Universal Pictures
Fast & Furious is one of Hollywood’s all-time most lucrative franchises. It is also one of its dumbest, and that inanity continues apace—by which I mean, at breakneck speed—with Fast X, the tenth (!) chapter in what has become a monument to absurd action-extravaganza excess, laughable platitudes about family, and Vin Diesel’s superhero-sized ego.
It’s additionally a summer-season series that allows myriad actors not on the Marvel and DC payrolls (and a handful who are!) to earn blockbuster salaries, which is about the only excuse for the majority of these individuals to be wasting their talents on such nonsense.
It’s been 12 years since Fast & Furious remade itself from a saga about street racing into some sort of bizarre quasi-Mission: Impossible rip-off, with Diesel’s Dominic Toretto reimagined as an invulnerable badass who works for a covert government agency (known as, ahem, The Agency) to thwart dastardly international criminals.