The “Fast & Furious” franchise, whose origins long predate the MCU and modern Hollywood’s attempts at creating cinematic universes, has brought back so many characters from past iterations that it has created an “Avengers”-like world in its own bro-y right. That convoluted yet crowd-pleasing cross-referencing will continue in what’s supposed to be the first part of the series’ final entry, “Fast X.” Vin Diesel himself, who plays Dominic Toretto, has spoken about how the upcoming tenth film will revisit “Fast Five” to explore the backstory of the new villain.
Few film franchises have retconned and rewritten their own continuity more than the “Fast & Furious” movies. Characters like Han (Sung Kang) and Letty (Michele Rodriguez) have returned from the dead (will Gal Gadot’s Gisele follow suit?), villains like Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) and Dom’s brother Jakob (John Cena) have joined Dom’s “family” to become heroes, and the official chronology of the films bounce around like a 1970 Dodge Charger swinging from the clifftops. It’s so common for the films to flash back to previous events in order to make sense of the timeline that it would be weird at this point if “Fast X” didn’t retell a scene from another movie in the series.
A furious recontextualizationUniversal
As hinted in the trailer, “Fast X” will reportedly show the bank vault heist from five films ago from the perspective of one Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa), son of the antagonist from “Fast Five.” Diesel, who has been a producer of the series since the fourth film, talked to Total Film magazine about returning to past events in true franchise flashback fashion in order to create a grander narrative:
“…there is so much un-mined territory within the films that, when you follow the storyline, it produces a really interesting and rewarding story. You’ll see as the finale pans out, it’ll make sense why, in the same way we went back to the first film for ‘Fast 9,’ we went back to the fifth film for ‘Fast X.'”
Diesel is referring to the fact that “F9” establishes that Jakob Toretto was involved in the death of their father, an event that was pivotal in building Dom’s character all the way back in the first “The Fast and the Furious” movie. It turns out that Jakob tampered with the car that was racing against daddy Jack Toretto and may have accidentally caused the crash that killed him. Similarly, Dante was actually a villain hiding in the shadows this whole time, not dissimilar to the instance when it was revealed at the end of “Fast & Furious 6” that Deckard Shaw actually killed Han in “Tokyo Drift.” If this all sounds like convoluted soap opera plotting, that’s because it is. But it’s also super fun, and it’ll be a hoot to see how “Fast X” further twists the series’ timeline into a muscly ouroboros.
“Fast X” rides into theaters on May 19, 2023.
