“You know what gets harder? The work off-screen,” he growled (probably), to industry weekly Variety. “The thinking, the expanding. There’s a reason why Tolkien stopped writing after a while.”
Sadly, the 10th instalment of his hit action series suggests he should have followed his role model’s lead.
After a caption reading “10 Years Earlier”, Fast X limps into action with recycled footage of the fifth film’s brilliant bank heist.
Only this time, we also get new shots of a digitally de-aged Jason Momoa in pursuit.
The Aquaman actor plays a jarringly camp new baddie called Dante, the previously unmentioned son of the fifth film’s villain.
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Now, a full 10 years after his dad was killed by Diesel’s Dom Toretto, it’s just occurred to him that he should be out for revenge.
So the next two-and-a-half hours of CGI-heavy car chases and choppily edited fight scenes mostly involve Dante chasing Dom and his “family” of off-the-books spies around the globe.
Occasionally, he’ll catch Dom, flounce about a bit then let him go. At one point he puts his mission on hold to challenge him to a muscle car race.
Dame Helen Mirren, Jason Statham and Charlize Theron also pop out to remind us of their obsolete characters.
Nobody watches this series for a coherent story but it’s clearly ridiculous. The screenwriters know it too, peppering the dialogue with self-aware quips.
Tej (Ludacris) describes Roman (Tyrese Gibson) as “the black Bezos”, referring to the sequence in the last film where he drove a car into space.
There’s nothing as hauntingly terrible in this one. None of the new action scenes come close to that 10-year-old heist either.
