Louis Leterrier takes over the tenth Fast & Furious film and gives Jason Momoa the keys. He is a joy, the Rome set piece is a proper one, and around them the film splits into three and finishes none of them.
Ten films in, the series about street racers who became spies hands the wheel to Louis Leterrier, with Justin Lin staying on to write and produce. The engine is a revenge story. Dante (Jason Momoa) is the son of the Rio drug lord whose safe Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) dragged through the streets in Fast Five, and he wants Dom to watch his family suffer. Fast X then bolts three other films onto it, and the result has one good villain, one good set piece and a great many people driving in different directions.
The set piece is in Rome and it comes early. Dante lets loose a bomb the size of a house and it rolls downhill through the city with half the cast chasing it. Stephen F. Windon shoots it in full daylight against ochre walls and pale stone, so we can see every car and every cobble, and Leterrier keeps the bomb and the people chasing it in the same frame, so the geography holds. We laughed out loud when it took its first bounce. It is a cartoon staged on real streets, and the only stretch of the film where everyone is in the same city with the same job.
Momoa plays Dante as if he had wandered in from a different, better film and decided to stay. He wears lilac silk and paints his nails, tilts his head like a curious bird, and delivers threats in a voice that lifts at the end as if asking permission. He is a pantomime villain who knows he is one, and every scene he is in has a pulse the others lack. Sanja Milkovic Hays dresses him in colours nobody else is allowed; when he leaves the screen the palette drops back to matt black and chrome.
The trouble is everything around him. Dan Mazeau and Lin’s script scatters the family in the first act and never gets them back in a room. Dom is in Rio. Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is locked up. Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Ludacris), Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) and Han (Sung Kang) are in London. Jakob (John Cena) is driving Dom’s young son across America. Each strand gets a chase, a fist fight and a conversation about loyalty, then we cut to the next. Five editors are credited, Dylan Highsmith, David Kern, Corbin Mehl, Laura Steiger and Kelly Matsumoto, and it looks like five editors’ work: scenes end on a punchline whether or not one has arrived, and twice we lost track of which continent we were on. Somewhere in the London strand we realised we had stopped following and were simply waiting for Momoa to come back.
Diesel has settled into a way of playing Dom that is mostly stillness and a low voice saying “family” as if the word were a plan. Cena has been reset as a cheerful uncle with a minivan, and the change suits him; his scenes with the boy are the only ones with any warmth in them. Brian Tyler’s score puts brass and drums under the engines, and the film is so loud so often that only his quiet cues registered. Jan Roelfs’s sets, once we leave Rome, are hangars, garages and control rooms lit the same cold blue.
Fast Five (2011), which this film keeps quoting, worked because Lin had one heist and one city and let the ensemble knock about together for two hours. Fast X raids it for its villain, its safe and half its jokes, then spreads what it finds so thin that the family spends most of the running time on separate continents, talking on phones.
And then it stops. We will not say how, only that the film does not end so much as put down a marker for the next one, and we walked out feeling we had seen a first half. Most critics liked it more than we did, and we see why: Momoa and Rome are worth a good deal. They are not worth the other two hours. It runs 142 minutes and carries a 12A. Enjoy Rome, enjoy Momoa, and do not expect the film to finish what it started.
