Fast X (2023)

​PG-13 for swearing and clothed butts.  Honestly, if I wanted to rename The Fast and the Furious franchise to match what is expected, that's a pretty good title.  There's a lot of violence, but the violence is so absurd that you almost can't comprehend it as violence.  Like, if I had to make a body count, it would be a mass tragedy.  But the deaths are so abstract because they're all faceless goons.  There is one death of a character that we know, but even that is pretty absurd.  There's some marital implied sexuality, but that's me fishing a bit.  PG-13.

DIRECTORS: Louis Leterrier and Justin Lin

Listen, I'm just listening to what IMDB tells me about directors, okay?  I'm pretty sure the credit goes to Leterrier, not Lin.  But I know nothing about what happened behind the scenes of this movie.  If you were wondering, "Hey, Mr. H, why are you knocking out Fast X when there are so many good movies out there?"  Well, I mean, I shouldn't feel the need to justify what I'm constantly doing.  But I get it.  Really, I saw that it was disappearing from Peacock and I really didn't want to have to pay to watch this down the line. I mean, it probably would have shown up on another streaming service, heck, almost immediately after being taken down.  But I've now seen every Fast and the Furious movie and why wouldn't I just maintain my status with this franchise?

The only things that I knew going into this was that it was the first part of a potential trilogy and that it got absymal reviews.  That didn't make me exactly inspire me to get out there and see the movie.  The more I think about it, I don't think I've seen any of these movies in the theater.  Part of me thinks that I'm too good for these movies.  I mean, if I criticize all of these movies, I have to criticize myself.  Part of me watched these movies ironically until I didn't.  I wish I could say that I'm a complete convert to these films, but the reality is that I tolerate these movies at best.  There's a bell curve to the quality of these movies.  They start off phenomenally bad, bordering the unwatchable.  Then, in the middle, they hit this sweet spot of understanding that these are just superhero movies with cars.  But a while after that, there was this need to continue to up the ante.  The problem is, those movies were absolutely absurd.  There was a heavy tipping point, honestly bottoming out at F9.  F9 was unwatchable. It was so so so so much that I couldn't even pretend that there were any stakes.  We knew that Dom and his crew were going to beat Jakob.  

To some that's fine, that feeling of comfort.  But films about meeting expectations and defying expectations.  Keep that in mind, but there is such a thing of going too far in either direction.  F9, when it decided to up the ante with the physics and the car crashes, in an attempt to do what no movie had done before, did exactly what The Fast and the Furious always does.  That's not good.  It made everything plastic.  It became toys hitting each other.  I wanted to invest in Dom and his relationship with his lost brother.  I did.  I had given these movies more than a fair shake, and that means investment.  I thought I might never really like these movies again.  

That brings us to Fast X.  I stress: people hated this movie.  I mean, they thought it was absolute trash.  Everything I heard about it was that it was a low point with the exception of Jason Momoa's Dante.  (I have thoughts.  I hope that I remember to write about these thoughts or else why am I even trying?) I think that was the best thing I could have heard about Fast X because I had strapped in.  (Henson's gag about the movie?  It absoultely should have been called Fast X: Your Seatbelts.) I honestly thought that this movie was going to be the worst.  I mean. I have to make it really clear.  This is not a great movie.  But I will give it the laudy praise of "It's fine."  Heck, I'll go as far as to say that it's darned fun.  The crazy part of the whole "It's fun" bit comes from a trope that this movie needed.

Momoa's Dante is a specific archetype.  He's the unstoppable force.  They said the line, guys.  "Dante's always been ten steps ahead of us."  That's his entire schtick.  He's the guy you shouldn't be able to punch your way out of.  He's the guy who is only going to be beaten through smarts and sacrifice. Don't get me wrong.  There's a very real chance that Dom's going to do the same thing he does for all of the movies with this movie.  I have just learned to accept that Dom saying something about family and hitting the nitrous button at just the right time.  But there's a chance that something real might happen.  Dom might sacrifice himself for his family.  There's a real chance of that. That's something though.  It's almost the healthiest in the world for this franchise to say that it's closing up shop.  (I mean, they're closing up shop until it's time to reopen the shop.  We all get that, right?) With the closing of a franchise, we have to expect that something might happen that might stick.

Because these movies really play it fast and loose with death.  Say what you will about superhero death, the superhero films have actually been pretty good with keeping characters dead.  I say that now, but it seems to be the truth right now.  The Fast and the Furious?  No one dies in these movies.  Honestly, that Gal Godot reveal on a submarine?  I wasn't sure if she was someone who was supposed to be dead or not.  I actually should probably Google that, but I don't know if I care about.  Ending a franchise might be the only way to make sure that people are actually dead.  Because the stuff that these people do should absolutely have killed them a thousand times over.  I mean, there's no scenario where a character could just die from a regular stunt at this point.  It has to be in slow motion with an epic score over it.  It actually has to be a choice.  

Jakob's death was a huge ask of us, by the way.  Jakob was the bad guy in the previous movie.  I'm glad that Fast X is the one entry in the franchise to actually address that the villain in the previous movie somehow becomes a member of the family, despite the atrocities of the previous entries.  And everyone came out of the woodworks to be here for the finale.  Now, apparently since F9, Jakob became not only a member of the family, but he became the most important member of the family?  He gets a pretty sweet subplot in Fast X, being in charge of Little B.  (Oh snap, if Dante's going after Dom's family with God's Eye, are we just ignoring the fact that Brian is out there, retired?  He would be the most painful sacrifice and there's really no appropriate way for the franchise to make that choice.) But when Jakob sacrifices himself for Little B (a name that I loathe typing), we have this disconnect between head and heart.  In my heart, I'm very sad.  I like John Cena and he's given some great bits to redeem his character in this one.  (You know, besides letting a child murder some folks.) His death hits all of the sad beats.  But my head is like, "That dude was a monster in the previous movie and he's not acting anything like he did in the previous movie."  It was almost a  death for the John Cena in all of those family friendly comedies that he has been in over the death of Uncle Jakob. 

Jason Momoa is going to be the guy who makes this movie memorable, right?  That's the consensus and I get it.  He's charismatic in this movie.  Sure, he's really channeling Heath Ledger's Joker here.  This entire movie really wants to be The Dark Knight, by the way.  But I'm moving past that.  There's a couple of things that raise yellow flags about the character. The opening scene, establishing that Dante is the child of the guy who was killed in Fast Five shows him as this intimidating beast of a man.  He's serious and intimidating.  Then he's Joker.  There's a throwaway line of exposition that said he had a head injury in that bridge event that explains away his behavior.  Okay.  That's fine.  But I do have questions about his performance.  He's playing a stereotype that I'm pretty sure that we're not supposed to be doing.  It's right on the line.  I get the vibe that Momoa is a cool dude.  I'm on Team Momoa.  I would like to think that he's an advocate to the gay community.  But this villain really plays up the effeminate choices as a means of gaining laughs and I don't know if I can necessarily applaud that. It all feels a little disrespectful, even if Momoa isn't going for that.  But he's charismatic and he's a villain that's probably going to be remembered.

The trope that I don't love though is the "that was always my plan" elements of the movie.  Dom Torretto does some hilariously silly stunts and survives when absolutely no one should have been able to survive.  On top of that, Dante gets really frustrated at Dom when Dom is successful.  I would be too.  These plans seem really hard to pull off and would be insanely expensive.  Each time that Dom gets out of these plots to kill him, Dante retorts with a variation of "That was always my plan.  You're exactly where I want you."  Nope.  Shannigans.  That dude almost always dies.  You can only plan so far ahead before we all call nonsense on the movie.  The entire third act of the movie is that by the way.   In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a movie try to lie to me straight in my face about that always being the plan.  

But it's fine.  Because team members are allowed to die in this movie, it makes the movie watchable.  The thing that I question, though, is the Rock.  There was this big public feud between Vin Diesel and the Rock.  So when the Rock showed up as the post-credits sequence, it was meant to be this moment.  But do you know what?  It all feels a little bit...staged?  I mean, was there beef beforehand?  Maybe.  But when it became a public Twitter battle, that now feels like it was made to draw attention to the movie.  

Just saying.

It's fine.  It's fine it's fine it's fine.  That's the takeaway.  Catch it at your leisure.