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LOS ANGELES, May 17 (UPI) -- Fast X, in theaters Friday, certainly struggles under the weight of its prior entries. Nevertheless, it's never boring and is best when it embraces the absurdity of its continually evolving premise. Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa) has been waiting 10 years to exact revenge on Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his gang of drivers, who robbed and killed Dante's villainous father in Fast Five. Why Dante waited a decade never comes up.
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Tying the new villain into a previous villain is a solid Fast and the Furious tradition. Dante's plan involves framing Dom's team for a bombing in Rome, thus splitting up Dom's family and making members vulnerable to Dante.
This leads to action set pieces that manage to escalate what has come before, although the strongest one remains the vault heist from Fast Five shown again. Dom's driving can magically shield pedestrians from flames by knocking down tarps to cover them.
Revisiting Rio de Janeiro gives Fast X the opportunity to stage action scenes in the same locations Fast Five used. Considering the series has traveled the world, returning to some pivotal settings inspires a clever redux.
The hoops through which Fast X jumps to avoid collateral damage are impressive and admirable, because murdering pedestrians would dampen the fun. There are a few unseen casualties in Rome and any of Dante's henchmen are fair game.
Momoa plays Dante as the villain whom even Fast and the Furious villains fear. He hijacks Cipher's (Charlize Theron) men and holds their families hostage to force them to work for him.
Reformed Furious 7 villain Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) gets a taste of Dante, too. Momoa literally dances around all the cliches of action movie villains.
Dante mocks Dom for taking the whole thing seriously, as if Dante is playing a video game with The Fast and the Furious characters as avatars.
Fast X definitely misses the quality of Chris Morgan's writing. He penned the third-through-eighth entry and spinoff Hobbs & Shaw, and had a way of making the dialogue between set pieces sound sincere.
Now, dialogue mythologizing Dom and the gang no longer sounds like words any human being would speak. Talking about family is important to The Fast and the Furious, but if the new writers don't believe it, they're just throwing words around.
One must admire the audacity of playing the "Swan Theme" from Swan Lake. That is the sort of highbrow meets lowbrow aesthetic that suits The Fast and the Furious, if only the film's script rose to the irreverence of new director Louis Leterrier's vision.
In Fast X, the plot turns a little too quickly with unnatural transitions from sentiment to danger. It requires a lot of shortcuts to get characters from place to place, though it does include the ever growing ensemble and finds room to introduce still more characters.
The most egregious is a scene in which Roma (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Ludacris) fight each other for no reason. It's not even part of an arc about them drifting apart, and the film's running time certainly could lose extraneous material.
Most of Fast X's new characters are related to previously established characters. It fits the franchise's theme of family, though it becomes glaring after a while that everyone had a daughter or sister.
Fast X makes a valiant attempt to address the theme of the franchise turning former lawmen into outlaws. Aimes (Alan Ritchson) comments on Dom turning Brian (Paul Walker's character), Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson's character) and Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell's character) into allies.
The script doesn't quite interrogate the concept about the switch to outlaws other than acknowledging someone in the franchise has also noticed.
It plays a bit better than F9 having the characters question their own immortality in an attempted meta reference that threatened even the franchise's absurd reality.
There is so much packed into Fast X that a viewer never waits for something cool to happen. It's less consistent than the best entries in the series, but still fun.
Fast X leaves a lot of threads open, but gets fans amped for Fast 11. Before it's over, Fast X introduces possibilities for the sequel the same way Fast & Furious teed up Fast Five and Furious 6 teased Furious 7, and it can't come soon enough.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001 a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
