Fast X film review: Jason Momoa tones down his masculinity, saves this film from the scrap yard
The Aquaman star says he was drawn to the role because it let him tone down his masculinity. But the latest instalment in the Fast & Furious franchise is a let-down.
Fast X (M)
In cinemas
★★½
In F9: The Fast Saga (2021), the previous lap of the Fast and Furious franchise, a car is driven through outer space. Can that be topped in Fast X, the latest film in the high-octane series?
The $US340m ($507m) budget suggests yes but the answer is no. I went into the cinema hoping to see a car dive 20,000 leagues under the sea like Jules Verne’s Nautilus.
The plot, thin as it is, does take F&F leader Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his friends and foes around the world, but in this case destination matters less than the travelling companion.
It is a F&F newcomer, Hawaii-born Jason Momoa, who saves this film from the scrap yard. He is Dante Reyes, the son of a Brazilian drug lord who was snuffed out in Fast Five (2011).
Dante blames Dom and his crew (with some justification) and has spent the past 12 years planning an inferno of revved-up revenge. Killing Dom, his family, including his eight-year-old son, and his friends is not enough. They must suffer first.
Momoa aka Aquaman has said he was drawn to the role because it let him tone down his masculinity. Dante is tall, strong and handsome but somewhat androgynous.
He wears colourful clothes, slip-on loafers, sports bright pocket squares and ornate jewellery and paints his nails. “Dante, enchante,’’ he says by way of introduction. At one point he notes his hair colour is the same up top and down below. “The carpet matches the drapes.”
He overacts but that’s fine with a character who is mad, bad and dangerous to know. And at least he can act. Vin Diesel cannot. He isn’t helped by the weak script. The dialogue is so trite it’s almost comic.
“I don’t care about dying,’’ Dom says at one point, his face showing the same non-expression as it does when he’s in bed with his wife (Michelle Rodriguez). “I only care about protecting the people I love.”
That his death would limit his protective capabilities doesn’t seem to occur to him, or to the scriptwriters.
This movie had a mid-production stall when Justin Lin, who directed four of the previous instalments, left over “creative differences”. He’s still credited as co-script writer.
He was replaced by French filmmaker Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk and the two Transformer movies). I wonder if this unexpected change of driver explains the lack of humour.
Helen Mirren, returning in a cameo, has the one witty line in this overlong 141-minute film. She and Dom are in Rome.
“It ain’t no Roman Holiday,’’ she warns him. Then she looks him up and down. “And you’re no Gregory Peck.”
This is the 11th F&F film if one includes the 2019 spin off Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw. Jason Statham (Shaw) makes a brief, meaningless appearance and the end credits sequence suggests Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) will return for the next film in 2025.
There’s no denying that the car chases in this movie and its predecessors are spectacular. Australian cinematographer Stephen F. Windon, on his sixth F&F movie, is a star behind the camera.
Yet is a thrilling car chase enough? Not for this viewer. The pedal-to-the-metal fans and the studio will disagree. The films have earned more than $US6.5bn to date making F&F the eighth highest-grossing cinematic franchise.
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (M)
Apple TV+
★★★★
Let’s go straight to the title of the absorbing, inspiring documentary Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. Being still is something that Fox, diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991, when he was 29, cannot do.
His left hand trembles. It’s the most noticeable manifestation of the incurable disease. He remembers the first time he noticed his left pinky was “auto animated’’. It was a “message from the future”.
That nod to the celebrated Back to the Future film trilogy, like so much its star says throughout this movie, shows Fox, due to turn 62 on June 9, has not lost his sense of humour.
He jokes about his diminutive stature (he’s 164cm or 5’ 4”). “Gravity is real,’’ he says after breaking his cheek in a fall at home. “Even if you’re only falling from my height.”
For people with Parkinson’s, the risk of falling is constant. In the opening frames we see Fox stuttering down the street with his physical therapist. He falls. A passing woman asks if he is OK. “You knocked me off my feet,’’ he replies.
Fox will not be still until he is dead, and he has no plans for that. “I’m a tough son of a bitch,’’ he says. “I’m like a cockroach. You can’t kill a cockroach.”
He adds that being fleet of foot, not still, has been his defence since childhood because “I always relied on my ability to run from any potential bully”.
He’s talking to the director, Davis Guggenheim, who is off camera. A significant part of this 95-minute movie is Fox answering the director’s questions, and it is wonderful. He is funny, wise, loving and conscious of his past mistakes.
The first time we see him, a make-up assistant is messing around with his hair. He looks into the camera and says, “Guys, at a certain point it just is what it is”.
The director won an Oscar for the 2006 Al Gore-climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth. This time, it’s Fox who tells truths about himself and about Hollywood.
His take on his failed audition for Ordinary People, Robert Redford’s 1980 Oscar-winning drama, is hilarious. It involves dental floss.
He talks about why he hid his diagnosis, except from his family, until 1998. He relied on dopamine supplements, as he still does, to control the shakes.
It’s fascinating, now that we know what he was hiding, to watch the incorporated clips from his movies and TV series, such as Spin City, and notice how he always keeps his left hand “busy”, as he puts it.
“I’m making people believe what I want them to believe,’’ says his political spin doctor character in a clip from the series, which started in 1996.
He talks about his self-doubt as an actor, even though the TV series Family Ties, which started in 1982, and the first Back to the Future in 1985 made him “bigger than bubblegum”.
Again the director splices in an apt movie moment, from Brian De Palma’s 1989 Vietnam War drama Casualties of War. “You I don’t know about,’’ Fox, a private, is told by his sergeant, who happens to be Sean Penn.
Fox has been married to Tracy Pollan, a Family Ties co-star, since 1988 and they have four children. The moments they are together are full of love, even when the grown-up children are laughing about how they have to help dad send his text messages.
He talks about his Canadian upbringing, his break into acting and his spectacular success. He admits he became an alcoholic when his career hit a dead end. He’s been sober for 30 years.
Fox retired from acting in 2021. He continues his work with the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which he founded in 2000 to help fund research into Parkinson’s.
Fox has written four books, the most recent of which is No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality (2020).
Asked why he wants to continue to tell his story, he says, “I love my mind and I love the places it takes me and I just don’t want that to get cut short.” Anyone who watches this uplifting film will share that feeling.
More Coverage
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout