by David Shedrack

Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa), the son of an old foe, comes crashing into the lives of Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) with a mission of revenge. Swearing to make Dom suffer before killing him, Dante sets off to hit Dom where it hurts most: his family. 

Reviewing – and certainly rating – the Fast and Furious movies is something of a challenge. None of the F&F movies are actually any good as movies, but many of them are really, really good at being F&F movies. “Good” and “bad” mean very different things in Fast and Furious movies than they do to virtually the entire rest of cinema. “Good” usually doesn’t involve things like good acting, smart storytelling or giving a stuff about the willing suspension of disbelief, but “bad” has almost nothing to do with being silly, over-the-top, or far-fetched. Well, almost nothing.

In truth, F9: The Fast Saga (or Fast and Furious 9, which is, I believe, its proper title in South Africa) actually was “bad” in both the traditional sense of the term and bad for a Fast movie precisely because it actually took that silliness, that over-the-top-ness, that far-fetched-ness that has been the series’ stock in trade since at least Fast 5 and pushed it well beyond its breaking point. Having our heroes literally drive into space may have seemed like a hilarious inevitability considering how each film in the series since the soft reboot of Fast and Furious (aka. Fast 4) has been upping the ante on ridiculous set pieces, but when it finally did happen in F9, it mostly just felt… lame. Ditto when Dom literally swings a car across a canyon with a barely there tightrope or brings down a whole building Samson-style.            

There’s a fine line between silly and just stupid, and the generally tired and tiresome F9 found the series treading all over that line, all while well and truly running out of steam. It didn’t help that Jason Statham and the Rock were nowhere to be found, so the whole thing rested on the far-too-earnest shoulders of Vin Diesel, or that it all looked that much worse with its fake and weightless CGI set pieces coming in the wake of the latest John Wick and Mission Impossible films – and, of course, Top Gun: Maverick.

So, where does that leave Fast X (or, again, as it is actually titled in this country, Fast and Furious 10)?  

Well, it’s pretty bad. Obviously, but the good news is that it’s only pretty bad as a regular movie. As a Fast and Furious, though, it’s easily the best since at least the 7th one, possibly even the 6th.

The problems are obvious. Vin Diesel is still more wooden in this than he is as Groot. The film has more characters than it knows what to do with. There’s no sense of actual jeopardy as the series has resurrected so many dead characters that we may as well treat the Fast gang as immortals. The action set pieces are less realistic than a roadrunner cartoon – and have roughly the same fidelity to the laws of physics. And if you want to be catatonic before the end of the first act, have a drink every time someone says “family” in this ridiculous cliché-ridden script.

It’s total crap, but in the best Fast and Furious tradition, it is super enjoyable crap. Fans can breathe a collective sigh of relief after the 9th movie seemed to lose even the most die-hard of them because this is what we want from the series.

Louis Leterrier (The Transporter, The Incredible Hulk) steps into the director’s chair, replacing series regular Justin Lin – who is still around as co-writer with Dan Mazeau – and he breathes some new life into the action sequences. They’re still ridiculous, and they’re still CG-heavy, but they’re propulsive and less over-edited than some of the other instalments in the series. They’re also on just the right side of ridiculous, so while you may laugh, for example, at the idea that almost no one died during the film’s first proper action scene involving our heroes trying to stop a gigantic runaway bomb from destroying the Vatican by all but entirely destroying Rome, the action itself is still – well, okay, it’s completely ludicrous, but it’s ludicrous within limits.

It also definitely helps that though the film’s revenge-centric plot is hardly new for the series, it junks the more convoluted spy stuff for something much more stripped down. Admittedly, with this many characters to serve (along with established faces, we also have even more new additions in the form of Brie Larson, Alan Ritchson and Daniela Melchior), the film is still massively overstuffed. Because most of our central characters are split up across the globe for most of the movie, it constantly has to shift focus between each one of them to give each their time in the sun. It’s good bang for your buck, but it doesn’t exactly help the film’s breakneck, but still sometimes weirdly plodding pace.

What really sets Fast X apart, though, is its ace in the hole: Jason Momoa. As a direct counterpart to Vin Diesel, who still seems like the only one in the cast still taking any of this remotely seriously, Momoa has quickly shot to the top of the list of series bad guys by being just as over-the-top as he can be. His preening, mincing, dancing, moustache twirling, flamboyantly camp Dante is just a total scream, and Momoa is clearly having more fun than everyone else in the film combined, relishing as he so clearly is, the chance to play completely against type. He’s technically one of the Fast gang’s deadliest baddies, but he’s such a ham (in a good way) that he never disrupts the overall camp comic-book tone of the rest of the film for a second.    

I wasn’t overly looking forward to Fast X after its lacklustre predecessor, but it’s such a blast that I can safely say that it’s not just the multiple cliffhangers that the film ends on – think Avengers: Infinity War but dumb – that have me really eagerly looking forward to Fast XI and, presumably, Fast XII. Because, of course, this wildly out-of-control franchise is going to need three films to wrap itself up. I would almost be disappointed if it didn’t.