In 2021, watching the scene in Fast 9 where Dom’s crew straps a rocket to a car and flies off to the International Space Station, everyone struggled to imagine where the franchise would go from there. How could they stretch the limits of the franchise beyond this? What is beyond space? Apparently, the answer is Jason Momoa. Introduced in Fast X as the new big bad, Momoa’s Dante Reyes is pulled from the peripheral shadows of Fast Five. He is the son of Hernan Reyes, the drug lord from whom Dom and his crew steal a vault full of money in the fifth film. Any franchise that starts running out of steam eventually tries rejuvenating itself by reconnecting with its roots. Franchises do this by either creating a prequel series (The Star Wars prequel series), exploring the younger years of the protagonist (X Men: First Class), or they will use time travel to take the characters directly to the first film as they did in Avengers: Endgame. Fast and Furious didn’t go through the trouble of employing such convoluted tropes. They just told you that the new bad guy was the son of the bad guy from the last time the franchise was any good (Fast Five), who you didn’t notice before because he was slightly out of the frame and was building up his rage all this while.
Director: Louis Leterrier
Cast: Vin Diesel, Jason Momoa, Michelle Rodriguez, John Cena, Alan Ritchson
When Momoa was introduced thusly in the trailer, many of us were understandably worried that the franchise was hitting a low that surpassed the critical mass of entertaining-bad and was going to be just bad. It was then a total surprise when the biggest positive of Fast X happened to be the extravagantly unhinged Jason Momoa. A myriad of things could have easily gone wrong with how Jason Momoa chose to play Dante. Momoa’s flamboyant, over-the-top Dante—who is reminiscent of the Joker from The Dark Knight at places—could have very easily fallen flat and become annoying and it nearly does at places, no thanks to the writing. However, it is Momoa’s earnestness to go all in with his performance that ultimately saves the day and renders some entertainment out of a rather flippantly written screenplay.
Fast X spends the major chunk of its beginning setting up the future of the franchise. The scenes spent with Dom’s son feel like they’re made to feed montages in future instalments. There are also other gratingly ostensible displays of franchise building like the scenes involving Brie Larson and Alan Ritchson. Vin Diesel’s emotional range in the film struggles to push past variations of mopey and dour. John Cena provides moments of respite with his energetic presence but the story trades his screen time for an—albeit overused—impactful character moment.
The supporting ensemble that includes Ludacris, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Tyrese Gibson, who provided levity and humour to the earlier instalments find themselves severely lacking in Fast X. The screen is drained of all energy and momentum whenever the story moves to them. Speaking of energy and momentum, the most divisive opinion about the film might probably spring out of the lifeline of the franchise— the action sequences. While the action feels like an echo of things we have seen earlier, the hand-to-hand combats manage to impress despite this shortcoming. The Fast and Furious franchise belongs to a class of blockbuster cinema, which engineers its action set pieces and then weaves a semblance of story around them. A significant portion of the franchise’s longevity could be attributed to the ingenious, larger-than-life action set pieces. While the scope and the scale of action scenes in Fast X live up to the standards of your typical global blockbuster, they lack the inventive spirit of “Children playing with life-sized toys” that the previous films had.
It was recently announced that the “final chapter” is being stretched into two more parts. Fast X’s lack of focus in storytelling and its obstinate refusal to let any of the characters evolve leaves us wondering if there is any more story for them to reveal by the end. However, this could be a strategic marketing move to rebrand the series with a new set of cast members. Does this mean Fast X is a bad film? Not by any stretch of a typical Fast and Furious runway. Hardly the worst offering of the franchise, Fast X still manages to entertain us despite its brash cinematic language, loud visuals, and glaring sound design. How it manages to do that demands its own separate analysis. Fast and Furious has been consistently entertaining us (in every sense of the word) long enough that it has become an inevitable part of our zeitgeist. We tolerate its shortcomings and still look forward to revisiting Dom and crew once in a while like we would a family member. I guess Dominic Toretto had a point when he brings up his “familia” in almost every one of these films. It is all about tolerating someone and caring about them despite their shortcomings all because they have been a part of your life for so long. The same goes for the Fast and Furious franchise.
#Embrace #absurdity #Cinema #express
