Movie Review: Fast X (2023)

[Dave Gray]

Fast X (2023)

Premise: A madman with means has been quietly preparing to enact revenge on Dom for his role in his father's death.

Rating: Fast 4-6 levels of crazy, but with a cast of everyone

You have to get past the Fast series being about cars and racing.  That is dead and has been since Tokyo Drift.  Now, these are super-hero special agents with soap opera plots: coming back from the dead, amnesia, secret family members, etc.  However, even within that framework, there are levels of absurdity: zombie cars, cars to the moon, cars swinging like Tarzan on vines, etc.  Fast X is crazy, no doubt, but it dials it back a bit from what we saw in the most recent entries.

Fast X plays almost as a direct sequel to Fast Five, using the bank vault heist as the impetus to propel this movie's action.  Sequences of that film are retold from different perspectives, both to remind audiences of what occurred, but also to let us know about character involvements of which we were unaware at the time.  It also allows some room for Paul Walker to get some facetime, using what I assume was cutting room floor footage.

In the present day, Jason Momoa is the antagonist and he's not what you expect.  He's probably the most interesting villain so far in the series.  He's not a muscle-head, he's not a genius, he's not out for money.  Momoa plays this like Heath Ledger's joker: a somewhat gay-coded agent of chaos.  He's having comic-book levels of silly fun, which is a good change of pace and makes his scenes interesting.

The action is fine.  It's still too CG heavy for me.  The series did have some good practical work around Fast Five but a lot of the action feels weightless at this point.  It's not quite as bad as the previous few films, but most of the action doesn't feel grounded.

What this film leans on is the soap-opera stuff -- everyone is in this movie.  Most characters don't have a lot of screen time, because there's just so many people, but in every scene, someone new is popping up from earlier in the series.  ...not to mention several new characters as well.  It's A LOT.  The script is convoluted and it's kind of amazing that they found a way to incorporate as many people as they did.  It's like The Avengers of the Fast Series.

There are a few twists and meta-references that I think are pretty good, especially because (as I argue in other threads) these movies know they are stupid.  They know that the plots don't make sense, so characters explain it away in one line of dialogue with a figurative wink at the camera.  Just like Ludacris went from a Jet Ski Race organizer to a world-class hacker from one movie to the next with the line "I had a life before you knew me, Brian", there are similar levels of character evolving absurdity here.  But they know what they're doing.

What you might not know is that Fast X isn't a complete movie.  It's clearly part 1 of a multi-part story.  There is no ending.  There is no climax.  There is no resolution.  The movie ends in the middle and there's more story ahead.

Fast X is mid-tier Fast and Furious.  It's on the better end of the ridiculous entries, but is still one of the ridiculous entries.