I watched Fast X

Or is it Fast X part one? The film ends with Dominic Toretto in a very bad situation and two more films and a spin-off are in the works. I should stress firstly this is not a good film by most measures but then most measures are not appropriate for this film franchise. It is what it is.

Yet what is that? According to Felapton Towers’s official stance, these films should be read as part of the ancient genre of tall tales about legendary but human heroes. In previous reviews I have compared the stories to the Odyssey and more directly to the Irish epic The Sick Bed of Con Culainn (the story not the Pogues song). There are obvious similarities between many of the films and superhero films but central to these films is that Dominic Toretto is just a guy. Yes, we could pretend that his superpower is driving cars but that’s missing the point. He is the same character that he was in the first film…mainly because of Vin Deisel’s limited acting range but still. He is a guy who likes cars, likes his neat house in Los Angeles, loves his mum, loves his increasingly extended family, and does what he thinks is right regardless of what laws he may break (mainly laws about theft, reckless driving and the laws of physics)…

The mighty feats he performs are mighty because he doesn’t have superpowers. True, such feats would only be possible IF he had superpowers but he doesn’t which just shows what you know. That all makes sense when you see these films as tales in which the storyteller must increasingly exaggerate the feats our very human hero must perform.

So Dom is human, his sister is human, his brother is human (or maybe not) and Roman and Tej are human the other characters in the films may or may not be. I don’t mean that the plot says they aren’t but rather different kinds of rules apply to different kinds of characters.

• Along with the human characters we have former humans who traveled to the world of the dead and then returned. Most notably these include Dom’s wife Letty and his best friend Han and at least one other character by the end of the film.
• We also have the Fey aka British characters. These people all have special powers and include Deckard Shaw, his (now dead) brother, his Mum (Helen Mirren) and also hacker/inventor Ramsey. I guess Idris Elba fits in here also but he’s dead and was only in the spin off.
• Then we have gods and demi-gods – essentially unkillable beings who travel between worlds. These include Mr Nobody (who now has Brie Larson as a daughter), Dwayne Johnson, Charlize Theron and maybe most people from Brazil.
• Finally we have a special character for Brian O’Conner – Paul Walker tragically died in real life, so while his character is the one character who canonically is not ever actually dead, Brian haunts every film like a benevolent spectre or maybe he’s like Arthur asleep on the Isle of Avalon. Either way, nominally a descendant of the last High King of Ireland.

While the films visit many places from Havana to Rome, we also have four key cities that have outsized significance:

• Los Angeles where the series starts.
• Tokyo where Han does and does not die in the same car fire on three occasions.
• Rio De Janiero where everything becomes weird.
• London where Letty returns from the dead.

Now you may say, “hey, isn’t this just a silly set of films about muscly men in fast cars?” and you would be right but I’d much rather watch the version of the film I’m writing about. And the films agree with me! The plot of all the films, the significance of any event are always subject to the plot twists of the most recent film. The future plots causally change the plot of the earlier films. Fast 9 not only gave Dom a younger brother Jakob (John Cena) but alters Dom’s origin story centred on the death of his father. Meanwhile, dead/not-dead Han is revealed to have been undercover for the mysterious “Agency” during the plot of Fast & Furious 3: Tokyo Drift. So what appears to be a relatively grounded film about street racing in Japan was actually a spy thriller all along…

So death, transformation, Brazil, big muscly men in cars and the fundamental contingency of the past rather than the future. You may have doubts about this formula but Fast X understands.

So naturally the latest film opens in the past, indeed at the very point where the film series transforms itself. Fast 5 involves Brian & Dom and the crew stealing a drug lord’s money from a police station by physically pulling a big metal vault out of the building using their cars and then dragging it around Rio on huge cables. Paul Walker rides again as we watch the absurd/sublime car chase all over again. However, this time we are told that among the drug lord’s many minions chasing our heroes is his son Dante played by Jason Momoa. Inevitably, Dante’s car is thrown off a bridge in a spectacular car crash and we see him plunging into the river.

Ten years later and he is back and determined to revenge the death of his father not be killing Dominic Toretto but by destroying everything around him. This point is important because at no point can you ask “but why didn’t he just…”, no he didn’t just, I don’t know, burn Dom’s house down because that would be insufficient. No, no, Dante must first conspire to frame Dominic and his crew as terrorists who tried to set off a comically large neutron bomb in the middle of the Vatican.

Momoa has his moments in the film. He’s trying to do a sort of Heath Ledger Joker thing, flicking wildly from aggressively masculine to hypercamp from scene to scene. Part of the problem here is that Momoa can act and wants to act but in general, the big muscly guys in these films are supposed to just stick with being something like a force of nature. Hobbs and Shaw are just the platonic essence of Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham’s movie characters. John Cena’s character is much the same, playing to his affable goofy version of an enormous bloke.

The film sensibly splits up its central cast because there is now way too many of them. Roman, Tej and Ramsay end up in London. Dom in Rio (and later Portugal, which as you all know is sort of next door to Brazil), while Jakob (John Cena) is looking after Little Brian. [Little Brian is Dom’s son from Fast 9 whose mother was Elena Neves, who Dom had a thing with, which was OK because at that point Letty was dead, but then Letty got better, but Dom didn’t know Elena had a baby until Fast 8 when Elena is killed by an agent of Cipher (Charlize Theron). In Fast 9 everybody just sort of forgets about Little Brian part way through, so it is nice he gets a baby sitter this time.]

Speaking of Cipher, she’s also in this film having come to blows with Dante and then captured by the Agency, she ends up helping Letty escape from a mysterious prison in Antarctica. Then there is a big twist near the end! A twist which only goes to confirm absolutely everything I have said about these films.

Anyway, there are car chases, exactly one actual car race, Jason Statham turns up for a bit and the mid-credit scene has Dwayne Johnson in it. None of it makes sense. A MAJOR CHARACTER DIES IN THIS ISSUE but who knows, he’s probably fine. Actually, maybe several major characters die by the end but it is not entirely clear if anybody has been truly mortal since they first arrived in Rio.

The film also adds another new big muscly guy: Alan Ritchson. I didn’t recognise him initially and assumed he was a wrestler I hadn’t heard of but he, funnily enough, played Aquaman in Smallville but more recently was Hank/Hawk in the Titans series.

Everybody has fun. Things explode. Dom drives down the walls of a dam. There is a nuclear bomb that bounces through the streets of Rome while on fire. It’s all good.