Fast X Review

The most interesting thing here is the performance nobody planned for. Jason Momoa plays Dante as a preening, flamboyant sadist who paints his victims' toenails and holds conversations with corpses, and he is the first antagonist in the series to grasp that the correct register is camp. Every scene he occupies has more life in it than the rest of the film combined. Around him is franchise maintenance at its most exhausting. Leterrier took over days before shooting and the seams show, with a cast so large that recognizable actors appear for a single scene and vanish, and a plot that exists mainly to arrange people for a sequel.

The Rome sequence with the rolling bomb is the one set piece with a clear shape, because you can see the street and the thing coming down it. The rest is a blur of digital vehicles and cutaways to characters explaining what is happening elsewhere. Ending on an unresolved cliffhanger treats the audience as a subscription rather than a crowd. Momoa is genuinely great. The film around him is a placeholder.