Fast & Furious 10 Review: the return of Vin Diesel and the Fast Family.
“Why did we let it go on for so long?“: this is a line that at one point is uttered in one of the many empty, idle scenes in Fast & Furious 10, the new chapter in the 20-year action saga – heist, spy, blockbuster, catastrophic, sci-fi, in short, you name it – headed by Vin Diesel as the iconic (meme level) Dominic Toretto, and if it carries with it a vague whiff of complaint well…it is what it is (speaking of cars, have you seen the Gran Turismo movie trailer?)).
With Louis Letterier directing the franchise for the first time-after replacing veteran Justin Lin, who jumped ship a week after filming began (apparently over diatribes with Toretto himself)-this new episode also represents the first act of the grand finale of Fast & Furious, which will close its doors with Fast & Furious 11 or with Fast & Furious 12., if the Chapter Ten will be successful. In short, a diptych or a trilogy does the same for Universal: the ideas are long gone anyway.
Fast 10: the Family is the Family
More than Fast Saga we have ended up well beyond the levels of Fast Soap Opera, with plots at the zero degree of complexity that become hodgepodge of family trees with intersecting branches that return with each woody twist a new fruit to be plucked and thrown into the fray.
There are great-grandparents and cousins, grandchildren and siblings, fathers and wives and children born or on the way or sisters of that fraternal friend who was once an enemy and even died and now, however, has returned for the family barbecue. There are scenes from old chapters that are repurposed to insert secret relatives who had always been there, only we had not seen them before (it is done twice in this film, to insert and reinsert two different characters in the same scene). There are strategies to follow and action sequences to choreograph that have already been used in previous chapters and reused here like nothing else.
The return of familiar faces from the saga kept hidden by the marketing? Yes. The obsessive use of the word ‘Family’ (which clearly is a way of embracing even veteran fans of the saga-the Family is them and not just the protagonists, the Family that has been supporting Dominic Toretto for two decades by foraging his adventures on the big screen and which, God forgive us, includes us)? It’s in it, too. There is even Jason Momoa imitating Heath Ledger, in one of the worst miscasts in recent times.
The shortcomings of a globetrotting story
What is missing, unfortunately, in Fast & Furious 10 is the perfect, millimeter-measured rhythm that globetrotting stories like this need, with such a large number of characters and situations (we are at the numbers of Avengers: Infinity War as far as the cast is concerned, but the same cannot be said of the quality or even the sense of real impending danger that hovered over the characters at every turn of the villain Thanos) that are lost in a monotonous revenge story whose outcomes are always postponed to the next scene (And, don’t surprise anyone, when the scenes end, we are given a date for the next episode).
Most importantly, for a saga that plays not on suspension of disbelief but on its reversal, on the continuous exaggeration and the ability that cinema has to make even the very fake beautiful, a saga in which the personalities of its protagonists are embodied by the cars they drive (which also become the counterparts, in this utterly fake world, of superhero superpowers) in Fast and Furious 10 struggles to leave you surprised of shamelessness: as if the Family, having reached this point, had seen so much of it, that it could no longer be surprised with anything and with nothing, merely recycling.
Why did we let it go on for so long?
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