Tag: The Wiz

Ever since I first looked at the release schedule for 2023, I have been dreading Fast X. The tenth Fast & Furious film seems completely pointless. I love a good car chase as well as the next guy, but Dom (Vin Diesel) and his “family” long ago exceeded both the bonds of Newtonian physics and cinematic decency. In the last one, F9, they literally drove cars into space. When a long-running film series that does not take place in space suddenly decides to go into space, it means they’re out of ideas. That’s called the “Moonraker Rule.”

Given Fast X’s running time of 141 minutes, it looked like a bad weekend was brewing for me. Then, a stroke of luck. On Saturday night, my wife LJ and I went to the monthly Time Warp Drive-In for Singalong Sinema: Mad Musicals in May, a triple feature of Little Shop of Horrors, The Blues Brothers, and The Wiz. It was a perfect night to camp out at the Malco Summer Drive-In’s Screen 4 with several hundred of our closest friends. Next door, Screen 3 was also filling up with a crowd who favored muscle cars and giant trucks.

At dusk, the films started. A miscommunication led to the Time Warp films being played out of order, so The Wiz rolled first. From our lawn chairs next to our parked car, we could see both screens 4 and 3. That’s when I got the idea. It’s highly unethical to review a film without watching it. But the truth is, nobody who is going to go see Fast X cares what a critic like me has to say about it. You’re either down with $350 million and 141 minutes worth of explosions and big guys in muscle cars going vroom, or you’re not. But technically, I was watching Fast X, even if the sound I was hearing was the Tony Award-winning score of The Wiz. If the other Fast & Furious films were anything to go by, it’s not as if hearing the dialogue would shed any light on the plot that was allegedly happening between car chases. I have seen at least five of them, and I have never understood what is going on. Is Dom a street racer? A bank robber? Some kind of super spy? All of the above?

The first big improvement I noticed in Fast X is that Aquaman himbo Jason Momoa is the big bad, a drug lord named Dante who is dead set on revenge for Dom’s crimes against (what else?) his family. This information comes from an extended opening flashback taken from Fast Five, where Dom and the crew steal a bank vault and drag it through the streets of Rio. Aquaman’s exquisitely-styled locks mean that, unlike earlier installments with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Jason Statham, the story does not boil down to bald guys punching each other. Momoa’s performance is so excessive it lands like a silent film actor’s pantomime — especially when accompanied by the dulcet tones of Diana Ross as urban Dorothy Gale.

At roughly the time in The Wiz when Michael Jackson is introduced as the Scarecrow, Charlize Theron is reintroduced in Fast X as Cipher. I hope she got paid a lot of money. Same for Rita Moreno and Helen Mirren, both of whom have scenes with Dom which I think are supposed to be motherly, but come off as romantic. You go, ladies!

As Diana Ross and Michael Jackson explode into the radio hit “Ease on Down the Road,” Fast X travels to Rome, where Dante is planting a bomb that looks like a giant metal ball. Naturally, automotive hijinks ensue, with Dom and fam chasing the big ball through the streets of the Eternal City. By the time Nipsey Russell is introduced as the Tin Man, the giant ball is on fire; it eventually explodes in the Tiber River in a way that is somehow both good and bad for Dom.

In conclusion, The Wiz, a box office bomb widely credited as ending the ’70s golden age of blaxploitation cinema, is flawed, but much more fun than its reputation suggests. The disco-era bass work in Quincy Jones’ soundtrack is especially choice. Fast X is elevated by the presence of Aquaman and a flagrant disregard for human constraints like “good taste.” It’s the best film in the Fast & Furious series to kind of watch out of the corner of your eye while doing something else.

Fast X
Now playing
Multiple locations
(But unfortunately not alongside The Wiz again)