Knee-jerk review: "Fast X"

1. These movies are completely nuts and illogical.  That doesn't mean they're not stupid fun, but each sequence is more ridiculous and impossible than the next.
2. The big joke, of course, is that these small-time street racing thieves are now international spies.  This movie opens with some very nonchalant discussion about the team undertaking a mission to Rome to thwart a... something involving computer chips.  
3. Jason Momoa steals the movie, no question.  It's also interesting that he shades his villain with some rather effeminate flourishes.
4. There's a mournful vibe when it comes to the characters talking about the late Paul Walker's character Brian - but in the movie, he's still alive somewhere safe and sound.  Weird.
5. We love that Ludarcis' Tej immediately can identify that a giant steel ball is a neutron bomb.
6. Honestly, if you took out all of the cars and explosions and just looked at the complicated tapestry of these characters and their convoluted, overlapping backstories, you'd have a soap opera.  More than once in the movie two characters meet and start immediately fist fighting because of a grudge from two movies ago.  Lil Fry had to keep nudging us in the theater with a whispered "Who's she?"  The answer was rarely a quick one.
7. The black site prison sequence would probably be too over the top for a Roger Moore-era James Bond movie.  It's that wild.  Laser robots and knock-out gas.
8. The morose, low-key performance by Sang Kim's Han is weirdly out of place.  Does he not know what kind of movie he's in?
9. We'd love a tally of how many times the filmmakers cut to a quick close-up insert shot of either a foot working the clutch and/or gas pedal or a hand shifting gears.  They are legion.
10. To us, peak Fast and Furious is Fast Five (2011), a.k.a. the one with the bank vault theft, so it's interesting that this movie is connected to that one.
11. Brie Larson crush.
12. The unending stream of mercenaries and henchman, all with cars and SUVs and helicopters, all swooping in at just the right time to save the hero or rescue the villain to prolong the plot, is impressive.  It's one of those movies where you can't really question how these last-minute arrivals were coordinated.
13. We must deduct points for putting the insufferable Pete Davidson in the movie.  Did someone in the casting office lose a bet?
14. Love that no matter what happens, the team always has handy those walkie talkies tuned into the right frequency to talk to each other.
15. The many family photos the characters look at so wistfully in the movie are clearly production publicity stills.  This is a movie with a nine-figure budget, people.
16. These heavily armored - and presumably well-trained - soldiers and law enforcement agents are never a match for our civilian heroes dressed in street clothes.
17. Despite all our nitpicking and eye-rolling, there's a certain insane charm to these Fast and Furious movies that clearly work so very hard to provide ridiculous spectacles (everything eventually explodes) and to continually underscore the value of family (when Dom makes a speech, drink).
18. It is what it is.  We happily paid the admission price.

Tweet