If there’s one thing that the Fast and Furious movies have sorely missed in nearly all nine films, it’s a good heel. Now, they’ve always had villains, and the names have gotten bigger and bigger — once The Rock, Luke Evans, Jason Statham, Charlize Theron, and John Cena come into the picture, you’re gonna have some memorable conflicts — but most of them either wind up becoming a part of the extended Toretto family (one can imagine Statham showing up with a large can of Heinz beans at one of the Sunday barbecues) or are cut from the same kind of serious cloth. You know, they’re badasses with a single-minded focus on avenging whatever slight that the Family has done to them, with the occasional additional plot to get rich or take over the world tossed in there for good measure. There’s something quite appealing about the redemptive qualities of the Fast franchise — one is, after all, a Vin Diesel ass-kicking away from enlightenment — but it can get a little predictable (shocking, I know, for one of these movies) in their wrestling-style face turns. Much like in WWE or AEW, the thrills lie in the construction of the action, the personas involved in the stable (is it any wonder that some of its most memorable stars have emerged from that world with its muscled charisma and wit?) and the perpetual escalation of the stakes, with title shots and challengers and grander stages for the heroes to take.
But they’ve sorely missed a true-blue honest-to-Christ charismatic asshole, styling and profiling all over a motherfucker, ranting about how they’ve spent more on spilt liquor in bars around the world than our heroes have made in a year or approaching the outer limits of madness in a kilt trying to beat Hulk Hogan. Louis Leterrier’s Fast X finally brings to this to the table in the form of Dante Cortes (Jason Momoa), the son of the corrupt crime lord the Family took down in Fast Five, who’s got a bone to pick with Dom (Diesel) and everyone else who ruined his chances at taking over his papa’s Rio operation. This, on paper, sounds pretty annoying — it’s a significant retcon (who knew Hernan Cortes had a crazy kid in one of those chaingun-mounted SUVs), and, in practice, Dante’s gifts for planning and brand of knife-licking madness are reminiscent of one of the worst trends in blockbuster filmmaking over the last decade: Making every baddie into Chris Nolan’s Joker, whether it’s deserved or not. But here’s the rub: Momoa is one of the few of these antagonists who actually understands what he’s doing. The unpredictable-yet-omniscient psychopath is inherently a campy figure, which is what made Heath Ledger so memorable in that role, given how heavily he contrasted with Nolan’s serious tone — his flippant theatrics, given the self-righteous nature of the hero’s dedication to preserving order, act as a perfect antithesis to his values even as he reflects them.
Dante acts similarly for the Fast franchise: A small-time crook who suddenly has global-level connections and the means to realize his goals while also being a goofy parody of Dom himself. Visually, they’re a set of perfect contrasts: Momoa exaggerates his toned belly into a gut, his style is gaudy and outrageous with his flowing colorful clothes, and, of course, he’s hairy as fuck. He’s defined by “family” even as he works to undermine Dom’s. Most importantly, however, he’s a giant bird-flip to the undeniably masculine sensibilities of the series, even if he embodies them in form, being the towering, ripped dude that he is: He paints his victims’ toenails as he rants on about how pastels are in season, hair done up into twin buns, clad in a pink bathrobe. It’s a tonal contrast that no other Fast and Furious film has even approached — an antagonist who outright refuses to participate in the earnest faux-seriousness that is directly aimed at the frontal cortex of every eleven-year-old and eleven-year-old-at-heart that makes up the audiences of these movies. If campy escalation is the name of the game in Fast X, he raises the stakes in ways that are difficult to quantify.
His presence has an even greater ripple effect on the film, adding to its pleasures. This takes on a number of forms, some tonal, some practical. The former is best demonstrated by the film’s action sequences, which, in recent years, have always tended towards sating the desires for the Twitter crowd — if you want to see the Family go to space, all you have to do is tweet about it loudly for long enough and Luda and Tyrese will soon be linking up with the ISS thanks to SpaceX — but they’re also left with fewer places to go. In keeping with the ethos here beyond Momoa’s presence — the film is a tribute to Fast Five, one of the GOATed modern blockbusters — a lot of the key setpieces are variations on Justin Lin’s action sequences but with an additional goofy twist. If you don’t remember the bank heist from that film, where Dom and the gang turned an uncrackable vault into a rolling flail-on-wheels, you’ll be reminded of it here before you see Leterrier’s twist on it. This one involves a giant metal sphere containing a nuclear bomb rolling through the streets of Rome, with Dom in a Dodge Charger going out of his way to save pedestrians, diners at outdoor cafes, nuns, and dog walkers from the ball’s path. The small details of the heroism and Dom’s frustration recall one of the most infamously funny moments in campy action — some days you really can’t just get rid of a bomb, as Adam West figured out in Batman ‘66 — albeit with a Rocket League twist (to the point that I almost imagined spamming the “Nice Shot” react when the sequence reached its climax). That sensibility is preserved all the way until the film’s ending, the subject of which we’ll return to in a minute.
That latter attribute — the goofy sentimentality — is probably best represented by Cena’s storyline. Taking a cue from the best parts of Fate (where the Shaw brothers are forced to become child-minders in the middle of a high-stakes mission), when the crew is split up across the world, and all of those that they care about are placed in danger, someone, inevitably, must act as a babysitter for Little Brian (Leo Abelo Perry), Dom’s kid, and who better than his own half-brother, Jacob? The pair go on a roadtrip in the uncle’s 5-0 ‘Stang, blasting “Good Vibrations” out of the tape deck, and singing along in a way that would make Don Jon proud, before doing some James Bond shit out of the back of a commercial airline in a vodka-powered glider. This sort of contrivance would sink a large number of similar storylines in films more committed to their own seriousness.
Still, Cena’s goofy earnestness and his character’s lack of adult pretension make it sing. What’s more is that it’s wish fulfillment for both sides of the aisle in the average multiplex audience — the kids get to imagine having an uncle as cool as Cena, and the adults get to imagine having a relationship with a kid — a son, a daughter, a nephew or niece — as idyllic as the one glimpsed here, all while getting them to unconsciously reflect on those relationships that do exist and matter in their lives outside of that chilled recliner chair. The Fast movies, once their transition to the heights of ridiculousness began back in 2009, have always had that accidental profundity but have accumulated it (for a good reason) in abundance since Furious 7.
It’s important to remember that Fast X is part one of a two-part finale for the series, with the requisite cliffhanger included — it’s amusing that, in the aftermath of ongoing Hollywood serialization (at this point, I will remind you to stay for the mid-credits sequence, which got a Royal Rumble-like pop from the audience at the screening I went to) some members of the press and audience are just discovering how necessary that numerical subtitle is. As much as I make fun of unpronounceable multi-hyphenate monikers like Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, it seems it really is necessary to avoid disappointment. Yet even this is in the service of maintaining that Batman-like tone, where one almost expects a series of freeze-frames and gaudy narration to inform us of all the unanswered questions left hanging in the balance.
I will admit to not having much hope for Leterrier’s involvement in the wake of Lin’s mid-filming departure (another victim of Diesel’s attempts to assert creative control over his baby, it seems), but he does enough of a solid job maintaining continuity of Lin’s original vision. It’s still a bloated mess, of course, but that’s the name of the game with this series, and to expect them to suddenly stop being overly complex and absurdly long at this late in the game is like expecting Diesel and company to give up the Hemis and barbecues in favor of fixed-gear bicycles and tofu stir-fries. What Fast X embodies is the often-goofy amiability of the American blockbuster, and the innate charm that still gives it global appeal without the requisite amount of compromises that may assume it may need in our world-spanning modern cinema. And all it took to remind us of all that was a Ric Flair type. Woo, indeed.