The ninth Fast & Furious movie, released in 2021, bundled its gearhead heroes into a rocket car and literally shot them into space. And that, you may argue, is as far as this franchise could ever possibly go. After brushing fingertips with the cosmos, you can only realistically go down. But the greatest mistake anyone could make with these movies is to assume they have any interest in our feeble, earthborn rules. Fast & Furious isn’t merely an action series – it’s Twin Peaks if David Lynch had guzzled nitromethane before calling action.
Fast X isn’t driven by an impetus to “go bigger” but to “go more insane”. And while the crew may not visit outer space this time around – or ride dinosaurs or discover Atlantis, or any of the other wild predictions that have circulated around the internet lately – this biblically-scaled soap opera will happily rewrite the laws of gravity and physiology just to put a smile on its audience’s faces. And Fast X, in particular, is better than many of the series’s most recent instalments. It starts with a heist in Rome that involves an RC Racer, a gold Lamborghini and 12 canisters of laughing gas. A gigantic, spherical bomb then rolls, while on fire, through the city’s cobbled streets and straight towards the Vatican. It ends with the TNT-packed mother of all cliffhangers.
