Fast X (2023) Review

April 22, 2026

The Fast Five vault heist plays again, but this time the camera watches from the sidelines with Dante Reyes as his father's empire is torn apart. Louis Leterrier's 2023 film turns a familiar triumph into somebody else's trauma, and builds a first chapter on the wreckage.

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, son of the drug lord Dom's crew destroyed in Rio, launches a campaign of revenge against Dom and everyone he loves. The crew are scattered across the globe, and Dom's young son is placed in immediate danger.

This is a deliberately fragmented story, the opening act of a larger conclusion, and it asks the audience to accept an unfinished narrative in exchange for a promised payoff. That bargain is the film's central gamble. It means the screenplay spends much of its energy on setup, moving characters into position rather than resolving anything, and some viewers will reasonably feel short-changed.

Yet the structure also creates genuine jeopardy. Because nothing needs to be tied up, the crew can be put in real peril, and the closing cliffhanger has consequences rather than a reset button. The Rome sequence, in which a giant bomb rolls through the city's streets, is the entry's showpiece and the moment the film feels most alive.

The recut prologue is the screenplay's cleverest move. By replaying a sequence fans already cheered and showing what it cost a bystander, the script retroactively darkens the franchise's history and makes Dante's grievance feel rooted rather than invented for the occasion.

Characters

Jason Momoa's Dante is unlike any villain the series has tried. Flamboyant, theatrical and dangerous, he plays revenge as performance art, and Momoa's physical expressiveness makes every scene he enters unpredictable. He is the main reason to watch, and the arguable truth is that the film is better for letting him run riot than it would be with another stern professional antagonist.

Vin Diesel's Dom carries the personal stakes. His love for his son is the picture's emotional anchor, and his enforced separation from the crew is what gives the cliffhanger its weight. Diesel plays protectiveness as a kind of stillness, a useful counterweight to Momoa's mania.

The wider ensemble, from Michelle Rodriguez's Letty to Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris, is used efficiently rather than memorably. Each player gets enough time to establish their danger, but not much more, which is the cost of a story spread across so many locations. John Cena and Charlize Theron add star wattage to a roster that already struggles to give everyone a scene worth remembering.

Meaning / Themes

The film's subject is consequence. Earlier heists and confrontations were played as victories; here they come back as debts, and the family Dom has built is revealed as vulnerable precisely because it is so visible.

Dante's motive is the sharpest counterargument the series has made to its own core value. He too is acting out of loyalty to a father, so the same bond that holds Dom's crew together is what drives their most dangerous enemy. The film does not push that mirror as far as it could, but simply raising it makes the action feel less weightless.

Direction

Leterrier is technically fluent and visually inventive. In Rome he keeps the bomb's path legible, so the sequence builds through spatial logic rather than through cutting alone, and the chaos has a readable shape. That clarity matters in a 141-minute film with this many moving parts.

Tonally, the picture lurches between Momoa's gleeful villainy and Dom's earnest family drama. The shifts are not always smooth, but the friction between them keeps the film awake: one character treats the story as a game, the other as a matter of life and death, and Leterrier lets the contrast generate energy rather than trying to sand it down.

The weakness is the middle stretch, where globe-trotting setup takes priority and the momentum dips while the pieces are moved around the board.

Reviews on release were mixed, with critics broadly praising Momoa while expressing frustration at the incomplete structure.

Final Verdict: Half a story with a magnificent lunatic at its centre. Momoa turns revenge into carnival, Rome supplies a rolling bomb worth the ticket, and the unresolved ending is a gamble that only the next chapter can justify. Messy, risky and rarely dull.