2/10 That’s it. I’m tired. I’m done trying to search for the best in these movies. They’ve made a tenth Fast/Furious movie, and it sucks.

Los Angeles- 10 years after that notorious vault scene in Fast Five, Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa) is inserted as an extra into the scene – he’s driving the car that whips out a minigun at the tail end there, that was Jason Momoa all along. He’s the son of Hernan Reyes, the drug lord they were ripping off in that scene, and after spending a decade masturbating I guess, he’s back for revenge!

Dante Reyes wants to make Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel, who also produces) suffer by threatening his friends, whom Toretto is known for ostentatiously asserting as “family,” and also his actual family, he does have a wife and child and they are in danger.

The more Fast/Furious movies get made, the more 2011’s Fast Five, and specifically that infamous vault scene, gets centered as the crux of the series, and it’s easy to see why. This is the film that came after all the central relationships of The Fast and the Furious were resolved and, with essentially no plot to continue, it shifts from grounded crime films into the heist and espionage genres.

That illustrious vault scene is a crux within a crux. It’s when Fast Five stops being a heist movie and starts being a Fast/Furious movie, and in so doing it defines what a Fast/Furious movie is. It’s outrageous car stunts, with every conceivable problem solved with the lead characters’ near-magical driving skills. It’s specific actors with a specific look playing out a specific soap opera with the full expectation that every viewer is up on the minutia of the conflicts both on- and behind the screen. It’s WWE meets Hot Wheels, and this is the first movie that solidifies that – Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, now just as much an icon of the series as Diesel whether either of them like that or not, makes his first appearance in this installment.

The thing that usually gets lost whenever this origin story is retold is that diabolical vault scene is actually really good. A whole lot of it was done practically, with the production building three different vaults to use in the scene, and while not every law of physics is respected, there’s a tremendous amount of physical reality still left over. Everything they destroy looks like it actually breaks. The vault always looks heavy, and the cars strain against it and move mostly in alignment with their tires. It’s also a long scene – this is the movie’s only really outrageous moment, and it commits the entire climax to this sequence.

In the bible of the Fast/Furious saga, Fast Five is the gospels coming in at the start of the New Testament – not a creation myth, but the sudden beginning of a new story that reenergizes and reorients that existing creation. As with Christianity, things go off the rails quickly afterward and many still point to this as the moment where things went wrong, but really, it was only a turning point, not when things started to go downhill. For solutions to all the series’ problems, you need only reread the gospel of that vivacious vault scene.

In Fast X, cars and bombs and tanks and helicopters soar through the air on perfect trajectories as if guided by computer. Many cars crash and much property is destroyed and lit aflame, but none of it looks real. The flames are the type of cheap aftereffect common in movies these days, and there’s never any lingering impact of destruction. The group goes from Rome to Rio to London to Antarctica to coastal Portugal with insane car-flinging action sequences everywhere and in between, but it always seems like these scenes are being breezed through, always whipping to the next thing.

Fast X is a lot of the same for a Fast/Furious movie, so much so that I find myself almost word-for-word rewriting analyses of prior installments. All of its characters are siloed as always, and always in the same little groups – the stars are in their own little worlds while Tyrese Gibson and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, still collecting paychecks after jumping onboard in 2 Fast 2 Furious once upon a time and now with Nathalie Emmanuel attached for sex appeal, do a lot of the legwork.

As soon as he learns Reyes is targeting people close to him, Toretto isolates himself, but Fast X introduces several new characters whom he retroactively incorporates as “family” so it can have the same stakes, just without risk to any of this menagerie of held-over characters, all of whose involvement is transparently dictated by availability and willingness to put up with Diesel personally.

The biggest new entry is a fresh focus on Fast/Furious as a biblical narrative, and that’s meant literally. Toretto opens the film by almost single-handedly saving Vatican City, and Reyes, who routinely refers to himself as the devil, makes a point to mock Toretto for “thinking he’s a saint” in every subsequent scene. Most of the time, explicit Catholicism in mainstream American movies are just an acknowledgement of Hispanic viewers, but we’ll have to wait for the eleventh installment to see if this pays off in a less crass way. The smart money is probably on Toretto sacrificing himself somehow, which will be hilarious when Diesel runs out of money in a few years and comes back for a twelfth installment. There’s also a refocusing on the ornate cross Toretto wears and his family’s Hispanic roots – nobody’s wearing any shoe polish, so we’ll give them a pass there.

The film opens with a re-hashing of that malevolent vault scene, recycling just barely enough footage from Fast Five to recreate the entire sequence as if in fast-forward. It’s understandable to want to get through the rehashing phase, but the drama of Dante Reyes’ inserted scenes is muted, and more importantly, the pace doesn’t slow down when we move forward. The entirety of Fast X feels like it’s being zipped through just to give viewers the gist of what’s going on, but not to revel in the wild stunts – or rough sketches of stunts filled out with CGI – that make the series iconic.

This is the Fast/Furious debut for director Louis Leterrier after longtime series director Justin Lin, still credited as a writer and producer, abruptly left early in production. According to rumor, this was partially over similar “candy ass” behavior from Diesel that’s driven the actor’s public feud with Johnson, but officially, Lin was unhappy with Universal making changes to what he’d thought was a locked screenplay, and in the final product, it’s easy to see why. Fast X has the bones to be great, with exciting concepts for sequences and tons of complex conflicts coming to a head in what’s designed to be a series finale, but watching the movie, it seems like a satire made by someone who has grown extremely bored with this series and isn’t willing to seek out the best in its script, but the movie’s apparent disregard for its own story came from the top down.

This is what Leterrier’s movies are mostly like – rushed, rushed, rushed. The introductory sequence of Fast Five footage with what looks like two of every three shots removed turns out to be less an abbreviation and more of a thesis for Fast X. Shots feel missing, especially in the major action sequences. Moments of peak drama that should be drawn out are skipped past entirely, and stunts that should be dazzle feel passé.

The truth Leterrier and Universal understand here is that remaining Fast/Furious viewers aren’t really here for insane stunts like that bespoke vault scene, a memory distant in the franchise’ rear-view mirror and now thought to be more enjoyable when fast-forwarded through, they are here for lore. The point of Fast X as a work is not to be enjoyed as an individual film, it’s to stuff fandom Wiki entries with more details about the faces you vaguely recognize from a 20-year-long stream of these movies. Where other decades-spanning action franchises like the James Bond series can survive several changes at every level of personnel with its commitment to genre, the idea of a Fast/Furious movie ever re-casting anyone is absolutely ludicrous. This series will die forever the second Diesel is done with it.

Momoa plays Dante Reyes as a fierce and joyfully bisexual lion, and apparently that’s done in mean spirit, describing himself as playing against type in a less macho character with “daddy issues.” It calls straight back to the gay villain tropes from the Disney Renaissance, and as with many of those films, the villain is easily the most entertaining character, but it folds back into how much of this series is dictated by Diesel’s ego at this point. Reyes is described as a foil for Toretto because he’s gay, and in February, Diesel publicly asked Robert Downey Jr. to star as the villain in the next film in a role he described as “the antithesis of Dom,” a tech billionaire promoting self-driving cars – and also certainly a tailor-made, fast-talking post-Iron Man Downey role. Matt Damon, still a capable action star, has also been publicly solicited, and apparently they wanted Keanu Reeves for a couple of different roles by now too. 

The goal is to keep adding recognizable faces, refreshing the franchise with stars who are less tired of it and maintaining that critical mass of lore generation, but the reality is nobody wants to be here anymore. Momoa, 43, is jumping ship from the DCEU after only recently breaking out as a leading man. No one Diesel’s been asking about, established actors in their 50s sitting on giant piles of money, wants to do this. Established series stars like Johnson, Jason Statham and Gal Gadot, jumping from that same DCEU ship which she had initially jumped from the Fast/Furious series to join, the ones who can only spare a single day for shooting because they have better movies to make, are completely alone in shots. They don’t want to be here either.

Even Diesel has said that he’s tired of trying to write all these people in, but what’s more indicative is that his ego demands he compare himself to J.R.R. Tolkien as he’s describing this. It’s past time to recognize this entire series is the story of one self-styled action star’s decades-long failure upward, enabled by a movie market that left a void for him as it trends away from movie stars in general, a studio desperate to milk any profitable property it can to keep up with Disney and an audience that showed up after that Machiavellian vault scene and to send off the late Paul Walker, the series’ other main lead, but has shown steadily dwindling interest ever since – Fast X actually opened below 2009’s Fast & Furious, the series’ fourth installment, and as of this writing, it still hasn’t met that movie’s domestic gross in five weeks of release. It still has Independence Day weekend to look forward to, but it’s now buried under weeks of new competition and only in 1,500 theaters. $142.8 million domestic and $677.6 million worldwide may be all this movie can pull in against the out-of-control $340 million budget, backing into one of the most expensive movies ever made by not really paying attention.

It’s beyond telling that nothing else Diesel has ever made, nothing he has real passion for, comes close to Fast/Furious movies in popularity. Audiences won’t follow him to other series, and when Disney, the only studio that still seems to be keeping track of its investments, comes calling, they want him to voice a cartoon tree that only says three words. Five of the highest-grossing movies of Diesel’s career are Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy installments that he’s not even recognizable in. Five of those made more money domestically than the highest-grossing Fast/Furious movie, and only the climactic Avengers movies were more expensive.

It sucks! The series sucks, this entry sucks, and the mentalities that it’s grown out of suck. I hate watching it, most of the cast and crew obviously hate making it, and Universal only foots the bill because they’re asleep at the wheel. The whole thing is built on a pyramid of losing ideas that have been propped up by off-stage drama and the memory of that one incorrigible vault scene.  

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.