'Fast X' Is Discount Action Movie Slurry

At least Jason Momoa seems to be having fun, in a film that's otherwise lazy to the point of spite.

Universal

Fast X doesn’t have an ending. Did you know that? I guess I missed the memo. It was apparently meant to be part one of a two-part finale for the series, or possibly a three-part finale, if Vin Diesel’s red carpet interview at the international premiere is to be believed.

After seeing the film, that feels more like a threat than a tease. Not a lot of film franchises make it to ten films, and Fast X seems like a good example of why. Just as in the Marvel universe, no character who dies in the Fast franchise is ever really dead (except for the former star of it, who died horrifically in real life doing the thing the movies glorify). From Letty to Han to Cypher to Gisele, everyone returns for their fan service cameo in Fast X (Gisele, played by Gal Gadot, doing it as the pilot of a submarine emerging from the ice off Antarctica — these characters are basically LEGO people now, you just screw different hats on them depending on the situation). Only unlike Marvel, the Fast franchise hasn’t quite figured out how to organize their IP into subdomains. At best it’s the lesser of two algorithms.

Aside from the resurrected, there are also some new characters (both brand and relatively), from Brie Larson to Jason Momoa to Alan Ritchson from the Jack Reacher series, plus regulars Diesel and Statham and Brewster and Mirren, and cinema’s worst comedy duo, Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson (who have unlocked the secret of doing “banter” without changing facial expressios). Basically if you can think of a Hollywood buff guy, he’s probably in Fast X. Suffice it say, that’s too many people to try to squeeze into one movie. And so we get two hours and 20 minutes with no ending; a film that asks, “isn’t applauding your faves story enough?”

Jason Momoa plays the Big Bad, and Fast X spends its first five minutes retconning his character into Fast Five (which, along with Furious 7, is one of about 2.5 movies in this franchise that are objectively above average). That was the one where the gang stole some giant safes from a drug lord and dragged them around Rio from ropes attached to their NOS machines (we did this once in high school using a stolen chair from Taco Bell). Well, what if we told you Dante, played by Momoa, was that drug lord’s son! How about that!

Does this knowledge add anything to the rest of the movie? Not really! It’s purely continuity for continuity’s sake. The scene, surely setting a record for the most re-used footage from a film that came out 11 years ago, is a microcosm of the whole, in which any potential fun buckles under the weight of the backstory required to get there. Fast has always been an Idiocracy-ready amalgam of Pimp My Ride, pro wrestling, and vague Christianity (now with more shiney Crucifixes!) but now it’s become the cinematic equivalent of a TLC reality show: so many recaps of previous action and teases of future plotlines that there’s barely any time left for the thing you thought you were watching.

At least Jason Momoa seems to be having fun. He plays a character who has sworn not to kill the Toretto gang, but to make them suffer. Which in practice seems involve kidnapping everyone’s wives about 27 times over. That’s how he recruited his gang, in fact. He just showed up at Cypher’s house (who I think used to be dead? I’m not looking this up) and showed all of her henchmen that he had kidnapped their wives. With what henchmen he accomplished this, we’re left to guess. It seems like some kind of wife kidnapping pyramid scheme to me, the SEC should get involved.

Momoa, playing a Brazilian, flirts with a Brazilian accent for about three words in his first scene, then settles into something like the muscle-bound Hawaiian equivalent of a flamboyant, gay-coded eighties villain (you could make a drinking game out of how often he sing songs “Oh, Dommy!”). I like Momoa better when he’s playing Jason Momoa instead of this Gary Oldman tribute act, but at least it’s a choice.

Universal

Dante’s first big act is to trick the gang into chasing a giant, round “underwater neutron mine” around Rome, framing them for the entire fiasco and putting them on the outs with the CIA. No part of this plan makes any sense (to say nothing of the logistics of how Dante is supposedly orchestrating it at all like an all-seeing God) but it does result in one of the film’s two inspired moments: a stunt that involves a muscle car playing deadly pinball with crane and a big round bomb. (There’s a later one involving helicopters that invokes two bees tied together with string that’s also quite nice).

That’s about the best you can hope for in the Fast franchise these days (or ever, really), a setpiece so inspired in its utter ridiculousness that you can’t help but giggle. Fast 7 is basically a compilation of these kinds of moments (sadly the only installment directed by James Wan, who understands the appeal better than anyone) and the muscle car crane-bomb pinball moment briefly gave me that same giddy head rush.

Fast X director Louis Leterrier (The Transporter, Now You See Me) is no James Wan, to put it mildly, and maybe he’s someone easier for the cast to push around. And so Fast X mostly lurches from one asinine side quest to the next, as incoherent as it is dull. Everyone gets a cameo! At one point Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and Cipher (Charlize Theron) wake up next to each other at a black site and immediately start fighting, seemingly to the death. We cut away to a different storyline for a while and when we return, the two are out of breath and now friends.

When The Rock shattered his arm cast by flexing and then choke-slammed Jason Statham through a table in Furious 7, it was inspired. All of Fast X’s fight scenes are interchangable combinations of blurry close-ups set to screeching sound effects, as implausible as the cast break but without any of the fun. Almost every American action movie these days makes me pine for RRR, the last big silly action film where it felt like the filmmakers were there to amuse themselves and not just check an action item off a list. It’s inconceivable that a filmmaker could be in this much of a rush to get to the next scene, especially when… there’s nothing to rush to! This movie doesn’t even have an ending!

Fast X feels like the logical end point of franchise filmmaking, which turns characters into IP and the movies in which they appear into pump-and-dump schemes. And so it isn’t a movie so much as a lengthy collection of character entrances and cliffhangers. Look who’s here! Look who else will be here soon!

Just like the characters in the Fast franchise eventually realize that there isn’t anywhere else to drive (hard to believe the “endless runway” sequence was a full decade ago now), these self-referential ourobori, dedicated to bilking a locked in fandom, are going to realize that they spent so much time serving fans that they forgot to make any new ones.