142 min | PG-13 | May 19, 2023 | Universal Pictures
A vengeful son spends years plotting to destroy Dominic Toretto and everyone he calls family. Jason Momoa arrives with a smile, a paintbrush, and a plan built on spite, and he is having a blast. The movie around him is running on fumes.
Dominic Toretto leads a crew of street racers turned global operatives. The franchise built its identity on cars, heists, and the word family repeated until it loses meaning. Fast X introduces Dante Reyes, the son of a drug lord Dom destroyed years ago. Dante wants revenge, and he wants it to hurt before it kills. The film is about a series that has launched its characters across the globe and now strains to find a threat that still registers as personal.
Vin Diesel plays Dominic Toretto with the same granite stillness he has used for a decade, growling about family and staring into the middle distance. Jason Momoa plays Dante Reyes as a giggling, preening sadist who paints his victims and talks to corpses. Momoa treats the role as a costume party and walks off with every scene he enters. Michelle Rodriguez gives Letty a hard edge in a subplot that strands her far from the main chase, and John Cena plays Jakob Toretto as a reformed brother saddled with babysitting duty. Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris play Roman and Tej as comic relief that lands less often than it once did. Nathalie Emmanuel gives Ramsey the closest thing to a human reaction in the whole cast.
Louis Leterrier takes over the director’s chair and stages the action with volume rather than clarity. Cars drop from cargo planes and a burning bomb rolls through the streets of Rome while the camera rarely holds long enough to register weight or distance. The script by Dan Mazeau and Justin Lin splits the crew into separate threads scattered across multiple cities and shuttles between them at a pace that flattens each one. The editing cuts so fast during the major set pieces that the geography dissolves into a blur of metal and fire. The score pounds under every frame to insist that what is happening matters.
Fast X ends on a cliffhanger and a promise of more, which is the franchise admitting it now exists to perpetuate itself. The pleasure here is Momoa, and the film comes alive whenever he is on screen and goes inert whenever he is not. Everything around him is a machine running familiar parts. The series once knew how to make a quarter-mile feel like everything. Now it drops cars out of the sky and asks the audience to feel the same stakes with nothing underneath them.