‘Fast & Furious X’ is the tenth installment of the popular franchise about the adventures of a group of street racers and thieves in collaboration with the government. It opens on Friday and this time it has been directed by Louis Leterrier, a veteran of action films with titles such as ‘Transporter’ or ‘The Incredible Hulk’, who arrived to save the production when Justin Lin left the project last April, in full filming, a problem that has left its mark on the result.
The FF saga has been shaping up over time as a testing ground for what American action cinema can deliver. From a temporary product of the time when tuning became a trend, he has managed to dodge with more or less success his film legacy equivalent to reggaeton in music to go through all kinds of subgenres until finding his voice in such a simple concept. like a great tennis match whose balls are speeding cars, in which the plot is not as important as the scenes of entertainment.
a cyclopean meeting
The saga found its best point in the eighth installment, when it finished shaking off the shadow of trying to be “good cinema” of robberies, and embraced an impossible delirium that brought its brand closer to something similar to one of those live shows of stunts, monster cars and fire in the wheels. The ninth took that same spirit into space and restored autonomy to a Vin Diesel displaced in the previous installment. Now the actor seems to have tried to make his hero the absolute center and is a blip in the potential of his own universe.
The film follows Dominic Toretto and his crew as they face a new enemy: Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa), the son of the drug lord they killed in ‘Fast Five’ (2011), who seeks revenge on the group for a grudge. derived from his robbery in Rio de Janeiro, for this he has displaced Cipher (Charlize Theron), the cyberterrorist who has been the nemesis of Dom and his family in the last two installments. This leads to a new game of alliances that allows the saga continues to be a space of enemies that become partners and vice versa.
The huge cast of this ‘Fast X’ includes familiar faces from the previous films, such as Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Nathalie Emmanuel, Helen Mirren, and Rita Morenoand also introduces new characters played by Brie Larson, Daniela Melchior, Alan Ritchson and John Cenathis, together with its megalomaniacal action scenes, have raised the budget to 340 million dollars, which makes it one of the most expensive films ever made, surpassing others such as ‘Avengers: Infinity War’.
A brainless Olympiad of explosions and impossible maneuvers
the scale of stunts have become more blatantly unrealistic than ever, but perhaps this does not justify its price. The feeling is that the stage is being set for its final two chapters and the event seems like an appetizer compared to what was seen in the previous installment. Yeah, there are two amazing sequences, one in Rome, with a rolling bomb that looks like a full-scale pinball and another towards the end, with a combo of planes, helicopters and cars jumping through the air that are to be seen to be believed.
But the action seems not to be everything on this occasion and a certain nostalgia for the first installments is sensed, for its tackier side in the worst sense of the word. Momoa has a better time playing the villain than the public and his catalog of unfunny jokes is too constant, his timing is not as well lubricated as the engines that destroy and his excessive messianic postures make a caricature of a villain that ends up filling up as much as the solemnity of a Toretto desperate to be iconica bath of grandiloquence and poor digestion of neighborhood pride that ends up saturating as redundant.
Its monologues about family, the authenticity of its people, the molasses of brake fluid and nostalgia set to 80s soap opera music builds up without too much adrenaline in between, the action getting stuck in a mud of stale phrases that seem to be different declensions of “I studied at the university down the street” and an advertisement for the perfume ‘Invictus’ that recover the worst possible version of the saga. Fortunately, as always, the secondaries come to the rescue. (Watch out for the post-credits scene)
A great (unintentional?) parody of motor culture
The character of John Cena undergoes such a transformation with respect to the previous installment that seems to recover the best moments of ‘The Peacemaker’ and his presence MVP manages to erase the forgettable attempts —or attacks— of comedy in the scenes with Pete Davidson. Statham’s fleeting appearance is one of the most memorable moments and Rodríguez and Theron’s unexpected buddy movie is much more dignified than some of its main characters’ moments. It is also a success to incorporate Ritchson into the saga, once again demonstrating why his presence is capable of turning ‘Reacher’ into one of the best recent action series.
Larson can work as an interesting ally in the planned trilogy, but her role is simply reduced to the anecdotal and ‘FF 10’ ends up being a stew full of characters, plots, villains that appear everywhere at the same time and a messy narrative that slows down the pace and makes Justin Lin miss in his moments of delirium. Leterrier is good at frantic editing in the most dizzying scenes, but he doesn’t have the same panoramic eye as the previous one.
In general, ‘Fast & Furious X’ does a good job as the first chapter of something bigger, and remains an ode to madness that improves others deliveries best rated franchise which can be defined as the family itself in the film, “a sect of cars”, and that is precisely the great achievement of the last three chapters, which they take motor culture to extremes of shamelessness and ridicule, to the grotesque caricature put on a tray by the first delivery itself. That’s why it’s much more gratifying when he plays at being a crazy traveling circus than when he wants to turn into a dick-sized duel in the show yard of a Diesel drunk on himself.
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