By Jake Wilson
FAST X ★★★
(M) 141 minutes
Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) loves street racing, he loves a good barbecue – but, as the Fast and Furious series never tires of reminding us, what he really cares about is family. Not just his biological family, although that’s where it all starts, but the chosen family that’s stuck by him as he’s evolved from a humble Los Angeles criminal to a clean-living American answer to James Bond.
Family is everything to Dom in Fast X: (clockwise from left) Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Han (Sung Kang), Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), Dom (Vin Diesel), Little Brian (Leo Abelo Perry), Abuelita (Rita Moreno), Mia (Jordana Brewster), Tej (Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson).
In the long run, even the bad guys in the Fast and Furious universe tend to be brought into the fold. In Fast and Furious 9, Dom’s black sheep brother Jakob (John Cena) was seeking world domination, but in Fast X he’s the ultimate goofy uncle; and while the amoral hacker Cypher (Charlize Theron) takes longer to come around, she, too, winds up showing signs of redemption.
Family, for Dom, is strength and weakness: it means he never has to fight his battles alone, but also multiplies the ways he can be hurt. This supplies the core tension of the saga, especially as the finale approaches (it was said years back that the 11th film would be the last, though there have been rumours of a part 12).
On the face of it, the world of Dom and his team is one where danger is constant yet never truly real. All the same, losses have occurred, sometimes unavoidably: the series is still steering around the absence of Diesel’s original co-star Paul Walker, killed in an actual high-speed car crash in 2013.
The action continues for Vin Diesel (left) as Dom, with Daniela Melchior as Isabel, in Fast X. Credit:
Fans will also be aware of recurring reports of disputes within the off-screen Fast family, where Diesel serves as producer and star. Justin Lin, the most frequent series director, walked off the set of Fast X a few days into production, and has been replaced by French action specialist Louis Leterrier (The Transporter).
Back in the realm of fiction, there may be genuine reason to fear for Dom’s cherished family members, including his wife Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and sister Mia (Jordana Brewster). As the endgame approaches, will the writers seize their opportunity to take a few pieces off the board?
Diesel no longer seems quite human enough to be vulnerable, with his bald dome polished to an ageless sheen and his life-coach mottos delivered in a gruff near-whisper.
Still, there are moments that show that despite everything he remains an actor – especially when Dom is thrown off-balance by his latest antagonist, Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa), a burly psychopath who flounces about like a Vegas magician.
This is not, frankly, a performance I expected Momoa to give – and its fey perversity may shed some light on what Dom’s broad notion of “family” finally excludes, in the context of a story otherwise peopled largely by exaggerated macho types, the women still more than the men.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Sure, the epic may be one big compensatory fantasy, built around the absence of Dom’s mother (yet to be addressed explicitly, though his world teems with mother substitutes, including Rita Moreno as his paternal grandmother and Helen Mirren as a Cockney crime matriarch who calls him “duckie”).
Unlike its predecessors, Fast X ends on a cliffhanger rather than purporting to be a complete, satisfying story – so, at this point, statements about what it all adds up to can only be speculative.
From another angle, all this psychodrama is little more than a pretext for the over-the-top action set-pieces, which are fantasy in a still more blatant sense. While the stunt team is undoubtedly first rate, there’s little effort to convince us what we see happened in anything like the way it’s shown.
These sequences are more like dreams or hallucinations, especially the early set-piece involving a huge spherical bomb rolling downhill towards the Vatican as if the Eternal City were one big bowling alley.
How much thought has been put into the symbolism is hard to say. But Dom, we know, is a man of faith – and if he were dreaming the whole thing, we might wonder if he felt some buried guilt for his undoubted yen for mayhem and destruction, even while telling himself it’s all in a good cause.
Fast X is released in cinemas on May 18.
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