Near the beginning of Fast X, we get one of those family barbecue scenes in the Toretto backyard that the Fast and Furious movies are so fond of–but nothing about it is quite right. We’ve got Rita Morena’s character saying grace like she’s been here the whole time (this is her first appearance). We’ve got curiously blurry backgrounds and a lot of weird close-up shots–hallmarks of lower-budget films, like Army of the Dead, that are trying to hide that they were filmed on a stage with CGI environments. And the editing is distractingly frenetic.
Like so many aspects of Fast X, this scene is a pretty bad attempt to do a new version of something that the series has done in the past. Fast X wants to be a greatest hits album, but instead, it’s mostly just a collection of low-quality covers.
Once they wrap up the family barbecue, most of the team heads to Rome for a mission. Which is, of course, a trap. Dante (Jason Momoa), the son of Fast Five villain Hernan Reyes, has been preparing for a decade to take down Dom and his family and is now finally doing it. We get a big chase through the streets of Rome–this sequence alternates between being quite awesome and quite terrible from moment to moment. Dante ends the chase by exploding a huge bomb near the Vatican, and our heroes are branded as terrorists.