Movie Review: Fast X
Having traversed just about every terrain on the planet (not to mention an intrepid foray into space, for the culture), and clearly exhausted their bag of souped-up auto-trickery whilst at it, the purveyors of the fantastically ridiculous verging on the pointlessly stupid are back again for the tenth sequel of a franchise that should have ended five installments back.
This time around, they are back on Terra Firma and take us back ten years before when the transmission from street racing cult movie franchise flipped into over-drive to become an uber-ridiculous mega-budget summer block-buster action movie franchise tomfoolery.
With a reported budget of $340m out of which, apparently, only a couple hundred dollars was assigned to scripting the sorry excuse for a script to build on the ridiculous-fest this unneeded installment of a franchise offered as a storyline.
Aware that it no longer had any gas in the tank to advance a plausible fresh story to justify its continued existence, Fast X piles on the nostalgia-fest by reaching back to the storyline of its fifth instalment (clearly aiming for the one-rev to rule them all) that gave transformational life to the floundering franchise back in 2011.
Apparently, a previously unknown spawn of late Brazilian drug lord, Hernan Reyes, survived the climatic bridge carnage in Fast Five but mysteriously sat out the previous installments of the franchise only to now attempt to extract revenge against Dominic Toretto and his familia of street racing recidivists turned super hero mercenary consultants of the CIA.
Having laid the implausible storyline race tracks, from here on out what ensues is a slew of high-octane stunts that throw the transmission stick from N for Nonsense-Neutral to D for Dumb-Dumber-Dumbest-Drive.
They shamelessly pile on cop-out re-enactments of stunt pieces and plot twists from previous installments and over compensate with pointless gags, WTF character resurrections, and some of the cheesiest, eye-roll and sighs-inducing lines $200 dollars worth of script can get you.
They threw in everything and the kitchen sink plus a couple of pint-sized bottles of Rose champagne to make this cringefest of a sequel literally fly and despite the overcompensating and dragged-out stunt and action sequences, the Fast ride has clearly lost its thrill and the Furious rev has clearly lost its steam.
Sadly, it’s a two-part ending to this joyless joyride. Knowing when to leave the race requires that X should have marked the spot as the end of the road for this ridiculously dragged-out franchise. Enough Already!/10
