Jeremy_Urquhart

It doesn't feel great dunking on a movie like The 15:17 to Paris, because it has good intentions, a novel concept, and it does generally feel sincere. These are things that are worthy of praise, but that praise is muted by the fact that technically/cinematically/narratively, this film is pretty much just a mess.

You see the runtime and you hear about the premise here, and you expect something tight, or maybe even something that plays out either wholly or partly in real-time, but what happens instead is that the main event - a thwarted hijacking - gets very little focus. That wouldn't be a problem if the flashback portions or the build-up to the main scene of the film were engaging/well-made, but those stretches of the movie don't do much to excite or pique interest.

Getting the real-life soldiers to play themselves was a cool idea, but the quality of the acting isn't great. Still, it's not the only misstep casting-wise, because so many actors who I think are associated most with their sitcom work show up in the first act of this movie as parents/teachers. It's very distracting.

The coming-of-age stuff in the first act isn't very exciting, the "becoming soldiers" segments in the second act prove dull, and the final act - which is shown in glimpses throughout - also kind of comes and goes without much of anything that packs a punch. As a short film solely about the hijacking, this would've been novel and to the point, but it's still not great, and the other parts of the film don't really mesh well with that stretch either. There was an act of heroism here worth acknowledging and supporting, so them trying to celebrate it here is worth something... but judged as a film, The 15:17 to Paris generally fails.

In all honesty, the 10th Fast and Furious is packed with the same flaws that made the 9th kind of disappointing to me, but Jason Momoa as the main bad guy here adds a lot to the film. There are stretches where he disappears, but he seems like he's having a blast chewing the scenery and being goofy, and his energy is infectious. Without him, I could see my enjoyment of Fast X being reduced considerably.

A couple of action scenes here are quite poorly done, while others entertain. I was never fully bored by the whole thing, but I was unsatisfied for long stretches of the movie. There are so many characters at this point, and plenty who I don't think need to keep turning up for a scene or two each film. Up until about the eighth movie, I loved how the films in this series tended to keep bringing back people, but 9 overdid things with the clunky reintroduction of the Tokyo Drift characters, and then X has a similar problem with bringing back (seemingly) everyone but the Tokyo Drift characters.

There's a way to make a movie with dozens of characters work, but they didn't pull it off here. If Fast Five can be labelled The Avengers of the Fast series, then I feel like Fast X was trying to be the franchise's Infinity War. They got the villain right, because Thanos and Momoa are just what their two respective franchises needed. But a balancing act similar to the one executed in Infinity War cannot be glimpsed here.

The ending of X frustrates, but also makes me excited to see how this whole ridiculous series will end. And, for more positives, at least X used John Cena better, even if it feels jarring to see him go from being two different characters between F9 and Fast X (I can suspend a lot of disbelief, but not enough to buy that character "growth").

Sadly, I still think newcomers to the series should tap out at movie #7. It's the best way to get closure from a series that's overstayed its welcome a little. It's still over-the-top in these later films, but this brand of over-the-top-ness in the last couple of movies hasn't been as fun as the over-the-top-ness from say movies #4 through to #8 (maybe even as far as Hobbs & Shaw, the spin-off).