I spent the day getting ready for my upcoming trip to Italy and Germany, and when I'd finished packing and other logistics for the evening, I sat down to finish Fast X. I started it last night and wanted to finish it before I leave, so you get my thoughts on that instead of my anticipation of my first trip without family since before the pandemic (the Germany part; for the Italy part I'm going to see my mom).
There are spoilers after the jump, so be warned:
The first thing to say, starting at the end, is that I don't know if I can cope with the idea of two more of these movies. Yes, you read that right: not only does this movie end on a cliffhanger, with the fates of Roman, Tej, Ramsey, Han, and no less than Dom Toretto himself, unknown. We also get a glimpse of Gisele, who's apparently not dead after all, and Hobbs, who I guess wasn't in this more because of The Rock and Vin Diesel's feud over the past couple of movies.
According to the Wikipedia entry, this was also not the most harmonious movie set of all time. Diesel clashed with the first director attached, Justin Lin (who did some of the best movies in the series), and Lin ended up leaving, though he remained as a producer and maintains a story credit.
It's a bit of an exhausting movie, because there aren't many quiet moments - and they all seem to come at the start. The chases don't evoke that sense of disbelief that they're pulling it off, the way the sequence in Fast 5 did, with the safe being dragged through Rio de Janeiro. That's a meaningful comparison, because that sequence forms the basis for this movie: we see it from the perspective of Dante, the son of the bad guy from Fast 5. The first big set piece in Rome (but partly also filmed in Turin, which I recognized at once) also tries to evoke that sequence, by having Dom and the others chase a big bomb that's rolling toward the Vatican.
It's also exhausting because it's referencing back to almost the entire series up to now. There's Cipher, the baddie from F8 of the Furious (or Fast 9, I can't remember anymore), Jason Statham and his mom, Helen Mirren, the sister of Dom's late ex, Elena, and even Diogo, some guy who appears in Fast 5 (briefly?) but comes a cropper here. This is another case of that affliction of all big franchises at the moment, of having to shovel in fan service and references and cameos wherever possible - for Star Trek and Marvel movies it comes from decades of history and retellings, but here it's all compressed into about 10 previous movies. It's not the worst thing, but I admit I didn't prepare for this by watching the entire series to date.
Ironically, for a movie series that talks so much about family, it feels like there's little on display. We get a nice moment between Tej and Roman, and the obligatory barbecue at the house in LA, but it doesn't feel like found family of Films 5-7, or of Tokyo Drift.
(I'm sure I've mentioned how Tokyo Drift is my favorite of the series, and so, yes, I am a little annoyed there aren't more references to it in this)
That's not just sour grapes at an extremely silly film. There are some (welcome) archival glimpses of Paul Walker from previous movies, but they kind of show how the world has moved on from those days when the Fast and Furious movies were basically the world's biggest action movie series. Furious 7 is pretty silly, but it was the latest to delight you with the craziness they were doing with the cars. And because of Paul Walker's death before it finished filming (almost before it started, if I recall), it has an emotional depth that the series hasn't really recovered. Imagine, indeed, if they'd just stopped the series there, with those shots of Walker's character driving off to his happy ending?
The longer the series goes on, the less likely that happy ending is to be permanent. And the more likely we are to get a CGI version of Paul Walker - all through this film I kept waiting for it to happen, but there are two more installments in which it now could...
Maybe I'm just being cynical, though. Still, while it seems odd to hold movies about driving cars off the Burj Khalifa and dragging safes around the streets of Rio to a higher standard, it'd be nice to have the series get back to showing us why these character love each other so much, instead of just ticking off all the boxes of the increasingly convoluted mythology.
On the other hand, of course I'm going to watch them all. I need to see what happens with Dante, especially now that he's set his sights on Hobbs. And I hope to get a nice reunion between Han and Gisele - Dom and Letty may be the mom and dad of the group, but they were a great couple too.
No comments:
Post a Comment