Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Fast X’ on Peacock, in Which Jason Momoa Makes a Floundering Franchise Even More Annoying

Fast X (now on Peacock, in addition to streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is the first of, god help us, a planned three-film mega-finale for a series that wore all the tread off its tires about three movies ago. THAT DOESN’T MEAN THIS NEW MOVIE IS BAD THOUGH, he said, convincing nobody, not even himself. This franchise’s M.O. is more more more, so this time, the already sprawling cast – call ’em a FAM’LY but only if you must – is freshened up with the addition of Jason Momoa as a wacky new villain, Rita Moreno as a great-grandma and Brie Larson as a wholly forgettable government agent. They join headliner Vin Diesel and everyone else, including Michelle Rodriguez, John Cena, Tyrese Gibson, Charlize Theron, Jordana Brewster, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Nathalie Emmanuel, Sung Kang, Jason Statham, Dark Helmet’s father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate, Helen Mirren for some reason, Grumpy Cat (via archival footage), your mom and Jerry Mathers as the Beaver. Am I forgetting anyone (without letting any spoiler cats out of the bag)? Probably. I openly admit to walking into this movie with preconceived negative bias, which is partly due to director Justin Lin quitting the gig (he reportedly said the movie “isn’t worth my mental health”) and being replaced by director of too many B-minus movies Louis Leterrier, and also is the natural result of having mirthlessly endured the previous nine movies. Maybe I’m in the minority with that one (these movies do make a lot of dough), but for the life of me, I don’t know why. Maybe I’m immune to mass hypnosis or something.  

FAST X: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with a repurposed sequence from (plumbs the decrepit depths of my memory; double-checks Wikipedia) Fast Five – you know the one, where Dominic Toretto (Diesel) and his FAM’LY stole a big-ass safe from a bank in Rio de Janeiro by shooting it with harpoons on cables and dragging it behind their automobiles. TEN YEARS AGO, a subtitle blares. The money in that safe belonged to the Reyes family, and the insane violence that occurred in the wake of the heist resulted in the death of the patriarch – and the guy’s son has been really P.O.’d for a decade. His name is Dante (Momoa), and he’s just now finally executing his revenge scheme, which is so convoluted and covers all the angles and bases and thinks ahead so many steps, it should’ve taken two decades to concoct. 

But before we get to that, we catch up with Dom as he teaches his son Brian (Leo Abelo Perry), nickname Little B, how to drive. Well, not just to drive, but to leave smoldering rubber figure-eights on the pavement of a parking lot with Dom’s signature slate-gray Dodge Charger. The kid’s like, seven years old or something, but it’s never too early to learn how to tear ass. Tearing ass has saved Dom’s life dozens of times, as you’re all too aware. Then they gather for a barbeque with Dom’s wife Letty (Rodriguez) and Crew peeps Rej (Bridges) and Roman (Pearce) and Ramsey (Emmanuel) and Mia (Brewster) and Han (Kang), and also Dom’s grandma (Moreno), who arrives to deliver heavy-handed speeches about FAM’LY. Now we know where Dom gets it. 

That night, there’s a knock at the door, and it’s Cipher (Theron). Yeah, she’s a bad guy, but she’s in rough shape and she manages to talk Dom out of finishing the job. She got the tar walloped out of her by Dante and his goons, and she’s here to enlist Dom’s help – the enemy of my enemy, and all that. Thus begins the most overwrought snaking winding tangled pretzeled contortion of a revenge plot ever put to celluloid, one that busts up Dom’s crew for the whole damn entire movie, so consider that a warning (they’re prolly saving the big reunion for 12 Fast 12 Furious 12, due somewheres around 2027). Roman and Ramsey and Han and Rej go to Rome for a gig only to learn it’s a trap, resulting in a maniacal chase sequence in which they barrel through the city in a Paw Patroller with Dante’s giant bomb in the back and Dom tears ass and Letty rips it up on her motorcycle and the bomb gets loose and rolls and rolls and rolls and rolls like it was on top of spaghetti before it explodes and nearly destroys the Vatican, and the whole escapade wraps with Helen Mirren saying to Dom, “It ain’t no Roman holiday, and you ain’t no Gregory Peck” as they look upon the smoldering wreckage of Rome, to which I can only respond, good Christ.

This is all rather nuts, but par for the F/F course. It’s all downhill from here, I’m afraid. The plot eventually enlists Dom’s brother Jakob (Cena) to babysit Little B when he becomes Dante’s kidnapping target, and puts American gov’t agents Tess (Larson) and Aimes (Alan Ritchson) in the middle of the brouhaha, and rubber gets burnt from Yuma to Antarctica and many points in-between. There’s a great bit where Aimes sums up Dom’s crooks-turned-heroes crew by saying, “If it rejects the laws of god and gravity, they did it twice,” which is soon rendered a lie, because there’s a third and fourth and fifth time – at least – yet to come in this movie. And after that, it’ll cliffhang us and make us wait two years for some resolution.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Twenty-first-century action movie franchises, ranked:

1. John Wick

1a. Mission: Impossible

2. Planet of the Apes

…

163. Fast and Furious

Performance Worth Watching: So, so many paychecks being cashed here. But I will say Theron stands out as someone who takes this shit very seriously without taking it very seriously at all, if that makes sense, and Cena’s upbeat-goofball tone is disarming and funny. Between them, they draw a few effortless laughs in a movie that otherwise tongue-in-cheeks itself to death.

Memorable Dialogue: Cipher drops this doozy while still bleeding from Dante’s assault: “Fought the devil tonight. Honestly, I always thought it was me – kinda disappointing.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: All the Fast X hype’s been about Momoa’s nutty, out-there performance as the flamboyant villain, but remember, context is everything; in comparison to the other performances here, it’s definitely… different. Colorful. Campy in the opposite direction of Diesel, a true foil for Dom’s poker-faced man of few grunts, words and/or grunted words. Yet by any reasonable criteria outside the Fast and Furious bubble, Momoa’s grandstanding is annoying tryhardism that begs comparison to Johnny Depp’s more grating roles. It’s memorable for all the wrong reasons. Maybe some will find it amusing, but it’s just more sand in the jockey shorts of haters (he said, looking for the nearest bidet).

I understand why Leterrier and Momoa make the decisions they do, because it’s clear after nine noisy OTT action-smash outings, this series needs a shot in the arm. It peaked creatively a few movies ago and has since devolved into repetitive spectacle and something I like to call rampant franchiseism, where you need to know all the ins and outs of the previous films to comprehend the new one. If you’re not up to snuff, you either have to put in the work ahead of time or sit back and watch a nonsensical blur of faces and color and explosions. It ceases to be dumbass entertainment and becomes more stultifying than your 11th-grade teacher’s monotone lecture on The Agony and the Ecstasy. 

Structurally, Fast X consists of a handful of subplots that Leterrier tosses into the playground like marbles. They roll around here, and there: There’s the one where Dom ends up in a street race against Dante in Rio (a return to the series’ dopey-ass roots), the one where Letty wakes up in a secret prison next to Cipher, the one where Jakob and Little B ram around in a flying kayak, the one where Rej and Roman and Han and Ramsey fart around and end up reacquainting with an old frenemy, the one with Brie Larson and the other agent guy, the one with Mia that abruptly stops. Sometimes, the subplots turn up familiar faces from past movies, and eventually, a couple of them intertwine but never reach anything resembling a satisfying conclusion. Taking into account that Fast X isn’t a complete movie, but rather one-third of a larger whole yet to be finished, lack of resolution is a given, but getting to the to-be-continued dots-of-ellipsis ending should be more enjoyable. There’s one shot here in which Rodriguez’s motorcyclist stunt-double pulls off a badass maneuver – probably with the help of CGI, the visual lifeblood of this movie – that inspired a big laugh and broke me out of a stupor, but for the other two hours and 20-and-three-quarters minutes of this movie, I was bored out of my skull. 

Our Call: Out of gas. Spinning its tires. Stuck in the ditch. Slid too far off the road. Grinding its gears. Crashed and burning with one wheel spinning. Insert your automobile cliche here. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.