Yowza. What a stinkburger with extra turd fries this franchise has become.
BQB here with a review of this drek.
Believe it or not, 3.5 readers, but there was a time when for me, a new Fast and Furious movie was the action flick gold standard. I went it believing I would have a great time watching the wacky car stunt mayhem unfold across the big screen and ever since 2011, when the franchise reinvented itself, the flicks never failed to disappoint.
The first, which came out in what, 2001? It was new and original. It was quite toned down compared to today’s installments, but no one had really ever made a good movie about underworld street racing before. Flicks 2 and 3 were so-so, though 2 didn’t have Vin Diesel and 3 didn’t have Vin or Paul Walker. 4 tried to get the band back together but was kinda meh.
But then low and behold, 5, released in 2011, brought us to Rio, where the crew steals a villain’s ill-gotten loot safe by hooking it up to cables and dragging it down the highway whilst attached to twin Dodge Chargers with the Rock chasing them and boy howdy, did that ever signal that the series finally found a way to kick ass.
The next few flicks, all the way through 8, upped the game. They were always over the top and at times, quite stupid if you bothered to think about the physics and logistics of all the out of control stunts, but this new world of street racers and car crooks turned into a multi-ethnic, diverse group of hip hop spies working for the government to take down villains whilst driving awesome cars really, really fast was a lot of fun.
I was disappointed with Fast 9. Jason Statham and the Rock weren’t in it and their absence was felt, such that I realized they had been carrying the flicks on the backs for quite some time. Also, the metoo era had begun, so the movie was completely devoid of the scantily clad female tushies shaking around at underground street racing competitions, the loss of which were a blow to me, because where else will I get to see underground street racing tushies?
Ah, but then the Fast X trailers came out this year and they looked good. I was prepared to forgive the franchise for one stinker. Jason Statham was even featured in the trailers and he’s a personal fave.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. This one cranks up the stink to eleven, so let’s dive in and get this over with.
The film takes us back to Fast Five, the movie that took the franchise off life support and made it awesome. As it turns out, the Brazilian villain bested by Dom and company had a heretofore unbeknownst to us son played by Jason Mamoa, who at the time was really pissed off at the fast gang for his father’s death and vows revenge.
Why the revenge plot took 12 years from 2011 to 2023? Your guess is as good as mine but at any rate, son comes back to destroy and humiliate the fast crew at every turn. To his credit, Mamoa is the one saving grace of this film. We’re used to him being quiet, stoic and angry in other movies but here, he reminds me of the Joker, but a twisted version of the criminal clown who pumps iron and pops steroids. Constantly laughing, prancing about, cracking funny jokes and one liners – Mamoa chews scenery with glee and it was fun to watch him nail a completely different style than what he is used to.
But it’s not enough to bring the film from stink to pink.
Cameos abound. I noticed this trend in 9 and it continues in 10, I think largely because the loss of Statham and The Rock left a void they’re trying to desperately fill. Sometimes these cameos come in the form of the return of long lost characters who played minor roles in the films like, over ten years ago, and I supposed if we were true fans we’d remember them but we don’t. Helen Mirren, who played Jason Statham’s mother, stops by though if she hadn’t, you wouldn’t have missed it.
Other times, there are new characters played by famous celebrities, often playing relatives of characters once played by celebrities who apparently now want no part of this bloated behemoth. Remember Mr. Nobody? Kurt Russell’s fun spy who recruits the fast gang to work for the government? He’s been replaced by his daughter, Miss Nobody, played by Brie Larson.
Remember Dom’s Brazilian girlfriend Elena who died a few flicks back? She’s got a younger sister now, played by Daniella Melchior. I’ll give the film some credit in that Daniella looks like she could be related to Elena while Brie doesn’t look like she could be related to Kurt Russell.
BTW, in case you forgot Elena, Dom longingly glares at a photo of her on the wall, a photo that looks like it is a publicity shot of Elena in full police gear taken to promo one of the past movies. Dom misses Paul Walker too and has several similar, well-produced publicity style photos of Paul hanging around his shop. I miss Paul Walker too, one of many reasons being that if he were alive, I doubt he would have allowed this franchise to become so stinky.
Rita Moreno, really for no reason, stops by one of those oft parodied “It’s all about family” barbecues as a long lost Toretto auntie, to give the gang a pep talk. Like several other cameo characters, if you’d gone to the bathroom during her scene, you wouldn’t have missed.
Really, from what I gather, Universal must have decided to go with a strategy where they skimped on the writers and just hired a bunch of famous folk to stop by and have unnecessary chats with Dom every five minutes.
There are two other tropes abundant in this flick that I didn’t care for:
#1 – Like that crappy Matrix sequel that everyone hated, this film is kind of meta and refers to itself and past sequels often, doing highlight reels of past films. Done well, flashbacks are fine but there’s a lot of them such that the movie becomes a promo for itself.
#2 – The gang splits up and goes on a lot of side-quests. Perhaps you noticed the fan backlash for the recent season 3 of the Mandalorian, where there is an incoherent plot, where either Mando or friends of Mando go on side-quests all eventually leading up to a weak story line. (Think of a video game where the end goal is to defeat a villain, but first you must go on a mission to find a weapon to defeat the villain, then you must go on another side quest to find a friend who will help you defeat the villain and so on.)
Here, the Fast gang goes on a number of side-quests. Letty and Cypher get whisked away to Antarctica, prisoners of Nobody’s elusive “agency.” Ramsey, Roman, Tej and Han go to London on a mission to buy gear the gang needs. John Cena’s Uncle Jake goes on a superfluous road trip with “Little B,” Dom’s son named after Brian. Ultimately, if you’re a cynic, you begin to wonder if the point of all these side missions isn’t just a ploy to make production easier and cheaper in that the cast can come to set for less time in smaller numbers and no one is paying for, say, Dwayne the Rock Johnson to hang out on set all day for weeks at a time.
I feared that streaming would turn movies cheap and sucky and my fears are coming true.
Was Statham in this? Yes, for absolutely no reason and for all of five minutes, despite what the trailers show. Spoiler alert: the Rock is in it too for a quick post credits scene. Big cameos. Big stars stop by quickly. It looks like the studio can’t come up with a script good enough to spend the money needed for big celebs to come to the set and be involved for more than five minutes.
STATUS: Borderline shelf-worthy, but it goes way, way back on the shelf so I won’t be embarrassed by it, and it only gets a spot on the shelf due to Mamoa’s fun performance. This film is billed as the first of a franchise concluding trio and it ends on a cliffhanger which frankly felt less like a cliffhanger and more like the chimps on typewriters they hired to be writers decided the movie got too long and it needs to be over now so we’ll end it here and pick it up in the next trainwreck.
I say this with love because I loved films 5-8. This can get better if they really put the effort in. Or then again, maybe it can’t. Movies are made by and geared toward the young and this generation doesn’t care for machismo or fast cars or scantily clad women unless it’s the dudes dressing like scantily clad women, so the glory days of the Fast and Furious franchise may be over.
But if they rub some brain cells together, I think they could come up with some great scripts and even they can’t get big stars like the Rock or Statham to be in it for more than five minutes, then they could go in a new direction with entirely new characters, that’s fine but they have to bring the story. I know the past stories were ridiculous too, but they were still better stories.
One more sidenote – the franchise may be suffering from the fact that the car stunts have become played out. We’ve seen cars jump out of planes. We’ve seen cars ransack big cities. We’ve seen cars flip around on cables. We’ve seen cars heist big things of value and cars narrowly jump across great divides. We’ve even seen cars fly into outer space. Is there something new for the cars to do? I don’t know but come on Hollywood, you can think of something.
Bookshelf Battle 