Fast X review: The dumbest Fast & Furious entry yet

Fast X Review

What is a movie? With the rise of AI-generated fake trailers and the video game industry’s clear dominance over the pop culture landscape, we may have finally arrived at the first artificial movie with Fast X, a deliriously dumb action blockbuster that feels completely untouched by human hands in any way.

With Fast 5, the franchise about muscleheads who like to drive fast cars essentially turned into a globe-trotting spy series, with wild action set-pieces and over-the-top villains that would give even the most outrageous members of James Bond’s rogues’ gallery pause. Even as the films became increasingly more complex and ridiculous, the heart of the franchise was always the relationship between Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Conner (the late Paul Walker) and the rest of their extended #family including Dom’s partner Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and the comic duo of Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Ludacris).

Considering Roman and Tej flew a car into space in Fast 9, it’s hard to up the stakes much with this latest entry, though the filmmakers certainly try. Director Louis Leterrier (The Transporter), working from a script by Dan Mazeau, Gary Scott Thompson, and the film’s one-time director Justin Lin, has essentially turned the franchise into a cartoon, with as much believability as the average Looney Tunes short. While these films left common sense in the dust quite a few entries ago, Fast X is fully bonkers.

Enter Momoa

Jason Momoa (Aquaman) joins the series as Dante, the son of the drug kingpin Hernan Reyes who was killed when Dominic and the crew worked for him on a heist in Brazil. Dante embarks on a lunatic revenge spree against the crew, including kidnapping Dominic’s young son, which brings the family together to help take him out.

Momoa makes the most of this role by seemingly channeling the energy (and style) of the Chiquita Banana Lady. Flamboyant and effeminate, his unhinged performance stands in stark contrast to Vin Diesel’s monotone gruffness and brings a new and very strange chemistry to the franchise.

Vin Diesel Wants to Make You Cry

Diesel is tasked with doing a lot in this film, which is one of its principal downfalls. Amidst all the offscreen drama surrounding the film (original director and co-writer Justin Lim suddenly left the project mid-shooting), Fast X centers on Dom as the emotional core of the film, and Diesel is decidedly not up for the task. We haven’t seen a leading-man action hero this stone-faced since the height of the ’80s — scenes that require Diesel to actually emote are full-on laughable, and not in a fun, self-referential way.

Terrible acting in a Fast & Furious movie can be excused if the action delivers, but Fast X even fails on that front. The set pieces are as elaborate as ever (including a massive bomb pinballing through downtown Rome), but the sequences all look about as convincing as PlayStation 3 cut-scenes. You never get the sense that these cars (and actors) are anywhere other than in front of a green screen, which drains the long sequences of any thrills. Entire chase scenes seem to be completely CGI-driven; if any real stunt drivers worked on this it’s a shame, since the scenes are enhanced so heavily that it removes any sense of excitement from the finished product.

Recommended for: those who need A/C

At nearly two and a half hours, Fast X is a long slog that seemingly gets dumber by the minute. It looks terrible, the plot is nonsensical and feels built just to bring back nearly every character from the franchise for some reason, and even the car chases fall flat. Worst of all, the film suddenly ends after a laughably silly finale at the Hoover Dam, so we’ll have to have to wait until Fast 11 to even wrap up this story. You’re better off doing doughnuts in the theatre parking lot than wasting your time with this.

Fast X is in theatres now.