In the last Fast and Furious film, two of the characters flew a car into space and orbited the Earth, which just went to prove how far the series had gone from its low-budget street-racing roots.
And yet the latest instalment, directed by Louis Leterrier, makes its predecessor look like a model of restraint, nuance, and documentary-like plausibility. The tenth film in the petrolhead series, not counting the Hobbs & Shaw spin-off, Fast X is colossally noisy, frantic and preposterous from beginning to end.
Everything about it is so far over the top that you may well start by being irritated at how stupid and excessive it is. After that, you might find yourself admiring its determination to be even more stupid and excessive than it was before.
And then, eventually, you may even smile and laugh at the way it takes stupidity and excess to breathtaking new heights. In short, this is a film that I loathed to the core of my being, but I also quite enjoyed.
If nothing else, this particular Fast and Furious is undoubtedly one of the fastest and most furious of them all. The dialogue is pared down to a few grunted catchphrases and goofy jokes, and there are no pauses in the action except when some young women are gyrating in hot pants. And yet somehow Leterrier keeps the narrative flowing and clear.
It begins, as so many of the Fast and Furious instalments do, with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) pottering about his modest Los Angeles home with his wife Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), his sister Mia (Jordana Brewster), and the ever-growing group of friends and relatives he calls his "family" at least twice per scene. Joining the family this time are his son Little B (Leo Abelo Perry) and Dom's grandmother (Rita Moreno), who turns up for no obvious reason except that the franchise's producers love to find work for Oscar-winning actresses: Helen Mirren, Brie Larson and Charlize Theron also make less-than-essential appearances.
Once everyone's clinked the requisite bottles of beer, Dom's grandmother makes a speech about how his legacy will never die, and so, before you can say "tempting fate", the trouble starts.
It turns out that several Fast and Furiouses ago, Dom and the gang stole a vaultful of cash from a drug baron in Rio de Janeiro – they stole the vault, too – and the drug baron was killed in the ensuing car chase.
Now his son Dante (Jason Momoa) is out for revenge. His motto is "Never accept death when suffering is owed", but that doesn't really account for the mind-boggling scale and complexity of his plans. These would require infinite resources and computing skills, which raises the question of how the impoverished, orphaned son of a drug dealer became a cross between Lex Luthor and the Joker, but it's probably best not to worry about such things.
The film just about gets away with the absurdity because Momoa, camping it up for all he's worth, is terrific value as a flouncing, flamboyant sociopath: the homoeroticism that runs through the Fast and Furious franchise comes out of the closet at last.
Leterrier is a director who can't see a window without imagining someone being hurled through it.
Anyway, Dante wants Dom's crew to be branded terrorists and hunted down by the very government agency (known as "The Agency") they've worked for in the past, so he rolls a giant metal bomb through the streets of Rome.
And that's one of the subtler sequences. Soon, the crew splits up into smaller groups. They head off to destinations around the world, never encountering any traffic jams or delayed flights on the way, instead encountering countless explosions, countless surprise guest stars, and countless warehouses full of souped-up cars, weaponry and ultra-modern supercomputers. They also have lots of fights.
As well as being extreme in almost every other respect, Fast X is one of the most gleefully violent films I've ever seen. Two characters are waiting for some information to download? They have a fight.
Two characters are breaking out of prison, but have four minutes to spare before the guards turn up? They have a fight. One character drops in on another to ask for help? You can guess what happens. Leterrier is a director who can't see a window without imagining someone being hurled through it, and, now that I mention it, he has the same issue with walls and floors.
The villains are usually killed in these fights – even if they're not really villains: the Agency's troops are just trying to apprehend people they believe to be terrorists, but that doesn't stop Dom and his crew butchering them by the dozen. (Again, it's best not to worry about this too much.) The heroes, meanwhile, never suffer anything worse than a scratch, which is the film's fundamental flaw.
Dom and co are all indestructible, hyper-competent, and immune to the laws of physics, which means that the viewer doesn't have the fun of seeing them come up with clever ways to get out of sticky situations. They get out of sticky situations by being superhuman. They can drive their cars off a bridge or out of a plane, plummet for half a mile, and both they and their vehicles are as right as rain afterwards. Amusing as this may be, it does mean that there isn't any tension.
For similar reasons, the stunts are never as thrilling as they should be. You'd have to assume that some fancy driving was involved, but it's hidden by all the CGI and the frenetic editing and camerawork. While Bond movies show you that actual people perform the stunts, and the Mission: Impossible films show you that Tom Cruise performs them himself, Fast X leaves you unsure as to whether those stunts are performed at all. Nothing seems real, so none of it seems to matter.
Leterrier's achievement in assembling such a gargantuan, multi-stranded, globe-trotting, head-spinning blockbuster is impressive, but however many gruff sermons Dom makes about his family, it's impossible to care about any of it.
BBC