By its Tenth Installment, the Fast and the Furious Franchise Had Honestly Gotten a Little Tired

Still a lot of fun though!

Every saga has a beginning. And every saga has an end. That’s true of every saga with the notable exception of the Fast & Furious franchise. I’m pretty sure they’re never going to stop making sequels and if they do then that’s when the reboot hits. 

I hope that when Vin Diesel dies, eighty or ninety years from now, he’s surrounded by family. It would REALLY suck and be horribly ironic if he died alone and depressed because he alienated everyone he once loved. 

That will never happen, however, because Vin Diesel is rich and powerful and in the wonderful world of the movies, also immortal and indestructible. 

I suspect that the Fast and the Furious franchise won’t die with Diesel but rather live on with his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren in the lead roles and a supporting cast of thousands, since pretty much all the heroes and villains stick around for film after film and bring new family members with them. 

Also the villains very consistently and predictably turn into heroes and members of Dom’s surrogate family of drag racers turned world-savers. 

In Fast X, for example, John Cena’s Jakob Toretto undergoes a remarkable and remarkably inevitable transformation from the most evil in the world to a fun uncle willing to sacrifice his life for family. 

Jakob’s personality changed dramatically once Dom does him a solid and doesn’t kill him when he really should. He went from being a glowering, scowling mass of muscles who lived only for power and revenge to being a stand-up dude who lives only for his family. 

That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but then the Fast and the Furious movies has never had much use for realism and verisimilitude. This is, after all, a series that sent two of its characters to outer space in a jacked-up automobile. 

Fast X’s decision to let John Cena be fun and have fun results in a performance that, unsurprisingly, is a lot of fun. Like his fellow WWE superstar turned big time action hero Dwayne Johnson, Cena brings a light, knowing touch and deep appreciation for life’s absurdity to everything that he does. 

Cena and Johnson are both veteran wrestlers so they know all about changing sides dramatically.

Few things in the wacky world of entertainment are more knowingly, intentionally absurd than the Fast and the Furious movies. 

The franchise’s often transcendent ridiculousness has not preventing me from sobbing at the end of more than one entry in the series. That’s right: Fast & Furious 7 AND Fast 9 both reduced me to tears. Manly, manly tears. They smell and taste faintly of gasoline and whiskey.

That’s because the Fast and the Furious movies are about feelings and family first and cars and stunts second. That’s a big part of the reason it has proved so unexpectedly resonant and enduring. It provides a safe space for macho dudes to feel emotions deeply without feeling ashamed or self-conscious. 

The latest muscle-bound bruiser to enter the arena is Jason Momoa as Dante, the son of Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), the villain in Fast 5. 

Fast X retcons Fast 5 to make Momoa’s character part of the action when Dom and the family kill Hernan for the sake of all that is good and holy. 

Dante did not care for his father, who, being an evil drug kingpin, was probably not a very nice man but that does not keep him from wanting to make Dom suffer the torments of the damned before killing him. 

Speaking of having fun Momoa is having the goddamned time of his life playing an unhinged, sociopathic monster of id and ego who is like a cross between Nicolas Cage’s Castor Troy and Heath Ledger’s Joker. 

As he gleefully confesses, Dante doesn’t want to rule the world; he just wants to see it burn. Momoa plays the super-villain as a maniac who gets off on his own outsized evil. 

Judging by his performance, at no point did director Louis Lettier, a newcomer to the series, encourage him to rein it in a little. Momoa’s big baddie finds himself and his criminal antics so delightful and so much fun that he does not care what anyone else thinks. 

It’s a big performance and a fun performance that can’t quite mask the fact that ten entries in the series, the Fast & Furious franchise is getting a little tired. 

I apologize if that sounds so crazy that just reading it made you instantly lose all respect for me but I can’t help but feel like they do the same damn things over and over and over again and while I generally find great joy in the franchise’s repetition there are times when the self-cannibalizing gets a little much. 

In a rare but welcome sign that he is willing to delegate authority, Dom lets Tyrese Gibson lead an expedition to Rome to purloin a priceless computer chip. The whole mission turns out to be a set-up engineered by Dante.

With Mr. Nobody out of the picture, the power vacuum at the secretive government agency that works with the family is filled by the nefarious  Aimes (Alan Ritchson), a family-hating monster who compares the family to a “cult with cars.”

Oh, and you know who else is in this? Brie Larson as Mr. Nobody’s daughter and Rita Moreno as Dom’s mom. That’s right: this silly, macho gearhead wish fulfillment fantasy for small boys knew that it would not be taken seriously as high art unless there was no less than FOUR FEMALE ACADEMY AWARD WINNERS IN SMALL ROLES. 

Moreno and Larson are of course joined by Helen Mirren as the badass matriarch of the Shaws and Charlize Theron as Cipher, the world’s greatest hacker. The Fast and the Furious franchise can’t seem to quit ANYONE so they found enough money in their budget for a quartet of Oscar winners. 

Dante’s first big surprise for the family involves unleashing a massive mine in the streets of Rome that it falls upon our heroes to stop, or at least make as non-catastrophic as possible. 

Dante is a chatty Kathy and a peacock who loves fashion and talking and himself. One of the many adorable hallmarks of the series involves making every new bad guy seem as badass as possible. 

Fast X achieves this in part by having Theron’s evil genius hacker tell Dom that she previously thought that SHE was the devil but meeting Dante convinced her that he is actually Beelzebub in human form. 

Another adorable cliche of the series involves shoe-horning in a drag race sequence to connect this maximalist series of blockbuster spectacles to the relatively modest drag race drama that launched the series. 

These scenes are invariably set to trendy-to-the-point-of-being-instantly-dated Hip Hop and Reggaeton songs and feature copious low angle shots of drag race groupies from behind so that we do not see their faces but get a good long look at their posteriors in skimpy miniskirts. 

In Fast X’s requisite drag race Dom travels to Rio de Janeiro and races Dante in a predictably deadly match and bonds with bad girl drag racer  Isabel Neves (Daniela Melchioro), the sister of the dead mother of his son.

For the last two weeks or so the Fast and Furious series has pretty much been my life. I’ve been consuming these glorious pieces of consumer product en masse. I am so deeply invested in the series that I’ve actually come to appreciate what Tyrese Gibson brings to the franchise. 

That’s not easy because Tyrese is extremely handsome. Like, so handsome it seems unreal and also not fair. So my natural inclination is to root against him. But he’s been playing a very useful, very specific role in these films and nails it. 

I’m even emotionally invested in Roman and Tej’s love-hate relationship and bickering dynamic. So when they get into a scrape early in the film and exchange fisticuffs I thought to myself that Roman and Tej fight like brothers but at the end of the day they also love like brothers. 

Sure enough these two supporting characters in a ridiculous spectacle have a moment of real connection later in the film that’s genuinely a little touching if you’re in the right frame of mind. 

This is the second epic journey into the heart of American vulgarity that I have embarked on for Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas. 

Watching all of these movies made me a legit fan of The Fast and the Furious series just as watching all of the Ernest P. Worrell movies for it made me appreciate what a remarkable comic actor and physical comedian Jim Varney was. 

But where the Ernest series started strong and got progressively worse, the latter entries in the Fast and the Furious franchise are where it really found itself in its loving embrace of ridiculousness and bigness in all of their forms. 

I am legitimately feeling a little sad that I will need to wait until 2025 for the next installment in this timeless saga of men and machines.

The characters in The Fast and the Furious movies have become, and I know this probably sounds weird, like family to me. 

So this is not goodbye but rather see you later.