Fast X: It's time to stop forgiving this franchise for being purposefully awful

True story, my original title for this article was “Fast X Fucking Sucks” but I got algorithms to feed so I can get about 12 people to read this. To say that the latest installment of this long-in-the-tooth franchise is a lazy, half-assed, disingenuous, CGI-overloaded pile of vapid dogshit is being downright courteous. With all the respect in the world for the folks that worked their ass off to make the film, the end product is a sorry representation of their efforts.

We are ten movies into this mess of a franchise that started as a Point Break ripoff with cars instead of surfboards and the theft of DVD players from the back of moving trucks instead of cash from banks, and things have gone from good to bad to weird to good to wild to over-the-top and now back to bad. Like, really bad. It was Fast Five that flipped a switch on the franchise, elevating the action and stakes to a level that felt like it had grown up, even if still carrying an adolescent vibe that was always part of the charm. It seemed like the franchise had found its way forward.

The sequels that followed continued to amp up the excess, with director Justin Lin creating a signature style that balanced over-the-top car stunts and WWE-style brawls, interspersed with slow-motion bouncing booties, bouncing cars, and a bouncing soundtrack, all helping to distract from a hackneyed plot, contrived cartoon characters, and an earnest message of “family” that’s become both the focal point and meme of the entire franchise.

After directors James Wan and F. Gary Gray took a crack at the franchise, adding a little veteran flavor, Lin returned for F9, which ended up being the most ridiculous, vacant, and outright ludicrous (pun intended) entry yet.

Until now…

If F9 was the worst of the franchise, then Fast X is its goofy twin brother, but it’s the twin that’s just slightly more interesting, due completely to the flamboyant performance from Jason Momoa as the retro-refitted villain Dante Reyes, the rambunctious offspring of Fast Five’s villain, Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida). Outside of the presence of Momoa, Fast X is an excruciatingly dumb movie that lacks any sort of authenticity, stakes, suspense, or stunt work to make it a convincing entry in the franchise.

Fast X is what happens with a long-running series when it buys into its own reputation and adjusts itself accordingly. Instead of inviting new challenges or advancing beyond the meme-level standing they have, Fast X doubles down on everything that folks expect (and joke about), creating a loud, messy, nonsensical entry that feels like it was written by AI rather than a human. It’s like the studio typed in “Write a Fast and Furious movie” into ChatGPT and out came Fast X.

Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto is seemingly living a “normal” life, training his ten-year-old child, Brian, to drive a car like he stole it, while dropping a not-so-subtle hint that his now-wife Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is pregnant. But, it’s all barbecues and Corona’s until Charlize Theron’s Cypher shows up, bloody and damaged, saying that she just “met the devil” who turns out to be Momoa’s Dante, out for revenge against Dom for stealing from and leading to the death of his father.

This pursuit of vengeance, funded by Dante’s seemingly infinite budget (ironic as he seems to be on this path because Dom stole their money), leads to a globe-trotting adventure of mind-numbingly stupid and implausible scenarios, none of which make any kind of sense, nor are particularly thrilling in any way beyond what’s been done before. We’re supposed to just laugh and be thrilled and entertained and put another gold star next to this long-in-the-tooth series for doing what it does.

The problem is, this franchise has asked enough of the audience and it’s time to give back. We’ve gotten to the point where everyone has gotten way out of control and the classroom needs to be brought back to order. Except the teacher has left the classroom and the rowdy kids have no guidance whatsoever. It’s the Lord of the Flies up in this piece.

In the fourth grade, I started drawing my own comics on notebook paper. I was inspired by GI Joe and The Punisher and all the action movies that were part of my steady entertainment diet. The problem is that I was a kid and hadn’t lived long enough to understand or contemplate real human drama to put on a comic-book page, so I gravitated to nothing but the simple things like violence, guns, explosions, blood, and a little sex peppered in (not that I knew anything about any of that at the time either). I didn’t bother with a detailed plot or fleshed-out characters or any kind of commentary that would elevate the material. No, I just had one shoot-out, car chase, and fistfight after another, pitting one favorite character against another endlessly. My friends and I ate it up and marveled at each new issue that I’d pump out within a few hours in the evening. It was junk food, plain and simple, and certainly carved a path for me to develop further, but it took some life experience, education, and perspective to get there. Decades worth, in fact.

Fast X is a movie made by 4th Grade Me. The dialogue reads like the kind of stuff someone that’s never lived in the real world would say. “I don’t care if I die,” Dom says at one point, “As long as I can protect the ones I love.” That’s the kind of lame-brain bullshit dialogue that you’d mistake as being profound at first and then once it settles, realize it’s absolute nonsense. And it never gets any better, unless Momoa is onscreen.

Dom seems so hellbent on protecting his son, yet takes every opportunity to leave him behind and go fight some other fight that he really doesn’t need to be a part of, including a trip to Rome that has the insufferable trio of Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Ludacris), and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) on some secret heist mission they somehow got from “The Agency” at random, but are actually set up by Dante, prompting Dom and the rest of the crew to roll in and seemingly save them.

This leads to an overblown, CGI-heavy sequence of a rolling bomb (on fire, too!) that defies all laws of physics by smashing through the city, destroying vehicles, homes, streets, infrastructure, and everything in between, just before getting knocked into the Tiber River by Dom in a stunt pulled right from an 80s Saturday morning cartoon. The explosion and subsequent blast send cars flying into the air like a hurricane, leaving behind a trail of massive devastation that rivals that of a superhero movie.

Then, comes the coup de grâce to the scene, a news report recapping what happened, including the news that there were ZERO casualties in the incident. Pardon me, but that’s bullshit. Like, I get that this is a PG-13 movie made for shits and gigs, but I can only be insulted so much by implausibility. That whole scene would’ve killed all manner of people, livelihoods, homes, property, and probably some family pets. That’s a fact. When a Sharknado movie has a more believable body count than your $340 million-dollar budgeted “blockbuster”, then you’re in trouble.

And let’s talk about that budget for a second. For $340 million bucks I didn’t see anything on my IMAX screen that I haven’t seen done just as well in a video game cut scene. For a movie that was supposedly shot all over the world and with multiple set pieces, the shots look like they were filmed on a virtual set in a studio backlot with B-roll of the location done with a drone. Seriously, they may want to take a look at where that money went, because it wasn’t on the big screen.

With that said, the best way to break this down is to look at the various characters of this film and what they get up to, which isn’t much, and dissect just why this went from overblown fun to overblown pap.

I’d argue that having Dom face off against his “family” in The Fate of the Furious was a bold choice that created a unique dynamic, even if still pretty lame-brained, but two movies past it and we’re watching Dom be a father by teaching his kid to be a fast-driving thief like daddy, which isn’t exactly inspiring. And, abandoning him to “save” his goofball friends in another country is counterintuitive to what he pretends to care about.

The franchise doesn’t really know what to do with Dom at this juncture, and his only challenge seems to be relegated to “save my son” from danger, which he continues to put him in by placing him in the care of everyone but himself. It’s a blatant misunderstanding of what a father would actually do while leaving Dom without a true challenge to his character. He’s a snooze at this point, and looking far too old to still be racing cars, not to mention being a world-trotting super spy.

Here’s the Fast X Checklist of dumb:

• Dom, no matter where he goes, be it another state or another country, will always have a black, souped-up 1970 Dodge Charger R/T on hand. Rio de Janeiro, Nevada, Los Angeles, whatever, Dom’s Charger will be there in that exact condition, no questions asked. The same for access to C-130 transport planes, additional vehicles, or anything you could possibly need to keep the plot moving well beyond the realm of reality.

• Jordana Brewster, who plays the 123 Ib sister of Toretto, has no problem taking out an entire squad of heavily armed and armored “Agency” troops with elbows and hip tosses with almost no effort or training whatsoever and you better support it because “family”.

• The tactical agent/soldiers of this franchise are essentially stormtroopers. They can’t shoot for shit, can’t fight for shit, and have no insight, intuition, or maneuverability whatsoever, despite being outfitted like SWAT badasses with the most high-tech and lethal weaponry. If you show up in this franchise as one of these characters, especially Fast X, your years of training mean nothing when squaring off against car thieves that think they’re super spies.

• John Cena goes from franchise villain with a tough, no-bullshit demeanor in F9 to a goofball PG-13-rated version of Peacemaker for Fast X, teamed up with Dom’s son and making possibly one of the most idiotic dipshit sacrifices in motion picture history that has the emotional wallop of a YouTube fail video.

• Brie Larson shows up as Mr. Nobody’s (Kurt Russell) daughter (because family, bruh) and apparently can gain access to anywhere and carry around that silly God’s Eye device in her hip pocket because family, and when she walks into a bar looking for someone she just starts beating everyone up because family and shut the fuck up and give me some beers and watch how I can’t do any of that fighting shit when it matters. Her presence in the film adds absolutely NADA and it’s not even her fault that it doesn’t matter. She has nothing to work with here and her inclusion is as painful as Kurt Russell saying no thanks to another trip in this franchise.

• Charlize Theron’s Cypher, who showed up in The Fate of the Furious as a pretty interesting A-list baddie, has been sanitized through the series to become an unlikely ally, robbing her of any real credibility or interest as a character. Yeah, sure she can do stunts and all that jazz, but why does she even matter at this point? Cypher offers nothing to the series at this point. Her death as a villain would’ve held more weight, but with F&F you go full reverse of The Dark Knight and either die a villain or live long enough to become a hero.

• Jason Statham is back, showing up for one scene to beat everyone up, grab some guns, and get in a car, presumably setting him up for a moment to show up when everyone is fucked in the next installment of this slog-fest. His scene is so small and hindered that it almost feels like a favor was called in to get him to show up with the least amount of responsibility possible. I mean, he probably shot it on a green screen set up in his garage.

• Roman, Tej, and Ramsey are essentially The Three Stooges. Seriously, every single time this trio is onscreen it slams the brakes on the film. Why anyone in their right mind would listen to or trust Roman with anything is beyond me. He’s an irredeemable moron and Ludacris has lost all sense of edge, becoming so vanilla that they may as well change his song “Get Back” to “Pardon Me”. Nathalie Emmanuel always looks stunning, so you can’t get away from that, but in no world is this forced wannabe love triangle believable. Ramsey is too smart and too hot to be with either of these fools and it may well be one of the most unbelievable aspects of the series to date.

• Jason Momoa is one of the most fun villains in recent memory and saves this movie from being an absolute and complete CGI turd, but it’s purely from his comedic bravado. As a villain, Dante is completely inept. Every. Single. Plan. that this guy sets in motion is thwarted, and he never does anything particularly dastardly onscreen other than lick the blood off of a knife. Jim Morrison did the same thing and he sang hit songs at least.

  Dante does everything from set-up Dom’s crew to be killed by a gigantic rolling bomb (dumb enough as it is), captures and loses Dom’s son in the course of a car ride, gets the god eye from Brie Larson by shooting her in the shoulder and fails to finish her off, kidnaps the families of a bunch of henchmen to blackmail them to kill Charlize Theron, leaving the room before they fail to finish the job, and sets up two remote control trucks filled with explosives to ram into Dom at the Hoover Dam, a feat he never in a million years could’ve planned to happen, and fails to do that too.

  I mean, Momoa hams this shit up, and I laughed out loud at a lot of his antics, but he never commits an act of sheer villainous strife that made me hate him. In fact, I loved him, and I was rooting for his ridiculous character to just kill everyone by the end, as Momoa was the only one that seemed to know what kind of film he was in and how to make it work, even if the script had him be an unmitigated failure at every turn. He may as well have been a villain from the 1960s Batman series, foiled over his dipshittery at every turn, but was at least entertaining, unlike everyone else.

• No risk, no reward. Except we bring that reward back from the dead. F&F has essentially become a comic book in terms of deaths, which has absolutely robbed the series of any dramatic weight it could ever carry. Nobody that “dies” stays dead, which takes away all the stakes the franchise could ever have. Death is the end for all of us. It’s what we all fear the most, even if we pretend to be Steven Seagal and say we don’t fear it. Bull-fucking-shit. You’re all scared. And you should be. But, not if you’re in a Fast & Furious movie (unless you’re in tactical gear or a 3rd-tier character, then you’re fucked).

  F&F has ZERO balls when it comes to taking risks and you can excuse it from that assignment all you want, but you know god damn well that if they killed someone that mattered and did it in a Rick Flagg kind of way that it would bring down the house and take this franchise out of neutral. Until then, assume everyone is still alive and coming back until this thing finally closes its books (which will never happen until profits drop off, I assure you)

Probably the biggest problem I have with Fast X is the complete and utter lack of authenticity. Yes, we expect it to be over the top, but so is Mission: Impossible, and yet with that franchise I am consistently floored, excited, and anxious as to what will happen because they go out of their way to convince me (and with a budget $150 million less than F&F). And F&F used to go that extra mile. They used to try. Now, out of laziness, convenience, and ego, the franchise is cobbled together out of shameless CGI and bloated star power, neither of which is justifiably earned. The script is so bad that it almost justifies letting the writer’s strike go on infinitely.

Defenders will say that I need to check my brain at the door. That I should know what I’m going into. That it’s meant to be funny, over-the-top, and silly. Defenders that weren’t even born on June 22nd, 2001, when I was there opening weekend for the starting gun of this ridiculous series. Fuck right off. I have watched this shit evolve from the drop of the flag, so don’t give me that bullshit. There comes a point where silly fun becomes insulting intelligence, and Fast X puts the pedal to the medal in that department.

I won’t discount anyone that happens to love this movie, especially the younger generation that wants to enjoy it as the meme franchise it’s become, but as someone that’s been with it from the start and seen what it’s capable of, it’s sad to watch something cool, even if still just a silly ripoff of a much better film, become something idiotic. We’re at the de-evolution process of the series and it just feels like homework to watch it roll to the finish line at this point.

The thing is, with this much talent devoted to a film franchise, we should expect better. There’s just too many people involved that know better and aren’t doing anything about it. No steps are being taken to make this a sharp, badass, fun series, and as soon as someone complains (like me), we’re told that we either just don’t get it or that it’s always been this way. Well, no it hasn’t, and I’m in the generation that grew up with Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and a movie literally called Over The Top. I know the bounds of silly, stupid fun and I am happy to celebrate when it works the magic just right. But, I’m also apt to pan it when the shit hits the fan, and Fast X is sputtering through the blades and stinking up theaters everywhere at this point.