| Worth seeing: | for another burst of gravity-defying, logic-denying, motoring thrills and spills in an action-laden thriller, whose stunts are as wildly convoluted as its plot |
| Director: | Louis Leterrier |
| Featuring: | Jason Momoa, Vin Diesel, Alan Ritchson, Brie Larson, Cardi B, Charlize Theron, Christopher Bridges, Helen Mirren, Jason Statham, John Cena, Jordana Brewster, Leo Abelo Perry, Ludacris, Michael Rooker, Michelle Rodriguez, Rita Moreno, Scott Eastwood, Tyrese Gibson |
| Length: | 131 minutes |
| Certificate: | 12A |
| Country: | US |
| Released: | 19th May 2023 |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Ten years ago (in Fast Five, as it happens), Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) led a bank raid in Brazil that left a drug lord dead.
The gangster’s son Dante (Jason Momoa) has spent the past decade planning his revenge on Toretto and his family.
This revenge doesn’t involve simply killing Toretto; he needs him to suffer first.
He starts by luring the team to Rome and trashes their reputation by ensuring that they take the blame for a major terror attack on the city. Then he drags them to all four corners of the world to fight to the death – and, yes, race fast cars.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Anyone who’s seen any of the Fast franchise of films will know exactly what to expect – the same as everything you’ve seen before, but ratcheted up a notch.
As Louis LeTerrier takes over the petrol-head franchise, it’s unsurprisingly all about the action – and not just fast cars; in Rome, there are a handful of supercars storming through the narrow streets, but it’s the giant bomb, destroying everything in its path, as it rolls down towards Vatican City, that will have teeth clenched and bums on the edge of seats.
There’s an exit from an aeroplane that will take the wind out of your sails – and there’s plenty of well choreographed fisticuffs.
The familiar faces – and after ten films, there are many of them – are exactly as you’ll remember them, but the arrival on the scene of Dante gives the franchise a flamboyant breath of fresh air; bills as the start of the end, Fast X (pronounced “ten”) is scheduled to be the first in a trilogy to bring the saga to an end, so expect Dante to stick around.
Jason Momoa is deliciously camp, viciously ruthless and has clearly spent at least ten years planning his reign of terror, with every piece of his puzzle intricately slotting into the next, controlled from his laptop, viewed from a perch above every scene of destruction, without getting even a puff of dust on his nightclub-ready couture.
If you don’t know Dom Toretto and his familia from previous films, you might wonder why you’re meant to be rooting for a thief who killed a man while stealing millions of dollars from him, rather than the lost soul who’s seeking revenge for his father’s untimely death.
The plot itself is monstrously chaotic and complex, with multiple armies apparently all trying to kill each other – it’s very much a case of my enemy’s enemy being – well – my enemy – as Dante’s hired guns approach Toretto from one direction and his former colleagues at The Agency move in from the other.
There’s little logic to the proceedings but fear not, even if you follow everything, if the end isn’t left open enough for the next film, a mid-credits tag scene ensures that fans will jump with delight, while others might groan that they’ve wasted two hours and still don’t know how it ends.
With car races and chases, fights galore, balletic action sequences that defy gravity and the essential gyrating hotpants, this will surprise absolutely no-one, delivering for the faithful and being a bit of a guilty pleasure for genre fans – for anyone else, who might be left cold, they probably should have been able to tell from the poster or the trailer that it’s not for them.