Battered bloody and heaving on Dominic Toretto and Letty’s couch (they’re played by Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez), Cipher (Charlize Theron, still looking gorgeous in bruises) utters words that don’t really shock the audience’s world: “There is a war coming. Sides are being chosen…and everyone you love will be destroyed.”

Despite the near-paralysed, dumbfounded looks on Dom and Letty’s faces — irrespective of Cipher’s proclamation that she met the devil that night, was disappointed that she wasn’t Satan incarnate, and that ‘the enemy of (her) enemy is (Dom)’, ergo her choosing sides — the most the audience would be thinking is: meh, what’s new?

With exception to a new screenwriter and the arrival of a new director, little else has changed…if, that is, these changes equal to anything at all.

Writers Dan Mazeau and Justin Lin, and Louis Leterrier (Transporter 2, The Incredible Hulk) succeed in bringing the usual to the table. Part 10 — or Fast X, whatever you want to call it — is filled with a lot of slow-spoken chatter about family love, kabooming varooms of the turbine-powered jet engines that run the film’s absurdly indestructible cars, and the jokingly slaphappy series of events that pass off as the plot points of the story.

Fast X manages to tone down the incredulousness that’s become a staple of the franchise

Since the series rehashes so much, one shouldn’t be surprised that Fast X’s producers — One Race and Original Film — reuse their own devices.

The villain is Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa), a drug lord whose father, another drug lord, was killed at the opening sequence of part five.

Reyes — or as Cipher calls him, the devil — is as threatening as a five-year-old. He loves to blow raspberries at his enemies in the middle of car chases, and then blows their cars with bombs.

But then again, no one really dies in these movies except minor characters. The last two to die, Han Lue (Sung Kang) dead in part six (or the end of part three, given the timeline) was resurrected in part nine, and — spoiler alert (but not really) — Gisele Yashar (Gal Gadot), also killed in part six, comes back at the end of this movie.

The roster is more or less everyone: Diesel, Rodriguez, Theron, Kang and Gadot are joined by John Cena, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jordana Brewster, Scott Eastwood, Helen Mirren, Jason Stratham and Paul Walker via archival footage. New additions include Brie Larson as the daughter of the now missing Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), Rita Moreno as Dom’s grandmother, Daniela Melchior as Dom’s late wife’s street-racing sister, Alan Ritchson as the new head of the secret ‘agency’, and Mamoa.

Although cars are flung fast and furiously (pun-intended) — at one time Dom heaves two helicopters into each other by jumping his car off from one freeway to the next — Fast X does manage to tone down the incredulousness that’s become a staple of the franchise…that is, at least no cars are flying off into space.

But then again, one expects these types of harebrained, too-ridiculous-to-fathom shenanigans from these movies. I mean, no one is there for the plot, and the family angle, by now, has long lost its sheen, which no amount of shiny car wax can bring back.

Fast X is released in Pakistan by HKC Entertainment. The film is rated PG-13 and features the same jokes one stopped laughing at, stoic conversations and near-fake visual effects

Published in Dawn, ICON, May 28th, 2023