In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, one professor explains to another his lecturing process on car crashes in Hollywood movies: to him, they are part of a “long tradition of American optimism. They are positive events, full of the old ‘can-do’ spirit.” To him, they are not harbingers of a civilization’s decay, but expressions of innocence and play. Anyone who resonates with this sentiment should be an easy mark for the Fast Saga, a series of bleeding-heart melodramas that unspool themselves with the visual vernacular of car-acrobatics and sweet, sweet property damage. It pains me as a fan of these movies — the scale and scope of which have been steadily and ludicrously increasing over the last 20 years — to say that the most appropriate metaphor they conjure is of a bubble inflating until it finally, messily bursts. Even in lesser entries like The Fate of the Furious (2018), the series has kept a reasonably steady hand on its commingling of human passions with vehicular ones, but with Fast X, DeLillo’s idea of explosive innocence has been grafted onto an exhausting sequence of sour and brutish interlocking thrills, and the cracks that threatened to compromise the series’ ethos of group love and collaboration may have finally ruptured. It’s a mangled, short-sighted wreck –– the kind you’d rather look away from than sit up and cheer for.
It seems that the further the series’ creative team has leaned into this idea of family (the word is said a record number of times in this new one, used in lieu of “team” at every available opportunity), the more behind-the-scenes conflict seems to plague production. From Michelle Rodriguez’s axe to grind with the producers’ boys-club mentality to the competitive macho posturing between Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Vin Diesel, the mechanics of corralling such an increasingly large (and increasingly wealthy and demanding) group have only grown more strenuous. During the first week of filming for Fast X, Justin Lin — who had directed five of the Fast films, wrote the ninth one, and was on track to write and direct the series’ two-part conclusion — walked off set and officially parted ways with the series (a pre-production full of forced rewrites and interference from Vin Diesel and Universal executives apparently disillusioned him from the project). The production was on hold for a week as they scrambled to find a new director, and continued once they settled on Louis Leterrier, the dutiful studio hack behind Clash of the Titans (2010) and Now You See Me (2013).
Leterrier, who hasn’t directed a theatrical release in seven years, is clearly very excited to be here. From the cartwheeling opening shot, his commitment is clear, and during action sequences his camera jolts to life as if it had overslept — it arcs and careens and whooshes, but without any rhythm (the editing in this entry is appalling) or finesse his direction comes across as giddily aggressive, almost hectoring, and despite his efforts, the setpieces (forcibly stimulating and genuinely well-conceived as they may be) are insistently and flamboyantly inept in execution. Lin’s concise, elegant framing and refreshing emotional directness — a best-case scenario, less-is-more approach to outsized action that buoyed the series’ transition from high-speed capers to globetrotting, physics-defying superspy shenanigans — have been traded in for a senseless deluge of waxy images and pummeling bombast.
It’s difficult to parse what material was left untouched from Lin’s version of the script, but regardless, the narrative patterning of Fast X is perplexing. The cast have been cordoned off in a web of leaden subplots, propped up by some of the series’ stalest banter and only briefly given a shot of urgency by a surprisingly mean-spirited emotional conflict between Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Ludacris). The so-called family are reduced to game-pieces in the now three-part conclusion’s larger design. Most of the regular cast look unhappy to be here, and the newcomers barely register at all (Brie Larson shows face for two scenes and pretty much plays herself, and some dead character’s sister appears in a couple scenes to be a hostage and then fades into the background). Jason Momoa, who plays the latest Ghost From Dom’s Past, Dante Reyes (son of the least interesting character in the spectacular fifth entry), capital-R registers; he does more than the rest of the cast put together, and most of it is awful, but his sheer exuberance brings some much-needed energy to the dreary scenes where people talk with their mouths instead of their cars. The unfortunate takeaway is that the series’ expansive heart and emphasis on forgiveness have overloaded the recurring roster; the family is just too big, and as a result the writers have been reduced to the kind of emotional shorthand that lesser tentpole blockbusters have leaned on for years.
The cast gets lost in the shuffle not just because there are too many faces to keep track of or care about, but because this is ultimately a Vin Diesel movie. He is unmistakably the focus of this entry in a way he was not in the others, with the bulk of the action following him alone in Rio as the occasional (new) cast member appears to disrupt him (it would seem the veteran cast can barely stand to be in the same room with the man). The other Fast films were strengthened and animated by the tension between Lin and Vin, between one man’s personal vision for a collective and another’s curation of his public image, but with the former out of the picture the scales are off balance, and this shapeless ego-trip of a movie is the result.
An obvious limitation in criticizing this movie is that it’s a two-and-a-half-hour setup for two other movies. This is also the main limitation of the film itself, however, explaining the hair-brained, slipshod plotting without remotely excusing it. When the final two chapters come screeching into theatres, it’s absolutely possible this mess could make sense in hindsight, but the only idea Fast X manages to communicate as a self-contained unit is the narcissism of its producer/star. The impossibly stupid cliffhanger ending — followed by an even stupider resurrection reveal that nearly knocked me out of my seat — just hammers home that even if it’s lightyears ahead of the MCU on a formal and technical level, the Marvelization of the Fast Saga is officially upon us. Fast X feels like walking through a graveyard of the series’ most recognizable (and therefore recyclable) moments, a 300-million-dollar Frankenstein’s monster whose sense of innocence and play have curdled into a bevy of malignant sensory stressors.
