By this point, I went to see Fast X without a clue as to what happened in the last one. I think some people went to space.

The F&F series is one where villains become friends, people come back from the dead and cars defy the laws of physics. No one has an idea of the story soon after they watched it.

A plot inspired by Fast 5, where they stole a safe and rode it along the streets of Rio de Janeiro.

Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa) is the sociopathic son of Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida) and he wants to make Dom Toretto and his family suffer for what happened to his dad.

The main action starts by dropping a big rolling bomb in Rome and aim it for the Vatican.

Plagued with behind the scenes issues. Original director Justin Lin departed soon after shooting started. Director Louis Leterrier does a workmanlike job. As he showed in the Netflix series Lupin, Now You See Me as well as The Transporter movies. He can do car stunts as well as sleight of hand. Some of the CGI looked cheap though.

As for Momoa, the director obviously told him. Man you will never play the Joker, too Polynesian. So Dante is your Joker and dial it up to 12. He is loud, camp and is having a ball. Especially with those two IT guys with a funny grin on their faces.

Some of the regulars are even more tiresome. A few should had showed up but did not like those two Brazilian guys from the earlier movies. John Cena plays lovable Uncle Jacob, he was the main villain in the last one.

The movie actually has four Oscar winning actresses. Not one of them told Vin Diesel how to do dramatic. When Dom had these small tender scenes, I nearly fell asleep.

I am (was) a huge fan of the "fast and the furious" series, and of Vin Diesel. Although I am a physicist I can live with "curbing" the laws of nature to some extent, provided that this is justified (e.g., through SciFi, magic, alternate universes etc.). It is also OK in movies like Mission Impossible and similar to drive things to the extreme. However, when both physics AND logic go awry it's simply too much.

The main villain in the story, (Dante, played by an amazing Jason Mamoa) is simply a joke. He is super intelligent, super rich, super powerful, and a caricature of a sociopath à la Joker. He is able to organize his crimes (which are purely driven by hatred) in such perfect timing across the globe and with access to every possible computer, that his abilities surpass those of Robert Langdon's foes (DaVince code), of Thanos (Avengers) and all James Bonds enemies at once. It borders ridicule. And, the most importantly, makes the film boring.

In the next episode they are going probably to have spaceships racing across the galaxy I guess, and Dante will use nuclear fusion to kill.

Acting is generally from decent to very good (well it's not Shakespeare after all, so not utterly important), and the cinematography (referring to the effects) excellent. Unfortunately a nice packaging does not salvage a really bad content.

Finally, I really abhor cliffhangers, and I seldom (if ever) have seen such an infuriating one. It's one thing to leave things open in a story, and quite a different one to literally stop the action in the middle of the most intense scene, like someone just pulled the plug of the TV. This practically means the producers where so sure the viewer will not watch the next one, that they had to use every means to animate them to do so. Plain awful and tasteless.

In a whole this is by far the worst of an otherwise very good series. If you really want to watch it, at least wait until the next one comes out to save yourself the frustration of the unfinished scene.

The Fast franchise is a movie series that should have faded away a long, long time ago. It started out as a fun but a bit over the top high-octane thrill ride but has descended into the realm of cartoons. With each iteration the action gets increasingly more and more unbelievable. Everybody likes an action film with chases and escapes and fights but what we get here is something like a bad anime in real life. Sure they tried and tried hard to make this movie more spectacular than all the others but one can only shut off their brain for so long. Pushing the boundaries of cinema is one thing but when you throw all sense and reality out the window you get, well this. In the first 5 minutes of the movie I already could tell this was going straight to the Moon with zero plan of how to actually get there. You see Dominic's 8 year old son driving and drifting a muscle car around a parking lot as if he was a pro. Utter ridiculous crap. What's next, to the actual Moon? Or maybe there is a secret bunker in the center of the Earth the team has to infiltrate in order to save the world? Or maybe Dom's car gets a time machine installed in it and they travel back in time to fight Hitler and the SS? I mean, why not? Everything else that happens in this movie is just as plausible. Everyone in Dom's team is an expert at everything and they all seem to be super-human as well. When will this garbage actually end?