Fast X (2023) - Review

April 22, 2026

Fast X opens with a recut of the Fast Five vault heist, now shown from Dante Reyes's perspective as he watches his father's empire destroyed, and the device reframes a familiar sequence as an act of violence with lasting consequences. Louis Leterrier's 2023 film is a deliberate first chapter rather than a self-contained story, and it is more interesting for that ambition than its mixed reception acknowledged.

At a Glance

Director: Louis Leterrier
Runtime: 141 minutes
Starring: Vin Diesel, Jason Momoa, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Jordana Brewster, Sung Kang, John Cena, Charlize Theron
Release: 2023
Critics Rating: ★★½ (2.5/5 stars, ambitious but incomplete)
Audience Rating: ★★★ (3/5 stars, entertaining despite its limitations)

Plot

Dante Reyes, the son of the drug lord whose empire Dom's crew dismantled in Fast Five, launches a campaign of revenge against Dom and everyone he loves, scattering the crew across the globe and placing Dom's son in immediate danger. The plot is the series' most deliberately fragmented, a first chapter of a concluding saga that prioritises setup over resolution and asks the audience to accept an incomplete narrative in exchange for a promise of payoff to come. The Rome set piece, in which a giant bomb is rolled through the city's streets, is the entry's most spectacular sequence and one of the series' most purely entertaining action passages. The film's willingness to place the crew in genuine jeopardy, and to end on a cliffhanger of real consequence, gives it a narrative tension the more neatly resolved entries did not always achieve.

Characters

Jason Momoa's Dante Reyes is the series' most flamboyant villain, a character of extraordinary comic energy and real menace whose theatrical excess gives the picture a tonal register unlike anything the series has previously attempted. Momoa plays Dante with a physical expressiveness and a comic conviction that makes him the film's greatest asset and the primary reason the experience is as enjoyable as it is. Diesel's Dom is given the series' most personally consequential material since Furious 7, a character whose love for his son is the picture's emotional core and whose eventual separation from his crew gives the cliffhanger its weight. The ensemble is deployed efficiently if not always memorably, with each crew member given enough screen time to establish their jeopardy without the depth of characterisation the series' finest entries achieved.

Meaning / Themes

At its core, the film is about the cost of the crew's past actions and the vulnerability of the family they have built, a reckoning with the consequences of the series' earlier heists and confrontations that gives the more spectacular elements a thematic grounding the more purely escapist entries did not always provide. Dante's motivation, rooted in the loss of his own father, gives the series' central theme of family its most pointed counterargument: the same value that binds Dom's crew together is the one that drives their most dangerous enemy.

Direction

Leterrier's direction is technically accomplished and visually inventive, with a command of the large-scale action sequences and a feel for the film's tonal range that gives the picture a propulsive energy despite its incomplete structure. The Rome sequence is the film's directorial highlight, a demonstration of practical action filmmaking at scale that ranks among the series' most purely entertaining set pieces. Leterrier keeps the bomb's geography legible throughout, so that the sequence builds through spatial logic rather than editorial momentum alone. Leterrier pitches the film at a register of spectacular excess and tonal range, with a willingness to shift between Momoa's theatrical villainy and Dom's more earnest family drama that is not always seamless but that keeps the picture consistently engaging. The contrast between Dante's gleeful chaos and Dom's protective determination gives the picture a dynamic energy that the more tonally uniform later entries lacked. The film received a mixed critical response on its release, with most reviewers acknowledging Momoa's villain performance while expressing frustration with the film's incomplete narrative structure. It is now most frequently discussed as the entry that introduced the series' most entertaining villain and as the picture that set up what promises to be a consequential conclusion to the saga.

Final Verdict: A flawed but engaging setup for the series' conclusion. Momoa's Dante is the film's greatest asset and the most purely entertaining villain the franchise has produced, the Rome set piece is among the series' most spectacular action passages, and Leterrier's direction gives the picture a propulsive energy that makes the incomplete structure easier to accept. Fast X is not the series at its finest, but it is the franchise at its most willing to take risks with its own conventions.