The Faxed and The Furious

I saw Fast X last night after a work meeting and I want to say this as plainly as I possibly can: There is not enough cocaine and red, expensive wine on the earth to turn Jason Momoa into Johnny Depp, nor enough sashaying and goofy disregard for human life to turn his Fast and Furious character Dante Reyes into Jack Sparrow. And that’s not Jason’s fault. I think he’s generally a good actor and, as far as I can tell, an even better dude and I hope we’re homies someday. But while I appreciate the The Fast and The Furious movies for what they are (Lifetime movies for people who yell about Die Hard being a Christmas flick every December), the latest installment was pretty difficult to sit through and I think there are a couple reasons for this.

The first is that it blows ass. Even Brie Larson was bad in it, which felt impossible while I was watching her scenes and still feels impossible now, and every joke in the movie was apparently pitched so high that only dogs could hear them. And I’m not a purist for action-movie coherence or historical authenticity by any stretch of the imagination, I actually liked the parts where they were swinging stuff around with their cars to hit the bad guys or whatever, but watching Helen Mirren tell Vin Diesel that the reason gladiators didn’t have children is because they knew they could die at any moment made a deep cave in my psyche scream. That’s just, like, the least true thing about gladiators that has ever been said on the big screen. They were slaves who spent their short lives fighting, training for fighting, or having sex with the people who either paid them for it or forced them into it and that’s about it. And the landscape that information reveals to us shows no free patches of earth on which to build a home, so. Yeah. And also I think it was Emperor Commodus who was rumored to be the child of a gladiator so they did have kids. Anyway.

The second is that I’m tired of big budget movies faxing us corny reproductions of Ledger’s Joker or Depp’s Jack Sparrow. There are other types of bad or complicated people in the world, and there are other contexts from which heroes emerge or re-emerge. We don’t have to force Momoa or anyone else into playing the latest iteration of Michael Mouse trapped in the inescapable shadow of Mickey.

And I’m not trying to be a dick here. I appreciate chain restaurant movie franchises as much as anyone I know, and I’m capable of preventing the action genre opus of the John Wick series from eclipsing its contemporaries and preventing me from appreciating them for what they are in their own light. I’m also a huge fan of knowing what I’m going to get, and I’m famously chill about its underlying nutritional value. But sitting through an endless 2 hours and 21 minutes of stuff like that Helen Mirren gladiator line and Vin Diesel incessantly edging himself with the concept of Family was bad enough. Watching Jason Momoa try to channel the hungry smile of the hell pit while also keeping it kid-friendly made my eyeballs fall out of my head. It’s just too much contra-zeitgeist goofiness for one movie, and too much danger of this cycle repeating itself to watch any future installments in a theater. Watch at your own risk and happy Tuesday homies.