Fast X: A Review

FAST X (FAST 10)

How long has Vin Diesel been growling, "FAMILY!" in a franchise that rivals the Marvel Cinematic Universe for both length and self-importance? It has been twelve years since the original The Fast & The Furious spun its way into the hearts of many. I confess that I too have enjoyed the overt silliness of the Fast & Furious films, a franchise that long ago abandoned all logic or continuity. With Fast X (or Fast Ten if you like), we don't exactly go back-to-basics, but we do get something one can enjoy even if it still struggles to be good.

Our illegal street racers turned international superspies are given a surprise new assignment involving arms smuggling in Rome. This is the first assignment headed up by Roman (Tyrese Gibson), much to the chagrin of Tej (Christopher "Ludacris" Bridges), forever quipping about Roman's overall stupidity. Going along with them is tech guru Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) and Han (Sung Kang).

Not everything is as it seems though, for this whole "mission" was really a master rouse concocted by Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa), the hereto unknown son of Brazilian drug kingpin Hernan Reyes from Fast Five. Dante, as wild and flamboyant a villain outside of anyone residing at Arkham Asylum, has decided he will first torture Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his "FAMIILY!" before killing them as revenge. 

With Roman's crew and Dom now framed as international terrorists who attempted to blow up the Vatican, the various members of Dom's "FAMILY!" now have to work separately before working together. Uncle Jakob Toretto (John Cena) from F9 has to keep Dom's son Brian "Little B" Marcos (Leo Abelo Perry) safe from Dante and his goons. Roman and his crew have to join Jakob at the "rendezvous point", which requires the help of Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), the ultimate frenemy. It also requires trips to Rio, where Dom meets Isabel (Daniela Melchior), sister of Dom's baby mama who has info on Dante. 

The Nobodies in the form of Little Nobody (Scott Eastwood) and his sister Tess aka Little Miss Nobody (Brie Larson) help our racing superspies, while criminal mastermind Cypher (Charlize Theron) is also involved. Both the Nobodies and Cypher have to work with and against Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), desperate to get back to Dom and "FAMILY!". Despite the difficulties, things appear to be going well, but there is a mole in The Agency, one who throws things into chaos. Will Dom and Little B survive? Has Jakob really met a noble end? Will "FAMILY!" survive this newest super-villain? 

Tune in next year for the first of a two-part series finale.

What I found while watching Fast X is that essentially this is the Blue-Collar MCU. It is the working-class version of the world's longest and most expensive soap opera. It is a soap opera, a soap opera for gearheads and those who find superhero films too silly. If you cannot identify with visitors from other worlds or billionaire vigilantes, you can identify with auto mechanics and Cockney brawlers. 

This is better than F9, but that is like saying a roof falling on you is better than the floor falling underneath you (and for the record, we do get to see the latter here). At this point, there is nothing that the Fast & Furious franchise cares about, except perhaps for the "FAMILY!" talk (also for the record, I counted the word "FAMILY!" used 26 times, even in Spanish). 

Can Dom lift an entire car with just his arm strength? Sure. Can his son fly out of a car and straight onto Dom's? Why not? Can people hereto dead come back for more rounds? Absolutely. 

Fast X, at a nearly two-and-a-half hour running time, is bloated beyond anything it should be. To be fair, at least we get something of an introduction when we recap scenes from Fast Five where we can retroactively include Momoa's character. We also get tacit acknowledgment of the outrageousness of things. When Little Miss Nobody interacts with de facto Agency head Aimes (Alan Ritchson), he tells her, "If it violates the laws of God and gravity, they've violated it twice". He also refers to them as a "cult with cars", as pretty apt a description of the entire franchise as I can think of.

However, there are entire scenes and characters that can be cut out and should have been. Of particular note is Pete Davison's character when Roman and his team are in London. It serves no purpose storywise, continues in making Roman and Tej look stupid, and even a strange bit where Han gets high. It is just there, and it stops things cold. As nice as it was seeing Rita Moreno as "Abuelita" Torreto and Helen Mirren as Queenie, there was no point to them either. 

Fast X is filled with pointless and bizarre moments that almost taunt the audience in showing off how little writers Dan Mazeau and Justin Lin care about them. For reasons known only to them and director Louis Leterrier, when a SWAT-type team storms Deckard's hideout, they have a body bag with a person still alive. For reasons even more obscure, that person jumps out of the bag wearing nothing but his underwear and runs out. I figure this person has to be known to someone, but it just is strange even for this franchise. 

Less of a point was the odd transformation of Cena's Jakob. From what I remember from F9, Cena's Jakob Toretto was meant to be a menacing, dangerous figure. Now in Fast X, he's a goofball protecting his nephew and apparently meeting a noble end. It is impossible to reconcile how Jakob went from "evil villain" to Marky Mark rapping comic relief. Not that the idea that Jakob and Little B would fly out of a commercial flight on some kind of air pod made things any more rational.

There is only one performance in the entirety of Fast X, and it is Jason Momoa as Dante. The thing about his performance is that he is all camp, not bothering to try and ground this in any kind of reality. Perhaps he figured that because the Fast & Furious franchise is essentially a cartoon by now, he played Dante as the illegitimate child of Batman Forever's Two-Face. Gleefully, even manically over-the-top, Momoa clearly had a good time camping it up way past the Nth degree. He made Dante into an overt villain, one who just enjoys being evil and ratting off villain quips whenever he could.

As he plans to have his giant bomb roll down to the Vatican, he tells his henchmen, "You're going to bomb the Vatican, but you're all going to Hell". When he sees Jakob meet his apparent end, he tells Little B, "I guess Uncle Muscle won't be back for the next bar-b-que", though he quickly adds, "OK, it was honorable". 

Two side notes. First, given how Fast & Furious never keeps anyone really dead unless they are really dead, Uncle Jakob may end up at the next "FAMILY!" BBQ. Second, I was really hoping that the bomb rolling down the Spanish Steps would take out the four old ladies from Book Club: The Next Chapter. 

Momoa was clearly in on the joke (that the entire franchise is a joke). Everyone else either did not realize it is a joke and tried to be serious or realized it is a joke but couldn't be bothered to play it straight or silly. No one has ever accused Vin Diesel of being an actor (though I understand he tried to move past action star roles in Find Me Guilty). Here though, Diesel gave an abysmal stab at acting. Looking blank and sometimes confused, Diesel elicited almost sympathy. He also should have subtitles whenever he speaks. It does get hard trying to understand what he is saying.

Leo Abelo Perry as Brian "Little B" Toretto took acting lessons from Diesel, as he was equally blank and confused as the man playing his father. That is the only thing they have in common, for Perry looks nothing like either Dominic Toretto or Elsa Nieves (Elsa Pataky from Fast Five, killed in Fate of the Furious). Perry therefore was cast due to his total lack of acting ability, at least in this film. I do not like beating up on child actors, but Perry was horrendous.

He also bore no resemblance to his alleged parents, making things more bizarre. 

Gibson and Bridges continue to think they are their generation's Laurel and Hardy with the forced interplay between them. After so many movies, why can't either of them make the Roman/Tej relationship believable? Emmanuel is the only one who appears to play a rational, plausible person. Everyone else is there to cash a check and be part of an increasingly nonsensical franchise. Ritchson went overboard in being the extremely serious Aimes to where it was parody.

It is not worth going over the action scenes. They all defy believability. It is a contest to see which moments were the most ridiculous. Is it how Dom saved the Vatican thanks to a convenient crane? How about Dom and Little B riding down a dam with a major explosion behind them? The fight between Cypher and Letty, where the latter gets swung headfirst onto elevator doors and is no worse for wear? It couldn't be when Dom is able to drive so fast and so furious, he is able to hold not one but two helicopters from lifting his car. Not any more ridiculous than him taking his car floating from a flying plane onto two other cars on a major highway and landing them perfectly.

I suppose once you literally went into outer space in F9, there was no way to top that.

I cannot say that I hated Fast X. I cannot say either that I liked Fast X. It is stupid, but it is not stupid fun in the way something like Fast Five is (which in my view is the best in the series). In this working-class MCU, Fast X is just a long trailer for the series finale. 

DECISION: C+

F9: A Review (Review #1497)

F9

The Fast and Furious franchise is cinematic junk food: not nutritious but enjoyable. How these street racers and petty criminals morphed into superspies that can defy the laws of physics and gravity without so much as a scratch are things we really don't notice or care about. F9, the latest entry into the Fast and Furious Saga, shows that an already bonkers franchise can take one turn too wild as to be deeply embarrassing to all concerned.   

Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his wife Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) are living a quiet life off the grid when their "Family" recalls them to help find Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), missing when his plane went down in the Latin American nation of Montequito. From here, they find themselves caught up in another explosive situation with nefarious master criminal Cypher (Charlize Theron) involved. Also involved is Dom's hereto unknown and unmentioned brother Jakob (John Cena), with whom Dom had a falling out due to Jakob's involvement in their father's death. Jakob is also the henchman for Otto (Thue Ersted Rasmussen), son of an Eastern European dictator bent on his own world domination.

At the center of all this is the device developed for Project Ares, one which will allow whoever holds it to control all electronic devices in the world. Otto plans to use this to give himself total power and take over the world.

I'm stopping to say that The Brain's schemes to take over the world sounded more rational.

Jakob, the Pinky to Otto's Brain, goes in search of the other half of the Ares device in Edinburgh, with Dom and his "Family" in hot pursuit. Jakob may have the device, but he's still missing the key. This key involves Han (Sung Kang), believed killed in The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift but who has risen from the dead. This battle between Dom's blood family and his adopted family culminates with Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Raj (Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges) going into outer space in a Pontiac Fierro. Crisis averted, there are hints of rapprochement in the Toretto clan even as Cypher escapes yet again.

I have seen many memes mocking the "Family" aspect that once was a major selling point to the Fast & Furious franchise. The film series was always fun and goofy despite its brazenly more and more absurd situations. Yes, sometimes even its most forgiving fans thought some moments were eye-rolling, but despite that we accepted things because the series had a heart. Maybe it was totally unbelievable that cars could leap from one floor of a skyscraper to another, but ultimately this group genuinely loved and cared for each other. 

F9 though seems to have lost that heart, the franchise having lost its mind somewhere between Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6. Now instead of these ordinary people involved in extraordinary situations we get these almost invulnerable superheroes performing acts that would get even the most skilled superspies if not injured, killed. 

It's one thing to quietly acknowledge the absurdity of the "Family" almost never getting injured whenever they face off against super-criminals. It's another when you openly talk about it and draw attention to it. I can accept absurd, I cannot accept stupid.

Stupid, however, is what dominates F9, a film that mixes total idiocy with shameless arrogance that I will suspend disbelief beyond what even in the Fast & Furious world would be unbelievable. So much time in this bloated two-and-a-half hour spectacle is spent on the Dom/Jakob falling out that it grows tiresome. We get a backstory to something we just don't care about. A lot of that could have been captured in less time. Worse, treating all this Dom/Jakob storyline with such seriousness ends up looking comical.

Granted, not as comical as seeing a Pontiac Fierro literally flying into outer space. It's hard to know what director Justin Lin, who cowrote the screenplay with Daniel Casey and shares story credit with Casey and Alfredo Botello thought how audiences would react to this. I hope they didn't think audiences would be awed or wowed by it. The theater I saw it at was laughing uncontrollably at seeing Roman and Raj not only flying a Pontiac Fierro in outer space, but crash it into a satellite with only the satellite affected.

When I heard they were going into outer space, I thought that at most they would skim the edge of the Earth's atmosphere to keep things to some level of reality (at least reality for a Fast & Furious film). I didn't think they would literally fly off into outer space. Not since Indiana Jones survived a nuclear explosion by hiding in a refrigerator have I not only seen something so stupid but be asked to accept it as even remotely logical. I spent far too much time wondering not just how the Pontiac Fierro didn't get immediately crushed when out in space, but how Roman and Raj could ever even try reentry. 

While this sequence that makes the cringe-inducing Homeboys in Outer Space look like The Outer Limits by comparison was saved for the end of the film, we had already seen enough idiotic escapes to have us think F9 was simply full of itself. We are asked to believe that not only can our "Family" go through a minefield with the greatest of ease but that they can almost by sheer willpower swing their cars across chasms by a single rope cord. There's also the introduction of Tokyo Drift's Sean Boswell (Lucas Black), who has gone on apparently to help invent the Flying Fierro. Somehow, he and his crew made said Flying Fierro look like Doc Brown's DeLorean from Back to the Future.

As a side note, by this point it wouldn't surprise me if in Fast 10 the "Family" literally time travelled. Makes as much sense as Pontiac Fierros able to serve as spaceships.

There's also the issue of clunky dialogue. Roman describes Cypher to Dom as "the woman who killed the mother of your child", perhaps thinking Dom wasn't aware of that fact. Roman's meta-monologue about how implausibly he keeps surviving and Otto's unhinged declaration that he wants not only guns but the Millennium Falcon and Chewbacca make F9 look even dumber.

There is no acting in F9. Those who have been with the franchise from the beginning are not stretching, though perhaps to be fair there is nothing more to mine for these characters in terms of backstory. Those who pop in for quick cash grabs (Theron, Dame Helen Mirren, Russell) are having a most fun time not having to put any effort. For some reason, I think Black fared the worst. It's not because he gave a bad performance (his was just as good as everyone else, meaning equally bad). It's that he looks at least ten years older than his 38 years. As for Cena, the most recent face to this, all he is capable of doing is scowling, and even that he does poorly.

He's much better at groveling to the Chinese Communist than he is at anything remotely considered "acting". 

There were cameos from pop stars that had some in the audience squealing with delight but whom I had no idea who they were.  

I have enjoyed every Fast & Furious film, even the much-derided Tokyo Drift. I hated the spinoff Hobbs & Shaw, and while I didn't hate F9, I can't muster any enthusiasm for it either. Somehow, F9 seems hollow, too stupid and insulting for those who genuinely care about these characters. 

 DECISION: C-

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. A Review

FAST & FURIOUS PRESENTS: 

HOBBS & SHAW

Now, I would call The Fast and the Furious franchise a very guilty pleasure. They have grown increasingly idiotic, outlandish and cartoonish. Despite that, I have loved them all...until now. I've seen dumb action films that I could still appreciate, but Fast & Furious Present: Hobbs & Shaw is dead-set on being insulting. I don't think there was a desperate need to have a spinoff franchise for two characters who weren't even in the original The Fast and the Furious and showed up in Fast Five and Furious Seven respectively (I'm not counting Shaw's Fast & Furious 6 cameo).

Even that I could forgive if Hobbs & Shaw were goofy fun instead of just goofy.

A team of MI6 agents attempt to confiscate 'Snowflake', a dangerous super-virus that could wipe out millions if it fell in the wrong hands. Out to stop them is Brixton (Idris Elba), an augmented human closer to a cyborg. He kills the whole MI6 team save for one female agent, who has injected herself with Snowflake to stop him taking it before fleeing into the night.

Enter Lucas Rebecca Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham). The American and the Brit are forced to work together to find the 'rogue' MI6 agent framed for her team's deaths. Hobbs & Shaw however, despise and loath each other, so the idea of working together, even if it to save the world, is anathema to them. Nevertheless, work together they must, especially when we learn that the MI6 agent is Hattie (Vanessa Kirby), who happens to be Shaw's sister.

Now, with Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds and Kevin Hart popping in to join in the hijinks in cameo roles (Mirren the only one even tenuously connected to the Fast & Furious Cinematic Universe), Hobbs & Shaw must battle against Shaw's frenemy Brixton and ETEON, the shadowy organization bent on world domination by committing genocide via Snowflake. This takes them all over the world, ending in Hobbs' native Samoa, where between repairing relationships with his estranged family they battle Brixton's army in an epic confrontation. Fate of the world resolved, the shadowy ETEON mastermind must now await for a new champion to take down Hobbs & Shaw.

Again, let me be clear: I have loved every Fast & Furious film, even the much-derided Tokyo Drift. They are fun and frivolous, involving cool cars, hot chicks and wild action sequences with an undertone of 'family'. None of those elements, however, are in Hobbs & Shaw. The question that should be asked is, "if the Fast & Furious franchise didn't exist, would you care about Lucas and Deckard? Would anything in Hobbs & Shaw be of such interest as to want to invest time in this, let alone suggest that this spinoff to an unintended franchise should itself get its own franchise"?

My answer is a solid, firm "No". I could roll with 'dumb'. I can't roll with 'stupid', which is what Hobbs & Shaw is.

I think my main issue with Hobbs & Shaw is that for men who are 47 and 52 respectively, they behave and think like a parody of teenage boys. How can I take even the most basic element of Hobbs & Shaw seriously if the title characters won't take the premise seriously? Here is the potential death of either Hattie or millions of people in the balance, but Hobbs & Shaw would rather rattle off bad one-liners and/or pull bad jokes on each other than get the job done.

Take for example when they have to go to Ukraine to break into the ETEON secret lab for the extraction machine to get Snowflake out of Hattie. Shaw has created fake passports, and given his hated rival Hobbs the name "Mike Oxsmul", which when read out loud reads "My cock's small". To make matters worse, or at least to cause Hobbs more irritation, Shaw deliberately has Hobbs' passport trigger security, with his plan to have Deckart and Hattie storm the secret base without him.

At this point, all I could think was 'why is Shaw being so small?' (and no, that isn't a Jason Statham height joke, though officially at 5'10" he does look small next to the 6'5" Johnson or 6'2" Elba). It just seemed so juvenile for him to do something so childish, let alone do it at that precise moment.

Needless to say, Hobbs gets out of his predicament because...reasons, but throughout Hobbs & Shaw the fixation with their metaphorical dick-measuring contests becomes tedious. Some quips and snide remarks can be expected, but a nearly two-hour parade of it becomes almost boring.

As they storm the secret base, with a detonator set, Hobbs sees Shaw struggling to both take down more henchmen than he had AND struggle to open the door that requires facial recognition. Again, despite the lives of millions hanging in the balance with time not on their side, Hobbs merely looks on in amusement rather than so much as help Shaw with either. I can take a joke, but not when the characters are the jokes.

Moreover, Hobbs & Shaw can't be bothered with trying to be even remotely clever. You expect that writers Chris Morgan and Drew Pierce with director David Leitch would know better than to put in cliches, such as having Hobbs have a nice heart-to-heart telephone conversation with his daughter Sam (Eliana Sa'u) while oblivious to how Hattie is behind him in a sealed but clear-glass room beating the crap out of a poor CIA agent in particularly brutal ways. That is the level of 'witty' Hobbs & Shaw goes for.

Over and over we have a film that is too lazy to care, mistaking long bits of monologue for humor. Sure, maybe seeing Ryan Reynolds and Kevin Hart pop up to rattle off quips could be fun, but neither adds anything to the film. As a side note, I'm old enough to remember when Ryan Reynolds was an actual actor, not a quip-spouting animatronic figure who has an expressionless face when delivering said quips.

Hobbs & Shaw clearly left the door open for a sequel, down to a post-ending scene of a besieged Reynolds. However, the mind boggles at exactly who would want more adventures with the Fast & Furious' version of Dr. Claw and M.A.D. I'm not trying to be funny: the ETEON director, never seen but with a digitally altered voice that appears as a sound graph, might as well have said, "I'll get you next time, Hobbs & Shaw! Next time!" with a cat's meow accompanying it.

I don't know what it says about a movie spinoff/franchise when it reminds you of Inspector Gadget.

I'm not even going to bother looking at Hobbs & Shaw when it comes to acting. I'll give credit to Johnson for having nice scenes with Sa'u when he plays the loving and slightly goofy dad. Statham is and has never been an 'actor' (though I'm sure his version of say Prospero or Willy Loman would be a lot more fun to watch than this). He's an action star, there to brawl and show off that Cockney swagger. Elba is about the only one even trying to play his Terminator-reject seriously, making me wonder whether he would have been better-served playing the actual Terminator in something like Dark Fate. I don't know enough about Kirby to make a definitive statement, though I didn't leave the theater much impressed.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is a cash-grab, riding the coattails of an accidental though quite enjoyable franchise. It gives audiences big action scenes, some of which I did find quite good such as a chase scene through London where cars slide under trucks. As much as I have enjoyed every Fast & Furious film I think I'll skip more adventures with the Oxsmul Brothers...unless Dr. Claw literally shows up and turns out to be Ryan Reynolds or Kevin Hart.

DECISION: D-

The Fate of the Furious: A Review (Review #906)

THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS

The big question surrounding The Fate of the Furious, the eighth (!) film in this most unexpected and unintended franchise, is whether you can keep it going without the late Paul Walker, who died during the production of the last film, Furious Seven. 

By this time, the Fast and Furious franchise is really bigger than one man, and minus a mention in Fate of the Furious, his absence wasn't noted. 

The Fate of the Furious gives us everything a fan can want: lots of action, some humor, beautiful locales, even more beautiful women, and more action.  In some ways predictable, in some ways almost cartoonish, it may not be the best in this series, but it knows what its audience wants and gives it to them.

I'll try to keep any spoilers to a minimum, but I will start out by saying there are no bonus scenes, so feel free to leave as soon as the credits roll.

Now in happy retirement in Cuba, Dominic Torreto (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) contemplate forming a family when a mysterious woman approaches Dom.  She pressures him into working for her, holding something over his head.

It isn't long before Dom must make a choice when Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) asks him to reform his crew for a job in Berlin.  It's here where Dom appears to go rogue, apparently betraying his 'family' to go with this woman.  With a little help from the always mysterious Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), now joined by his eager novice protégé, dismissively nicknamed by the others "Little Nobody" (Scott Eastwood), we learn that the woman is Cipher (Charlize Theron), a master hacker with nefarious schemes.

She's the type of villain that would be considered too broad for the dour Daniel Craig-James Bond series (though welcome in the Roger Moore-era), but I digress.  She has a master plan that will be revealed later.

In any case, it's all hands on deck as Hobbs, Letty, and the Nobodies bring back Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Ludacris), and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) back, but with a surprising new face to join them against Cipher: Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), who has his own reasons for revenge against Cipher.

They track Dom and Cipher to New York City, where Dom attacks the Russian Defense Minister (aided with Cipher's hacker skills) and the Family attempts to stop him.  When that fails, they all go to Russia, where Cipher's ultimate scheme is discovered, involving nuclear weapons and a Soviet sub.

I can say that all's well that ends well, with everyone back and with the possibility of yet another sequel open.

I've tried to be as spoiler-free as possible, but while watching Fate of the Furious you pretty much know where things are going.  We're told pretty early that there is a very logical reason why Dom 'betrayed' his Family (a reason that should be obvious long before we see what it is).  I kept thinking that the film would have been better to hold back on the reason until later in the film, to make it more surprising (even though it would be pretty obvious).  Even when the reason is literally revealed to everyone at the cookout scene (which I think pretty much ends every Fast and Furious film), you know what we're going to get.

However, that's one of the great pluses, dare I say, charms of the franchise: it doesn't pretend to be original or innovative, but it knows it is a lot of fun.

The film is almost a mass reunion where just about everyone who has been involved in a Fast and Furious film makes an appearance: some in cameo roles, some in more substantial ones.  It's not a spoiler to say there's a Shaw Brothers reunion since Luke Evans (the nemesis in Fast and Furious 6) is listed in the credits.  About the only significant member of a Fast and Furious film not in Fate of the Furious is poor Lucas Black, forever condemned from the much-maligned Tokyo Drift (a film I still am unapologetic about enjoying). We have another cameo from Dame Helen Mirren's and in her two brief scenes she brings a humor to her role as Mama Shaw.

One positive thing about Fate of the Furious is that there is a strong amount of humor, starting from Johnson's first scene (even if we know where it's going, predictability being one of the franchise's signatures).  The interplay between Tyrese and Ludacris still brings laughs (where one wouldn't mind seeing them in their own spin-off movie).

Bless Diesel for doing his best to turn in a performance, the script giving him a chance to try for something other than growling (though one sometimes thinks he would do well to have subtitles when he speaks).  Pretty much everyone from the main crew breaks no new ground, their characters pretty much established.

As a side note, while I don't care about on-set beefs between stars, I can believe the rumors of strife between Diesel and Johnson given that they share no screen time together, let alone appear in the same shot together.  Even when everyone reunites at the end, Torreto and Hobbs don't actually appear together, but are edited in such a way as to show them in the same place, but not side by side.

As the new figure, Theron obviously loves being the slinky, conniving villainess.  She remains calm and cold throughout Fate of the Furious, a woman confident she holds all the cards.  It isn't until the end when her perfectly laid-out plan starts completely unraveling that she even raises her voice. 

Eastwood, perhaps filling in for the late Walker, has an unexpected ability with comedy as the more straight-laced, by-the-book "Little Nobody", someone who finds the rules don't apply to the family.

As I watched Fate of the Furious, there is something in it that veers into both cartoon and/or comic-book adaptations.  The escape from the prison where Deckard is holed up, the attack on the Russian Defense Minister, and the Battle of the Ice (which I figure draws from Alexander Nevsky, and yes, I threw in an Eisenstein reference to a Fast and Furious film review), they are all big and even ludicrous.  When Dom appears at the end of the New York attack, he comes like some sort of comic-book villain, with the attempt to capture him coming like an auto club version of the Justice League. When we get the massive Battle on the Ice, the Rock shows himself to be almost Thor-like in his physical powers. 

However, that's all part of the fun in a Fast and Furious film: things are meant to be big, overblown, and sometimes so wildly over-the-top they would be laughable anywhere else.

If I find fault with Fate of the Furious, it might be the predictable nature of some of the twists.  I also think the film is long (over two hours) and I wonder if some things could have been trimmed (Johnson's first appearance, the 'Riot in Cell Block F'). 

The Fate of the Furious shows that there hasn't been a bad Fast and Furious film (even Tokyo Drift, which I stubbornly stand by).   We see beautiful images of Havana, New York, and Iceland (filling in for Russia), we have loads of action, some car porn, beautiful people, almost balletic action, and that PG-13 friendly level of violence that draws teens and those that think like them into the theaters. 

It might not be logical, it might not be realistic, it might all be loud and overblown and bombastic, but at its heart, any Fast and Furious film is about loyalty, love, and yes, family.  It asks that you suspend disbelief, indulge in a lot of action, some humor, fast cars and cool people. 

The Fate of the Furious holds up its end of the bargain, and I cannot fault it for giving me what it promised: a good time.

DECISION: B-