Fast X (2023) Blu-ray Review

Plot:

A team of lovable international criminals goes up against a supervillain who has a grudge.

Review:

There is no peace for long for patriarch criminal-gone-good Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel getting a little long in the tooth for this stuff) whose curated family includes a loyal woman, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and their son Brian (Leo Abelo Perry), plus all the former enemies who became friends and neighbors, including Han (Sung Kang), Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), Tej (Ludacris), Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Mia (Jordana Brewster) who is Dom’s sister, Shaw (Jason Statham), and even the wayward brother Jakob (John Cena) who gets to make good for being bad the last time he and Dom crossed paths. There’s also Cipher (Charlize Theron) who skirts the path of turning coat and joining the team, but there’s a new foil this time in the form of Dante (Jason Momoa), a Brazilian wild card whose life was upended back in the day when Dom and his crew made off with millions in their heist in Rio (see Fast Five). It was more than money that Dom and his team made off with – it was also Dante’s pride and his family that was destroyed, and so after all these years of planning the ultimate payback, he shows up to dismantle Dom’s sense of security and his whole world comes crashing down one calculated step at a time. Dante emerges as a completely unhinged wingnut of a villain; is this guy even sane? He behaves like a supervillain in theory, but he acts like someone who can’t be in charge of a legion of disposable goons because he’s clearly got some serious screws loose. He’s basically a bonkers, fey version of The Joker, with no scruples about killing anyone and everyone just for a good gag. Is he a good foil for Dom and his crew? Well, sort of, but it’s difficult to take him seriously, and maybe that’s why he’s so good at destroying Dom’s world. Dom is always so serious and willing to sacrifice anything (although nothing is ever actually sacrificed in these movies because nobody’s death counts … everyone always gets resurrected later on), but Dante is so carefree with his methods and stuff gets obliterated.

So, where does that leave Fast X as a movie? By this point in the franchise (which is technically the 11th entry, counting Hobbs and Shaw), I don’t believe anything I see, and it all resembles one of the ’80s cartoons like Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos or G.I. Joe where the fight against evil never ends and where the team gets bigger and bigger and everyone laughs in the final frames. Fast X ends on a huge cliffhanger (Dom and his kid are basically presumed dead, along with at least half the team in a plane crash, while Dante saunters away), and so this is the first one in the series that has a dour conclusion, and so here’s hoping they wrap it all up and end this thing once and for all time. I’m done with this series, and I long for the grounded sense of “reality” that we had with the fifth film, which is the best one, no contest. Director Louis Leterrier only adds madness and confusion to the franchise as a filmmaker. He does nothing to scale the franchise back, but only pushes it into cartoonish insanity. This one was only marginally “better” than F9 and Hobbs and Shaw, which were the low points of the series.

Universal is offering Fast X is several different editions: There’s a standard Blu-ray / DVD / Digital Code combo pack, and there’s a 4K Ultra HD / Blu-ray / Digital Code combo. There’s a ton of bonus features on the disc that explore the making of the film as well as the characters, and stuff like a gag reel, music videos, and a commentary by the director. This will be out on August 8th. It’s already available digitally.