In Review: 'Fast X,' 'Master Gardener'

The reportedly penultimate 'Fast & Furious' offers a tail of revenge while the latest from Paul Schrader explores a long, hard road to redemption.

Fast X
Dir. Louis Letterier
141 min.

When the Fast & Furious series kicked in 2001 with the gritty (for a big studio action film) The Fast and the Furious, its future as the most shape-shifty franchise of the 21st century would not have been easy to foresee. A Point Break-inspired thriller set in the underworld of illegal street racing, the original led to a couple of similar sequels that gave way to crime thrillers, international heist movies, and globetrotting espionage thrillers as the scale and the cast expanded and one sequel piled on top of the next. With Fast X, the franchise assumes its latest — and, if plans for it to serve as the first of a two-part finale hold — final form: the high-octane equivalent of the 1960s Batman TV series.

The franchise has been trending in this direction for a some time  and while the divisive F9 moment in which Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Ludacris) headed into orbit in a rocket-fueled Pontiac Fiero might have seemed like the moment when Fast & Furious fully crossed over into self-awareness bordering on musclemen camp, that was before Jason Momoa’s debut as Dante Reyes, the archvillain of Fast X. The child of Herman Reyes, the drug lord antagonist taken out by Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew back in Fast Five (still the series’ peak), Dante is described as “The Devil” and set up as the foe to end all foes. But instead of a sneering sadist, Momoa plays him as a flamboyant, colorfully attired, unapologetically silly madman who performs acts of terror with an enviable sense of joie de vivre. Momoa’s sole direction seems to have been “Go for it, man.” He does.

Intent on making Dom and friends suffer rather than on killing them (a convenient motivation if you want to stretch the story across two films), Dante opens the first phase of an elaborate plan by framing the gang for a terrorist attack on Rome after sending a pinball-like bomb rolling through its streets. To counter his attack, the group disperses into smaller units. Old enemies return as friends (again), and the series picks up some high-profile new additions in the form of Rita Moreno and Brie Larson. (One plays Dom’s grandmother. The other’s a highly accomplished superspy. You can probably figure out who’s who.) 

Directed by Louis Leterrier, who subbed in for series vet Justin Lin at the last moment, the film’s action scenes are well-choreographed and effective enough, but struggle to overcome the weightlessness that’s crept into the series as it's moved further and further away from anything recognizable as reality. The familiar characters banter familiarly. The only surprises come in the way of some unexpected returns, at least one of which is as absurd as the return of the once extremely deceased Han (Sung Kang). (After conquering space, literally defying death seems like the only card the series has left to play.) 

Fast & Furious lost any sense of gravitas a few films back and Fast X is pure, self-indulgent silliness. If its artistic, commercial, and cultural peak — roughly Fast Five through The Fate of the Furious — was its imperial phase, Fast X is the peak of its Caligula era, a film driven by decadent whims, florid gestures, excess, and insanity. But if you’ve enjoyed any past entries, and if that sounds at all appealing rather than a reason to retreat to other corners of the cinematic world, may as well hop on for the first lap of this, allegedly, final ride. —Keith Phipps

Master Gardener
Dir. Paul Schrader
107 min.

(A quick warning: Master Gardener is about a horticulturist who’s forced to reckon with his own dark past. The trailer and other reviews of the film have been coy about what that past is, but it’s revealed early and I feel it would be pointlessly vague for me to write around it. So if you wish to go in completely clean, I’d advise coming back to this review later.) 

“Gardening is a belief in the future. A belief that things will happen according to plan, that change will come in its due time.” 

That’s Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) jotting down his thoughts after hours, sitting alone at a plain wooden desk in the small, austere, minimally appointed living space he shares with no one. He is the latest of Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” types, familiar from his script for Taxi Driver and a much longer list of films he has written and directed, including American Gigolo, Light Sleeper, First Reformed and The Card Counter. There’s often the feeling these men, wracked with guilt and inner torment, have deliberately imposed these conditions on themselves, as if they’ve constructed a prison of their own making or custom-fitted a crown of thorns. When they emerge from solitary confinement, they act on the world in dramatic, shocking, often violent ways. The only question is whether redemption will follow. 

It will be a particularly long way back for Narvel, whose sins are even graver than the lead character in The Card Counter, who’d participated in the torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Through meticulously tending the blooms at Gracewood Gardens—an estate owned by Norma (Sigourney Weaver), a wealthy dowager who lives alone for more obvious reasons—Narvel has been planting the seeds for his own rehabilitation, though forgiveness will not be easy to achieve from himself or from other people. When Norma asks him to take on her multiracial grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) as an apprentice, he has to confront his past directly. For one, they’re both drug addicts. For another, Narvel was a white supremacist primed to hate people like Maya not so long ago. 

Through flashbacks, Schrader reveals the shocking extent of Narvel’s sins, which are mitigated somewhat by his cooperation with the authorities in ratting out a murderous gang of white power goons. (In an amusingly bizarre touch, the marshal looking after Narvel’s witness protection wears a “We Should All Be Feminists” t-shirt.) Such stories of redemption have been told in films before, like American History X or The Believer, but Schrader follows his own formula with Master Gardener, which carries a heavy spiritual weight despite religion never getting explicitly evoked. The fact that Narvel has not removed his tattoos is itself a fascinating window into his conscience: He doesn’t feel that his shame should be so easily scrubbed away. 

Schrader’s willingness to confront the audience with uncomfortable questions remains exciting, and lends a natural tension to Master Gardener, because our feelings about the possibility of pardoning Narvel might differ from Schrader’s, particularly once violence again becomes part of that equation. Yet despite Edgerton’s deep, haunted performance in the lead role, there’s a sense of diminishing returns after First Reformed and The Card Counter, like he’s telling a slightly worse version of the same story. The horticulture angle plants metaphors aplenty into the voiceover narration (e.g. “The smell at certain times of the year is minty with a hint of almond. Gives you a real buzz, like the buzz you get just before you pull the trigger.”) and certain aspects of the film, like Maya’s addiction and her generic lowlife dealers, are woefully unconvincing. Swindell does fine work, but Maya feels more like a device than a person. 

Still, Schraderheads will find much to savor about his commitment to broken, solitary men like Narvel and Schrader’s persistence of moral vision. He also gets a humdinger of a turn from Weaver as a sinister counterpoint to Narvel, the type of rich person whose seeming generosity is insincere and papers over a more polite form of racism that she has no interest in reforming. Whether you think a person like Narvel deserves a second chance or not, Master Gardener has the integrity to suggest that the road back isn’t a clear or easy one. It’s a seed that needs constant tending. (3/5)