Fast X

After years of increas­ing­ly way­ward sequels and spin­offs, F9 got the Fast and Furi­ous fran­chise back on sol­id asphalt with a renewed focus on the char­ac­ter dynam­ics of its increas­ing­ly sprawl­ing cast and much-improved action direc­tion from Justin Lin. Lin’s wel­come return to the series sig­naled hopes of a strong fin­ish for this baf­fling­ly huge prop­er­ty that were swift­ly dashed when he depart­ed dur­ing pro­duc­tion of this sequel. Worse still, Fast X was entrust­ed to Louis Leter­ri­er, an undis­tin­guished hack whose anony­mous film­mak­ing hint­ed at a like­ly back­slide for the franchise.

Sur­pris­ing­ly, Fast X emerges as not only Leterrier’s best film but one of the most enjoy­able entries in the entire series. A great deal of this can be attrib­uted to the fact that this film, to an extent hereto­fore unseen, acknowl­edges and embraces just how absurd this fran­chise is.

Repeat­ed ref­er­ences are made to the fact that no one ever seems to die in this uni­verse, that one-time pet­ty thieves are now inter­na­tion­al spy assets, and that the assem­bled fam­i­ly of blood rel­a­tives, friends, allies and for­mer ene­mies under the aegis of Dominic Toret­to (Vin Diesel) has grown to a pop­u­la­tion rough­ly equiv­a­lent to Luxembourg’s. Even when the plot engages in the usu­al ter­ror­is­tic may­hem and vehic­u­lar com­bat, the tone is con­sis­tent­ly goofy in its fore­ground­ing of lunacy.

Nowhere is this more appar­ent than in the per­for­mance of Jason Momoa as incom­ing vil­lain Dante Reyes, the son of the Brazil­ian drug lord killed at the end of Fast Five. Though Dante is will­ing to lev­el entire cities to exact revenge on Dom and his crew, Momoa plays the man like he’s the first Fast and Furi­ous vil­lain with advance knowl­edge that he’ll like­ly end up a mem­ber of La Famil­ia someday.

Dressed like a dis­graced Las Vegas magi­cian, Dante hoots and cack­les, laps­es into iron­ic fan­nish­ness in their face-to-face con­fronta­tions, and reg­u­lar­ly throws off the cadence of a line deliv­ery with a sud­den flour­ish of high-pitched mania that would make Nico­las Cage proud. Dante is such a hilar­i­ous­ly grotesque mani­ac that in one scene he even chats to two grue­some­ly butchered and re-stitched hench­man in what looks like a trib­ute to Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built.

Dante’s over-the-top inten­si­ty trans­lates to the action, which some­how keeps find­ing new and baf­fling ways to fight against for­mi­da­bly armed ene­mies with noth­ing more than cars. The relent­less pac­ing of the sequences here some­times threat­ens to lapse into pure incom­pre­hen­sion, but there’s just enough spa­tial coher­ence to thread togeth­er, say, Dom’s crew bounc­ing around a giant bomb rolling through Rome or a war of wills between a Dodge Charg­er and an attack helicopter.

Every action sequence starts at an out­landish lev­el and esca­lates rapid­ly, the deaf­en­ing roar of tur­bocharged engines drown­ing out the brain’s objec­tions to basic vio­la­tions of physics. As this unwieldy, baf­fling fran­chise enters into its final instal­ments, Fast X posi­tions it to go out on the goofi­est note possible.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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