‘Fast X’ Is So Lifeless It Feels Like It Was Written by ChatGPT

If ChatGPT were to write a feature screenplay it could scarcely be more robotic or soulless than Fast X, the latest exercise from the action franchise that won’t die. This is less a movie than a series of, well, car crashes, many of them spectacular in a rote way but, like the rest of the pileup, completely removed from any emotional or logical context. It’s a numbing collage of fiery, stitched-together spectacles. You can feel your IQ draining with each passing minute.

Once upon a time there was an action movie about a group of street racers. It was ridiculous, but also good, silly fun, fairly modest in scale and pleasantly forgettable. That was, believe it or not, 22 years ago. Yes, The Fast and the Furious belongs to a pre-9/11 world, and its architects surely never foresaw that there would be ten of these things (and counting). But that’s what happens when people keep buying widgets. The industry continues to make them.

Today’s model hops around the world – Rio, Rome, Naples, London, Antarctica (yes, Antarctica) – wedding perpetual stunt work and digitally-rendered chaos to a nonsensical plot that exists (to the extent that it exists) in order to chase its own tail. It seems the team, which still includes Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris and Sung Kang, has killed a drug lord, and the guy’s son (Jason Momoa) is ready to scorch some earth in his quest for sadistic revenge. And that is pretty much that. 

Except someone forgot to tell Momoa he could mail his performance in like the rest of the cast. The big guy flounces about in what appears to be a series of blouses, snickering and sneering and shouting and generally having way more fun than anyone else. He seems to be in on the joke that is Fast X, as opposed to, say Diesel, who has a couple of basic performance modes here as the franchise anchor, Dom. The most prominent of these is the steady glower, to which Diesel seems most comfortably accustomed. But once in a while, in a show of deep emotion, Dom will purse his lips and mutter something about the importance of family. Such moments are enough to make one long for more car crashes.

By now this franchise should have the car part down pretty well; it certainly maintains a “Can you top this?” flair on a movie-to-movie basis. In Fast X cars are catapulted and dropped from helicopters, blown up (more times than you can count), and flipped end over end over end. They are used as weapons as much as vehicles. But the movie’s most impressive feat is making all of this feel deadly dull. When all you eat is ice cream, you get sick of ice cream pretty fast. When all you get is automotive mayhem, you start hungering for something radical, like character development. Whatever recognizable humanity this series ever had has long since skidded off the road. With its listless callbacks to old characters and storylines, and a narrative that doesn’t even seem to care about making sense, Fast X really does feel like it was written by a software program.

And maybe that’s all the fanbase really wants. Maybe niceties like story, pathos and motive are beside the point here, unnecessary gestures. It would be OK if Fast X were merely loud and dumb; that much is to be expected. The problem is that it’s also achingly mechanical. It’s all car, no driver. We can almost certainly expect another one coming around the bend in a couple of years.