Running on Empty: FAST X

I watched Fast X with a sinking feeling. Oh, no, I thought. This is what people who dislike the Fast & Furious movies sight unseen assume they’re all like. Here’s a nonsensically plotted movie with Vin Diesel’s scowling visage and big ensemble of honorary family, cartoon-logic special effects action, grunted monosyllabic emotionalism, short shorts, street races, super-spy silliness, convoluted call-backs, cringing humor, clanging cameos, and sentimental emotionality in a gear-head soap opera of the dumbest order in grindingly repetitive sequences of weightless noise and chaos punctuated by preposterous feats of vehicular mayhem. Sure, they all have bits of that, and that's often fun, but this one gets the mix all wrong. I imagined dials and knobs and levers and switches pushed around in a haphazard manner resulting in a cacophony of empty confusion. It has everything us fans love about the series, but it’s jumbled up in the wrong proportions with ineffectual execution.

New-to-the-series director Louis Leterrier just doesn’t have the subtle touch of Justin Lin, who directed five of the previous 10 entries. Lin often made the preposterous sing with clean emotional hooks and an eye for expressive action beats that leapt lightly over the possible into the excitingly excessive. Leterrirer falls shorts exactly how Furious Seven’s James Wan and Fate of the Furious’s F. Gary Gray did, but more so. They were over-cranking everything but the characters’ basic believability and the plot’s streamlined cohesion. He adds the latter, too. Maybe Lin’s the only one who can get the balance right, though Vin’s the one who really has the reins at the this point. Regardless, X makes me appreciate how much closer Wan and Gray got than Leterrier does.

It doesn’t help comparisons that the first action scene—indeed, the first scene entirely—is made up of clips reused from Lin’s Fast Five with X’s flamboyant villain (Jason Momoa) awkwardly CG retconned in. The whole project then peaks early with a just-the-wrong-side-of-preposterous sequence in which an enormous round bomb pinballs through the streets of Rome. (That’s the good stuff.) The rest is just so much scattered character work—fleeting sketches and disconnected gobs of exposition that ill serves most every returning character and a few new ones—amidst some of the franchise’s limpest fight choreography and dopiest plotting, near abstract in its confusion and lack of emotional reality. That, too, peaks early when Rita Moreno, tears in her eyes, hugs Diesel while the score swells with a treacly reprise of “See You Again.”

I felt myself straining to enjoy myself, or at least tell the straw man hater in my imagination that, no, they aren’t usually like this. That said, I did find it merely disappointing and perplexing more than outright enraging, like the movie’s an overworked engine running off the last wispy fumes of my affection for this whole dumb fun series. Perhaps landing more frustratingly incomplete than anything else, the movie, advertised as the first half (or maybe third) of a finale, simply throws a bunch of nonsense in the air and then ends abruptly. Maybe they’ll figure it out next time. (Maybe it’ll take yet another round of villain-to-ally arcs or back-from-the-dead or secret-relative revelations to really stick the landing again.) A satisfying resolution may not make this particular entry any better, but at least it wouldn’t leave the franchise stranded on the side of the road with nothing left in the tank. That’s the sinking feeling that had me slump out of the multiplex grumbling that the exuberant F9 would’ve made a better finale—so far.

Vanished: NOW YOU SEE ME

If you had stopped the heisting magician thriller Now You See Me halfway through, I’d have been just as happy with the movie’s conclusion. Actually, I’d have been a smidge happier, since that would mean I got to leave the theater an hour earlier. Everything about the movie feels arbitrary to its core. If, at the midway point, you’d asked me to explain who the characters are, I’d have been at a loss. They’re given absolutely no characterization outside of what the plot demands of them, which is very little and up to change with the whims of the twists. If you’d asked me to describe the plot, I would’ve vaguely muttered something about stolen money and investigating cops. What happens makes little to no sense in the moment and less when you stop to think about it. By the movie’s conclusion, it’s easy to tell that Important Things are cohering, but awfully hard to figure out why or why we should care.

Within the first few scenes, it’s clear the movie has already failed Siskel’s lunch test: Is this movie more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch? When you see the names in the cast, it’s easy to think a filmmaker can start with this much talent at his disposal and end up with at least a mildly diverting film. (You’d be wrong, by the way.) Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, and Dave Franco play magicians who are given the blueprints for an amazing trick under mysterious circumstances. Michael Caine plays their bankroller (and a reminder that The Prestige is a much better magic thriller). Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent are detectives who enter the picture when the magicians appear to heist millions of Euros out of a Parisian bank during their Vegas act. Finally, there’s Morgan Freeman as a magician debunker who exists herein as Mr. Explanation. I knew something had gone horribly wrong when I actually forgot he was in the movie when he wasn’t in a scene.

The arrogantly nonsensical plotting from screenwriters Ed Solomon, Edward Ricourt, and Boaz Yakin does nothing to explain why these magicians are suddenly famous. Their act looks lousy with terrible patter and a sparse collection of cheap tricks, the worst of which are clearly aided by CGI. But, they’re famous nonetheless and though we never get a good sense of their personalities or how they relate to each other beyond what we surmise about the actors themselves from other roles and public personas, they’re supposed to be, well, I don’t know. Are the magicians our protagonists? Maybe. Their stunt ends with the possibly stolen money rained down on the audience. How very Robin Hood of them. But then there’s the dogged detectives, who have a slight edge in the sensible, stable characterization department. I liked them more, but couldn’t make heads or tails of what the movie was trying to do with them.

I’d have actually gone along with it if it gave the actors more memorable reasons for doing what they do. Maybe the problem isn’t that it’s nuts, but that it’s not nearly nuts enough. Either way, I sat dumbfounded by how little I cared. Director Louis Leterrier, who started his career with promising actioners like The Transporter and The Incredible Hulk before hitting Hollywood junk like Clash of the Titans, films Now You See Me in a blur of fast-moving images that can’t move fast enough to outrun the looming sense of unsatisfyingly unstable plotting. Scattershot plot points, aggressively explained shrugs of twists, and nothing characters all contribute to a singularly mindless two-hour sit in a theater. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense to me; it’s that the movie can’t even be bothered to come up with parameters for itself with which it could make sense. At least this movie about magic manages to pull two good vanishing acts. The first was when my money disappeared from my wallet. The second was when the movie’s specifics left my mind almost entirely even a mere 12 hours after leaving the theater.