Rapides X

Ever since the Fast Five (in my opinion the best movie in the series), The Fast Franchise has taken a nosedive. It is now straight up ridiculous what this series has turned into. A street gang, is basically an army of unstoppable and invinsible soldiers. Seriously these people would probably survive a nucular blast - or a more likely scenario, Dom Tortetto would likely absorb the blast and shoot it from his eyeballs. It's gotten that absurd.

While this movie is close to being an MCU movie, it is drastically better than the horrific previous movie, which made me rethink what a movie is. Fast X is pretty good for the most part, if you can switch off your brain and not take anything you see seriously at all.

The story is as you would expect - bad, but it flows from point A to B which is good enough. The visual effects are great, the soundtrack is pretty good as well. But the clear standout here is Jason Momoa. His acting and character is a blast to watch. Every scene he's in, keeps your attention, because he brings a much needed fun and humorous vibe to this weird movie. Jason was clearly having fun here, because it translates to the screen. His crazy character was more compelling than most, if not all of the previous villains of the series combined. So the reason I am even giving this movie a 6, is solely because of Jason as Dante.

Fast X ends of a stupid cliffhanger, but if we get to see more of Dante, I'm up for the next installment. Let's just hope thye don't stick to this trend of making villains heroes by the end, and killing off more people only to bring them back a few years later.

First, the car actions are great, a lot of imagination, a lot of CGI, and great locations.

In-between, we get some asskicking, much more ordinary.

Following these hate scenes, we get some emotional scenes.

Like love for family is everything. And of course some of them are dying to go back to some hate.

Diesel is such a bad actor, impossible to accept any of his emotional scenes, be it love or hate. He has not evolved in 20years of filming. There is nothing in between, just primitive emotions for the brainless.

Jason Momoa is the bad guy, followed be some minor bad guys. His character is so over the top, and he obviously enjoyed the acting. But some maniac jokes of bad taste are not funny at all.

His scenes are the only ones worth watching along with the fake computer generated car stunts, who throw overboard the most basic laws of physics. It is just incredible how many stuntmen and visual effects experts worked on that movie. I suppose each one only worked on 5 seconds of a scene. They all need to be paid, and it surely takes a hell of a resource management to make it a coherent finished product.

The music is just annoying during the stunts, just too loud, a brain killer...

For a budget of 349 mio USD, a lot of stars appear just for a few seconds, like they visit to attract people to the theatres to keep the money flowing in, and leave with the loot.

I won't name them, I don't want to be an acomplice of their deception...

I mean they didn't even try to hide the fact they are all mostly two word titles with copy-pasting the same sentences in different order in one paragraph. Racing Victors, Racing Heat, Racing Rivals, Racing Independence, Racing Mavericks, Racing Tranquility, Racing Liberty, Racing Bliss, Racing Winners, Racing Explorer, Racing Heaven... and many, many more - and those are just the titles starting with Racing, there are other obvious patterns with different title words.

This has to be a world record for bogus ChatGPT reviews. I mean it's pretty bad when the producers have to stoop so low, and they're that lazy to even hide the fact they are trying to fool their audience this way. It also proves how little faith they have in their own film. The current Rotten Tomatoes critics 54% rating is a more accurate. I gave it a generous 6/10.

It's too bad more effort didn't go into the writing and S/VFX (which needed major toning down and lacked realism), as they put towards trying to fool their fans of the franchise. This was too long, too slow, and too cartoonish. The writing was infantile, like it was written by a bunch of prepubescent giggly teens, and Momoa's character was too overboard and can't be taken in long doses. They basically tried to copy The Joker's character instead of creating his own persona. His performance however was still the most engaging and entertaining. Don't even get me started on the lame ending which will punish anyone following Vin Diesel on social media with him constantly counting down the days until the next ridiculous part 2 of Fast X. They should've just put us all out of our misery and ended this franchise at a nice even number.

Nevertheless, still a decent popcorn watch riddled with brainless exposes of plot holes and nonsense entertainment, especially if you have nothing better to do and almost 3 hours to waste.

Do you remember the game people used to play where someone would write down the first line of a story on a piece of paper, fold it back so the next person couldn't see it and then they'd add another line, fold it back etc. Then at the end you'd read the story in full and laugh at the results? Well I think that's how Fast X was written. It's a mish-mash of the previous 9 films rolled into one with cameo appearances from almost anyone who's ever starred in any of them. The problem is the story is nonsensical - we have jumps to shoots all around the world for no reason at all. We have a few maudlin scenes from the past. And of course (this is not a spoiler as it's now everywhere in the press) Fast X is not in fact the last film of the franchise so there is no closure of any sort at the end. The cast felt tired, going through the motions. I think even they think there's maybe been too many movies in this franchise. The only saving grace here was the wonderfully over the top villain played brilliantly by Jason Momoa - every scene he was in stood out.

Yes there's the usual over the top stunts (though personally I thought not as good as some of the previous films) racing for no real point, fight scences etc so the fans of the franchise will probably enjoy it. But as a standalone film and even in comparison with the previous 9, it's a bit of a mess.

The movie starts it story from the first ten minutes of Fast Five. The story starts out of nowhere and thr scenes are not even connected properly with each other. Any scene comes out of nowhere. The performances by all the cast members felt weak and the character development of the main Villian was bad. Jason's character wanted revenge in the movie but it more looked like he was a psycho who kills people for fun. The main problem with this franchise is saturated. It feels like we have seen all this millions of times and the action scenes doesn't amaze you.

Overall, it was an average action movie and the franchise has reached fatigue.