I Think The Fast Saga Has Finally Run Out Of Gas

The Fast Saga is speeding into its long-awaited finale, the forthcoming Fast 11, but the Fast & Furious movies may already be out of fuel before crossing the finish line. Following two years of relative silence since the Fast & Furious franchise’s last movie, 2023’s Fast X, Vin Diesel recently announced new details on the plans for Fast 11 to conclude the Fast Saga. Among these are Fast 11 arriving theaters in April 2027 (a staggering 26 years since the Fast Saga began with 2001’s The Fast & the Furious), along with a return to Los Angeles and the culture of street racing that the series began with. Additionally, Fast 11‘s finale will also involve, in Diesel’s words, “re-uniting Dom and Brian O’Connor.”

While it isn’t clear how the late Paul Walker’s Brian O’Connor will be brought into the story, another concern going into Fast 11 is one of the franchise’s relevance and sustained energy. Put simply, the Fast Saga feels like it is increasingly running on fumes, through a combination of the series continuing past its perfect ending point in 2015’s Furious 7 and plunging head first into more and more ridiculous territory. Here is why the Fast Saga may already be out of gas going into Fast 11.

The Fast Saga Peaked With Furious 7 (Save for One Movie)

The Fast Saga has had an unusual history, to say the least, beginning with its humble “Point Break with street racing” origins in 2001’s The Fast & the Furious. The middling success of the subsequent Fast & Furious movies eventually culminated into the franchise becoming a box office and pop culture supernova with 2011’s Fast Five, with the series greatly capitalizing on its surge in momentum with 2013’s Fast & Furious 6 and 2015’s Furious 7. The latter also ended up being an unexpected emotional turning point for the franchise with the untimely death of Paul Walker in 2013, and the heartfelt tribute that Furious 7 paid to Walker. That also ended up being a turning point for the Fast Saga in another way, with the subsequent installments failing to resonate with the same power as the Fast Five through Furious 7 trilogy.

There is one exception to that trend, though: 2019’s spinoff Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. Building on the chemistry and rivalry of Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs and Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw, Hobbs & Shaw captured the energy of the Fast Saga’s heyday with great car stunts, fight sequences, banter between Johnson and Statham, a thoroughly entertaining villain performance by Idris Elba, and strong direction by John Wick co-director David Leitch. Looking at the Fast & Furious movies post-Furious 7, Hobbs & Shaw is the only one that feels on the same wavelength and of the same high-octane caliber. Hobbs & Shaw also highlights how the Fast Saga could have ideally continued after Furious 7, with that movie acting as an emotional finale while characters like Hobbs, Shaw, and others moved into side stories. That also highlights how scattershot the main Fast & Furious has become since the heights of Furious 7.

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The Description of Fast 11 Completely Undercuts Where the Franchise Has Gone (& Where Fast X Ended)

Adding to the problem of the Fast Saga’s post-Furious 7 malaise is Diesel’s own description of what Fast 11 has in store. A return to street racing culture and the series’ original Los Angeles setting reads like a long-awaited return home for the Fast Saga on paper, but it also completely runs up against the franchise’s evolution from relatively low stakes and grounded street racing to the literal save-the-world plots that have been a regular feature of the Fast Saga from Furious 7 on. Going back to street racing and car culture simply cannot help but feel like a plummet in stakes after Dom and his family have fought supervillains to keep God’s Eye and other doomsday tech out of the wrong hands in multiple movies.

Moreover, the entire notion of going back to street racing already feels like a radical left turn with the cliffhanger ending of Fast X itself. Not only is Gal Gadot’s Gisele Yashar back from her apparent death in Fast & Furious 6, but the movie also concludes with the sinister Cipher (Charlize Theron) joining Dom’s crew, and Dom and his young son Brian also facing down a collapsing dam right in front of them. With that and Hobbs’ returning for his own showdown with Jason Momoa’s Dante Reyes, a return to street racing does not just ignore the massive cliffhanger stakes of Fast X, but cannot help but feel anticlimactic with where that cliffhanger has taken the series to.

The Fast Saga Has Gotten Too Ridiculous (Even by Its Own Standards)

It’s become something of a selling point for the Fast Saga that the franchise has a loose relationship with physics and reality on a good day. However, while it was once an endearing novelty for every Fast & Furious movie to go out of its way to outdo the craziness of the last, it has gradually become a punchline and a source of warranted criticism. Put simply, the Fast Saga has turned into the action movie equivalent of a Road Runner cartoon, and in doing so, has lost much of what helped it break out in the first place.

Fast Five, Fast & Furious 6, and Furious 7 all had plenty of absurdity to go around, but each was also predicated on actual car stunts, fight choreography, and physical grit that, combined with the franchise’s theme of family, made them genuinely enthralling action movies. Though Hobbs & Shaw arrived amidst the series’ shift in wackiness, it too strove to balance its absurd moments with a believability rooted in the carefully planned stunts and action that Fast & Furious audience loves. The latter day Fast Saga has seen a real shift into not just the physically impossible, but the genuinely laughable, to the point that Dom driving his car down the face of a dam to escape an explosion no longer has the slightest stakes or believability. With the Fast Saga‘s inability to keep its level of ridiculousness in check, the series simply hasn’t felt the same since Furious 7 with the exception of Hobbs & Shaw. Even a gas tank fueled by the power of family needs a refill at some point, and going into franchise’s planned finale of Fast 11, it feels more than ever like Fast & Furious franchise might finally be running on empty.

Fast 11 is targeting an April 2027 release date.