Chris "Ludacris" Bridges

Review of “Fast X”

Dedication to one’s family is often played for laughs in movies and TV shows. The father intent on being at every little league and peewee football game is often seen as weak and pathetic by unmarried or childless characters. Moms volunteering for various committees at a child’s school are sometimes portrayed as having an ulterior motive, such as trying to impress the wealthy parent or as a bid for power within the clique of the PTA. This goes both ways as those parents completely uninvolved in their kid’s activities frequently are viewed as slackers and a point of comedic derision. It seems that there’s no pleasing everyone, no matter how involved or hands off parents are. Family has been a big motivator in the various storylines in “The Fast and the Furious” films, except the first three. In the original, Dom says he lives life a quarter mile at a time and when he’s behind the wheel, there’s nothing else, not even family. Since the first film in 2001, the franchise has evolved from a movie about street racers making their money by stealing truckloads of home electronics to a globetrotting group of superspies saving the world in sequel after sequel. At the heart of the later films was Dominic Toretto’s mantra about it all being about family. If you attack one member of his crew, you are attacking his family. Now, in “Fast X,” Dom’s family is facing a threat to every member from a villain that’s lost his family at the hands of Dom and his crew. Thankfully, all the cars are still running and full of nitrous oxide tanks.

Dominic “Dom” Toretto (Vin Diesel) is surrounded by all the ones he loves, including Abuelita Toretto (Rita Moreno), for one of the famous family cookouts. After they eat, Roman, Tej and Ramsey (Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris and Nathalie Emmanuel) are headed to Rome on a mission for The Agency to steal a computer chip. Dom is sitting this one out to stay home with Letty and Brian (Michelle Rogriguez and Leo Abelo Perry) and Roman is in charge, much to Tej’ chagrin. That night, Cipher (Charlize Theron) shows up bleeding at Dom’s door. She tells him how Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa), son of Brazilian drug kingpin Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), killed during one of Dom’s missions 10 years ago, is looking to exact revenge on Dom by killing everyone in his family/crew then killing Dom. Agents of The Agency show up to take Cipher to one of their black site prisons. The next day, Little Nobody (Scott Eastwood) arrives to tell Dom and Letty about Cipher’s imprisonment. Dom asks about Roman and his crew as he can’t get in touch with them. Little Nobody doesn’t know what Dom is talking about as they have no operations in Rome. Dom realizes they’ve been sent on a fake mission by Dante and The Agency gets Dom and Letty to Rome to try and save them. Dante takes over the truck carrying not a computer chip, but a massive bomb, drives the vehicle remotely, and releases the bomb trying to blow up the Vatican and frame Dom and his people as terrorists. Dom diverts the bomb into a river, but it still causes death and destruction, putting all of them on the Most Wanted list worldwide. Letty is captured and sent to the same black site prison as Cipher. Dom, Roman, Tej and Ramsey escape, but Dom is separated from the others and Dante has hacked into their bank accounts, leaving them broke. Mr. Nobody’s daughter Tess (Brie Larson), who also works for The Agency, visits new Agency head Aimes (Alan Ritchson) to argue on Dom and his crew’s behalf, but Aimes is unmoved and puts the full force of The Agency into finding them all. Tess quietly vows to help them on her own. Dom has few options and a scattered crew, and Dante has evil plans for all of Dom’s family.

No one has ever accused the “Fast and Furious” films of being too subtle or logical. The soundtrack is loud, filled with thumping hip hop beats, explosions, screeching tires and the roar of supercharged, NOS-boosted engines. The plot is convoluted, requiring insertion of a new character or two into 2011’s “Fast Five” and the McGuffin of “Furious Seven” from 2015. The laws of physics and gravity are broken regularly, cars and their drivers survive massive crashes and explosions to drive off to the next action scene. Characters make perplexing decisions that puts everyone at risk and Dom still says it’s all for “family.” We’ve seen this all before, perhaps done better in “Fast Seven” with the emotional farewell to the late Paul Walker, but what cannot be said about “Fast X” is it’s boring.

The plot races along, violating the usual filmic speed limit that is in place, so the audience doesn’t get confused about where characters are and what they are doing. In the “Fast and Furious” films, the more audience confusion the better, so no one notices how little sense this all makes. Both the good guys and bad guys predict exactly what the other is going to do and plan accordingly. Fortunately, law enforcement is clueless and always seems to be caught off guard, otherwise none of these films would be more than 10 minutes long.

Director Louis Leterrier just barely manages to keep all the plates spinning while also juggling a dozen balls as the film abruptly cuts from one European locale to a shot of the Christ The Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro to Los Angeles to the middle of nowhere, and another of our scattered Toretto family.

No one goes to a “Fast and Furious” film expecting deep introspection and serious stories. We want to see the action, the races, the cars, the beautiful women, the fights, the exotic locales and the scenery chewing villain. “Fast X” has all that in spades, especially Jason Momoa as Dante Reyes. Momoa is clearly having a great time hamming it up as the big bad that is wrapping up the franchise. Dante is the “Fast” universe version of Batman’s Joker. He’s flamboyant, flippant, brilliant, and effortlessly homicidal. Dante dresses and paints his fingernails in a color that compliments his car. He’s as funny as he is dangerous. Momoa is the best addition to the franchise possibly ever.

The rest of the actors all take a back seat to the action (and Momoa), doing what they can with what they are given in the script written by Dan Mazeau and Justin Lin. Vin Diesel does appear to squeeze out a tear during a scene about midway through the film in a scene set in Rio. The emotion is fleeting, and the rest of his performance is vintage Diesel: Gravelly growling dialog with the occasional barked commands into a walkie-talkie. Charlize Theron is again under-utilized. Of course, with a cast this size, 19 actors credited on the film’s Wikipedia page not counting cameos, even Academy Award winners are going to have a minimal presence to allow the main villain and the long-time stars to shine. I enjoyed Brie Larson’s Tess (Larson is also an Academy Award winner) but found her performance very similar in tone to her recent Nissan car ads. Tyrese Gibson is put slightly more out front leading the Italian mission despite it being a red herring and takes on some responsibility for its failure. He’s also still the film’s comic relief so some things never change. Perhaps the producers are looking at making Roman the next team leader when Dom, Letty and some of the others join Brian in retirement. There’s nothing movie studios love more than beating the same dead money horse if they think there’s another billion dollars to be made.

“Fast X” is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, language and some suggestive material. The car crashes are too numerous to count as some are recycled from “Fast Five” as well as a brief montage of other films in the series. There are countless fist fights, shootings and stabbings. There is one impalement. None of the violence is as bloody as it should be to keep the rating where it is. The suggestive comment is a brief scene of Dom and Letty apparently preparing to have sex, along with the obligatory close ups of women’s behinds at the street race. Foul language is scattered and relatively mild.

“Fast X’ is the very definition of a summer popcorn film. While it is technically not summer, it is late May and movie studios are beginning to return to their pre-pandemic release habits. Big, loud, bombastic crowd pleasers starting in May and running until Labor Day. “Fast X” continues the series trend of ignoring reality and physics to create giant action set pieces and cars that survive practically everything, including giant bomb blasts, driving through concrete walls, dropping out the back of a flying airplane and zooming down the face of a massive dam. Is it a good movie? No. Is it a fun movie filled with humor, action, likable characters and a villain you almost want to win? Yes. Like I said it’s the definition of a summer popcorn movie.

“Fast X” gets four stars out of five.

Follow, rate, review and download the podcast Comedy Tragedy Marriage. Each week my wife and I take turns picking a movie to watch, watch it together, then discuss why we love it, like it or loath it. Find it wherever you get podcasts.

Follow me on Twitter @moviemanstan.

Review of “F9: The Fast Saga”

Ah, summer! That time of year when thoughts turn to enjoying bright, hot sunny days by the pool, at the lakeshore and on the beach. That’s what most people look forward to, anyway. On the other hand, I see summer as the time when movie studios bring out their big guns, their heavy hitters, the releases that are guaranteed (they hope) to bring audiences out en masse to watch the latest action, comedy, sci-fi blockbuster. Of course, last summer was a washout with a deadly virus ripping through the population and spread via airborne transmission. Being closed up in a large room with recirculated air was a perfect contamination storm, leading all the major movies to be delayed or receiving simultaneous limited theatrical releases and streaming platform premieres. Despite the vaccines and lessening of infections, hospitalizations and deaths, Warner Brothers is still doing both theaters and their HBO Max streaming service through the end of the year. Assuming more people become fully vaccinated (get you shot/shots if you can) and a variant doesn’t become immune to the vaccine, maybe next summer will be more normal than this one. However, the one thing many people were counting on has finally occurred: The latest “Fast and Furious” movie has opened. Is “F9: The Fast Sage” worth heading out in the hot summer sun for?

Dom and Letty (Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez) and Dom’s son Brian are living a quiet life on a farm when they received an unannounced visit from Tej, Roman and Ramsey (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Tyrese Gibson and Nathalie Emmanuel). The trio is going on a mission to Montecito to recover their covert boss, Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) whose plane was downed in the jungle by rogue agents as he transported a captured Cipher (Charlize Theron) to prison. Also, on board the plane is part of a gadget named Ares that could put any device that runs on code under a hacker’s control. During the operation, the team is attacked by a paramilitary outfit led by Dom’s younger brother Jakob (John Cena). Jakob and Dom have bad blood going back decades to the death of their father Jack (J.D. Pardo) during a stock car racing crash. Jakob is working for Otto (Ersted Rasmussen), the son of a European leader and billionaire, and Cipher is helping them against her will. Cipher finds the location of the other half of Ares, but it still needs a key to unlock and use it. That key is under the protection of Han Lue (Sung Kang) who was thought to have died in a car crash and explosion years earlier caused by Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham). Dom and the crew must stop Jakob from getting his hands on the other half of Ares and the key and stop him from using the device to take over every nuclear arsenal in the world.

That is one fully packed plot recap, and it doesn’t cover half of it. There’s lots more family intrigue, spy shenanigans and electromagnetic-augmented car chases (yeah, I said “electromagnetic-augmented”) I didn’t have room for. It’s a jammed full action movie that’s in a big hurry to get somewhere but doesn’t. It’s a two-hour, 25-minute preview for “F10, Part 1” and “F10, Part 2.” It wants the audience to buy in fully with the idea of Dom’s extended family working together as a team and how they are all willing to sacrifice the individual to save the whole. In “Star Trek” terms, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…or the one.” While there are a few examples of that sacrifice, it doesn’t have the emotional punch director Justin Lin was probably going for. The attempts to make us feel fear and pity for the crew are always short-circuited by the knowledge that none of the central team is in any real danger of dying. No matter how bad the car crash, plane crash, explosion, fight, building collapse, fist fight or whatever, no one is in real peril. Their contracts won’t allow it.

Listening to Vin Diesel growl out his dialog is becoming a chore. While Diesel says very little, letting his driving and fighting do most of the talking, when he does speak, it’s barely understandable. What he’s given to say may be as much to blame with hollow sentiments about family and loyalty. His emotional range isn’t much better. Running the gamut of mildly bemused to mildly annoyed with occasional peaks of rage, Diesel has about as much acting chops as, well, a lamb chop. However, one must give Diesel credit for stumbling into a role that matches his abilities. Much like the Kardashians are famous for being famous (and the occasional “leaked” porn tape), Diesel has made a fortune from the “Fast” franchise and become a producer on many of his own films, as well as the voice of the Marvel character Groot. We should all be so lucky as to find what we are marginally average at and from it make a fortune.

The biggest thing holding back the “Fast” franchise (aside from logic) is a character that can’t be there but is always hovering in the background: the late Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner. Walker’s death in 2013 during a break in the filming of “Furious 7” led to a delay in the that film, rewrites and using old footage and Walker’s two brothers with digital effects to finish his shots. Walker’s Brian is mentioned several times in “F9” with a hint he might show up at a family gathering. It might be best for this franchise if Brian is allowed to die, as the frequent mentions and fake outs he’s going to appear is only a cheap ploy to play on the sympathy of the audience and remind everyone that Walker is gone. Enough is enough. Fold the character’s death into the plot (Cipher tracked him down and had him killed or something like that) and let the audience and the franchise say goodbye in a way that’s meaningful.

There’s plenty more I could complain about: The way the magnet weapon attracts and repels items after the vehicle in which it’s mounted has already passed, the explosions of mines and missiles that cause no damage to the vehicles they explode under, the sheer luck of a rope or wire from an old bridge catching a car’s wheel just right, not ripping out the suspension and the rope not breaking, and don’t get me started on a car in space. Since “Fast 5,” logic and physics hasn’t been very important to the makers of the franchise. Normally, I wouldn’t care as much, but there’s something about the shallowness and cynical feeling of this film that makes its logical flaws stick out that much more. This may be one of the “Fast” franchises most ambitious films, but it’s also one of its most bland.

“F9: The Fast Saga” is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, and language. There are numerous scenes of shooting where no one gets hit except the bad guys. Crowds of bystanders are often in the line of fire during these shootouts, but we never see if anyone is injured or killed. There are numerous fist fights, some occurring on or in moving vehicles. Some characters are hit by cars, but we never see the aftermath. There is a race car crash that results in a fire and presumed death. Foul language is scattered and mild.

Despite my criticisms of “F9,” I don’t hate the film. It lacks the fire and excitement of previous episodes that all the car stunts in the universe can’t generate. While it is doing big business at the box office, both in its opening weekend in North America and at theaters around the world, audiences may be flocking to see it out of a desire for normalcy and a return to the simple pleasures of life taken away by coronavirus. I cannot blame them, and I feel the same way, but I believe “F9” is a lesser chapter in “The Fast Saga,” and I hope the final two films in the main franchise can return the magic that’s missing.

“F9: The Fast Saga” gets 2.5 stars out of five.

Subscribe, rate, review and download my podcast Comedy Tragedy Marriage. Each week my wife and I take turns picking a movie to watch, watch it together, then discuss why we love it, like it or hate it. Find it wherever you get podcasts.

Follow me on Twitter @moviemanstan.