The Doctor’s Diagnosis: F
I’ve seen worse movies than Fast X in the last couple of years. I’ve certainly seen movies that pissed me off more than Fast X did. Halloween Ends does exist, after all. But rarely do movies leave me feeling as empty inside as Fast X did. Not since Grown Ups 2 has a movie left me questioning where we, collectively as humanity, are heading. It’s not that this movie is bad. It’s not like I was expecting it to be good. It’s the transparent soullessness of it that really got to me. It feels so much like a product that it doesn’t feel human; it feels like the first movie written by chatgpt based on years of conversations in Honda racing forums. Watching Fast X is like staring into an abyss and sometimes, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back at you.
Describing the plot of a Fast & Furious movie is like providing play-by-play commentary on two children playing Chutes and Ladders, but here we go. As with the last three or four of these movies, the villain is someone that wants revenge on the “family” because of events in one of the previous movies. This time around, that villain is Jason Momoa as the son of the villain from Fast Five. I’m not going to waste more time summarizing this plot than the screenwriters spent writing it, so I’m just going to leave it at that: villain from the past wants revenge on the family and Vin Diesel needs to stop them. The Friday the 13th franchise was more imaginative than this.
Fast X is an agonizing 2 hours and 21 minutes long and ends on a cliffhanger to lead into Fast 11 (or Furious 11 or whatever the fuck) in 2025. A sane person might wonder how this could be justified by a series that abandoned any semblance of plot a decade or so ago. It’s a legitimate question. The answer is that these goddamn movies keep adding characters and won’t let them go. If a character dies, they will come back. If a villain is defeated, they will join the heroes in the next movie. The maddening adherence to this soap opera formula means that the series is increasingly stuffed with more characters than the plot could possibly use.
The result is a disjointed mess. It doesn’t feel like a script written by an adult, so much as the chronicles of a child that couldn’t decide which of their action figures to play with, so they are just going to play with all of them. The team is split up through various machinations of dumbfuckery and so we are left to follow different groups of them. Pretty much any of these subplots can be cut from the film without impacting the plot and I didn’t know that a plot could work that way. You’ve got Michelle Rodrigues and Charlize Theron teaming up to escape some sort of prison in Antarctica. You’ve got John Cena (returning as Dom’s actual brother that he didn’t mention for the first eight fucking movies) on a road trip protecting Dom’s kid. You’ve got Ludacris, Tyrese Gibson and Sung Kang doing, I don’t know, presumably something until they decide that they need to enlist the help of Jason Statham to help them with whatever the hell they have to do with this. This is all intercut with Vin Diesel traveling the world mumbling about family and being shocked that his past came back to haunt him for the hundredth frigging time.
Longtime series director Justin Lin left the project shortly into production over “creative differences,” which, for a series this creatively bankrupt, is code for “I don’t want to deal with this shit anymore.” I suspect that the increasing creative influence of Vin Diesel had something to do with his departure. At its core, despite the supporting cast of hundreds of dispensable characters, this feels like a Vin Diesel vanity project. One could argue that about all of these movies, but not since xXx: The Return of Xander Cage has a film felt so entirely dedicated to stroking this man’s ego by building up Dom as an almost superhuman man among men. The odd thing, though, is that the film has the opposite effect by showcasing just how limited he is as an actor. The man looks and sounds like he is sleeping through this film and that’s barely an exaggeration. His dramatic speeches (of which there are many) are all given with his head tilted back and his eyes half-closed, like the producers dragged him away from a nap to film the scene. It is painful, frigging painful, to watch him trying to act opposite Helen Mirren (forgot that she is in these? Yeah, me too.).
As for the new additions, I don’t know what Jason Momoa is doing. He’s over the top as hell and is trying to do some sort of feminine Bond villain shtick. A lot of people have found this entertaining, but I just found it grating. Brie Larson is in this for no reason except as replacement for Kurt Russel, who was presumably either busy or finally got enough paychecks to stop doing this bullshit. There is no reason for her or her character to be in this movie and, for someone that was once a such promising young actress, she seems to have reduced her performances to staring wide-eyed at everything.
I could go on about how oddly synthetic the entire film feels. About how it’s often obvious that the actors were never actually on the set together. Or how some locations are just green-screened into the film. Or how one actress has, for her second straight movie, just green-screened in a painfully fake cameo appearance. But, really, all of the technical and creative deficiencies added up don’t convey the sum of their parts. Fast X is a hollow, empty, cynical product that counts as filmmaking in the sense that scribbling a stick figure on a piece of toilet paper would qualify one as an artist.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_X#/media/File:Fast_X_poster.jpg
