About 15 minutes into Fast X — part one of what was just this week revealed to be a likely three-part Fast & Furious saga finale — that familiar piano part starts playing. You know the one. Even after I’d sat through a lengthy prologue in which Jason Momoa’s Dante Reyes is retconned into the Rio de Janeiro bank heist from 2011’s Fast Five (still the high point of the entire franchise), and even after I’d sat through several family-related platitudes from 91-year-old Oscar winner Rita Moreno and platinum-selling rapper-turned-actor Ludacris, those melodramatic piano notes still got me.
It’s bewildering the emotional hold a decade-old Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth song still has over the culture, but even just a hint of “See You Again” sent the crowd at my screening into a frenzy. A woman sitting behind me exclaimed, “Oh no, I can’t handle this again.” But when you center your mega-franchise around the importance of family, the tears start to appear when referencing the real-life death of Fast family member Paul Walker.
About 20 minutes after the brief appearance of those melancholic piano notes, a bomb is pinballing through the streets of Rome … while on fire. It’s the kind of physics-defying sequence that has become par for the course for a franchise that kicked off with the modest crime of stealing DVD players and has morphed into a globe-trotting action-spy series. The series has become less and less tethered to earth with each sequel, but the unreality has kicked into high gear during the past few installments, which featured human men pulling helicopters out of the sky with their bare hands and a car-turned-spaceship reaching orbit.
But even with all of its comically absurd moments of action, the franchise lands somewhere between the antiseptic, CGI blah of modern superhero movies and the gritty, feel-every-hit attitude of franchises like John Wick and Mission: Impossible. That is partially due to the series’ continued emphasis on cars and other modes of transportation. It makes the films feel slightly more tactile than other mega-franchises like the MCU. There’s also the fact that there are actual stakes in the Fast world — sure, the franchise has brought a handful of characters back from the dead, but that tells you how dire the idea of stakes is within the modern blockbuster-franchise ecosystem.
The MCU is an interesting comparison point to Fast X, in particular 2018’s Infinity War. Like that film, Fast X is part one of a major finale (with a very similar ending, which is all I’ll say), has constant location-hopping, and sees the return of seemingly every major player in the series. And like Infinity War, which was very clearly intended as one part of a whole story, it’s hard to judge Fast X without seeing the next film(s). It’s an incomplete story.
Momoa brings a much-needed spicy energy to the franchise as a chaotic-evil villain. Certified Big Boy Alan Ritchson is also a welcome addition. All the usual players have their moments of both comedy and action. Oscar winner Helen Mirren shows up again for a brief moment, as does Pete Davidson, who’s basically playing himself. Oscar winner Charlize Theron shows off her always-impeccable fight skills, while Oscar winner Brie Larson continues to give us nothing, as she has for the better part of a decade.
But I’ll still be back for Fast XI and Fast XII — because, somehow, just like those piano notes, these characters have an inexplicable hold over our emotions.
