Becoming The Muse

Fast X (or Fast & Furious 10) is a 2023 American action film. It is a sequel to the 2021 blockbuster F9 (Fast & Furious 9) and the tenth movie in The Fast Saga starring Vin Diesel as Dominic Torreto and the Fast family. Fast X premiered May 2023 and at $712 million is currently the third-highest-grossing film of 2023.

The premise of the movie just like the others in the Fast-verse is centered around family. A villain who has been plotting revenge for the past ten years has set his sights on making Dominic Toretto and his family suffer.

The Good

If you have been a fan of The Fast Saga, then you are in for a treat which will also take you down a nostalgic lane with references and call backs to some of the epic scenes in the Fast-verse and its not shy about making fun of itself.

"Let’s start back at the beginning … Los Angeles, 2001 … Humble roots, local kids … Street racers who became hijackers … Graduated to high-speed smuggling, mobile jailbreaks, train robberies … If it could be done in a car, they did it … If it violates the laws of God and gravity, they did it twice."

The story links directly to events from Fast Five (which I feel was one of the last good Fast movies before the franchise wore out its tyre treads and totally lost its grip on reality) Sure you could say cars dragging ten tons of top-of-the-line security vault was a bit implausible but compared to the sequels which included launching cars into space, then that was believable.

Vin Diesel as usual had brought his Dominic Torrreto energy which consists of saying family a lot in a gravelly voice. Each moment he is on the screen is epic and iconic, delivereing his lines like they being filmed for the trailer or promotional material.

Jason Mamoa introduces a new villain to the Fast-verse channelling a Jack Sparrow meets Joker colourful antagonist who is as diabolic as he is hilarious.

The Bad

Why did they call it Fast X instead of Fast Ten? As in fasten your seat and suspend your disbelief as we take you on one last ride for family. Were they like lets brainstorm improbable events and turn those into set pieces, a car tangled with two helicopters, check, a cannon car, check, a car driving down an exploding dam wall, check and double check.

With each sequel the modus operandi has always been more and bigger, sticking to a formula that no longer surprises us when the villain in the previous movie become allies or a part of the Fast Family, bringing back dead characters that we no longer trust anyone to actually stay dead…

The Ugly

The Fast Saga has come a long way from its humble roots as a mid-budget street racing action flick to a blockbuster that identifies more with John Wick meets Mission Impossible than where the Fast-verse started. There is less of the street racing life and the one time they do have a race in Fast X its barely got the risking life at a quarter-mile high-octane-stakes.

Its become another money making franchise here to simply secure the bag and that’s that… Good thing it’s the last in Fast Saga… Oh I mean it’s the first of three of the last… which explains why it ends on a cliffhanger

Final Thoughts

With a running time of 2hours 21 minutes it’s a bit of a long ride… FasTen your seatbelts… as the end of the road begins for The Fast Saga. The release date of the sequel is 4 April 2025.

Fun Fact: The word family is said 56 times in this film.

Have you watched Fast X? What are your thoughts on the Fast Saga?