The Fast & Furious franchise reached the ideal level of sublime ridiculousness with Fast Five, which brought Dom Toretto, Brian O’Conner and four films’ worth of gearhead rogues together for a compact heist thriller that’s basically Ocean’s Eleven with cars. It peaks with the ultimate smash-and-grab job, as Dom and Brian attach a giant bank vault to their Dodge Chargers and drag it through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, occasionally thwacking their pursuers like an improvised wrecking ball. The films that followed have tried nobly to top the simple, lizard-brain pleasure of this moment – the skydiving cars in Furious 7 come the closest – but recent entries have started to grind like metal-on-metal, scrambling to figure out how to top itself.
Fast X seems to recognize Fast Five as the top of the franchise bell curve, because it starts there, by retconning a super-villain out of a previous villain’s son. (It turns out there are unforeseen consequences for killing a crime boss with a flying bank vault.) By flashing back to the heist sequence, the film also announces itself as a return to the giddy excesses of the series’ best moments, embracing high camp and cartoonishly destructive violence while leaving behind the glum tone of entries like The Fate of the Furious. It may be dumb as a box of rocks, but there’s still something irresistibly vulgar about a film that nearly blows up the Vatican as a throat-clearing exercise.
