesting.   Because of all of this, the old cast gets left in the dust.  After the bomb sequence, Letty gets completely sidelined for the rest of the movie.  Another one who gets pushed to the side is Shaw (Jason Statham).  Slight spoilers ahead.  The last movie sort of set up a resolution between Han and Shaw in the next movie.  Shaw killed him, but, unbeknownst to everyone, it was staged and Han turned out to be ok.  This conflict goes nowhere in Fast X, since Statham's character only appears in a scene or two.  I get that they're trying to set up for the next (two) sequels, but it was really disappointing to not see this thread followed through.

While there are some impressive action sequences, there was nothing that really wowed me.  I actually got a little bored at time.  In the trailers, the team is getting chased by this ball thing and it's actually a bomb.  At first it was fun, but after a while, come one.  This was also one of the worst bombs I've ever seen in a movie.  It's bouncing down stairs, going through cars, catches on fire, and it didn't blow up because of that.  I know i'm rambling, but this sequence lacked any sort of continuity.  At one point, Dom is driving his car down the stairs and I'm pretty sure his tires got deflated.  Doesn't stop him though, because he's still somehow able to keep driving and the tires are fine.  To add insult to injury, some of the effects in this movie are pretty bad.  I could easily tell where green screen was used.  This is unacceptable when the movie cost a reported $340 million dollars.  Then again, that might have to do with having such a big cast.  It also didn't help that when original director Justin Lin left, it cost the studio up to $1 million per day to keep the movie going.

To wrap everything up, Fast X is certainly an improvement to its predecessor.  Jason Momoa saves the whole movie as Dante, there is some fun to be had, and things do get bonkers.  However, the film is all over the place, things get kinda confusing, a lot of characters get sidelined while new ones are introduced, the action is kind of lackluster, and the CG can get pretty rough at points.  This is pretty much the definition of a movie you watch once and then forget quite quickly.  It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't really good either.   As I mentioned earlier, now we have two more of these things to sit through.  According to Vin Diesel, the studio wanted to make this a trilogy.  Lucky us.  If I were to rate it, I'd give Fast X a 5.5-6/10.  Also, be sure to sit through the credits as well!