The end of the road has only just begun, and "Fast X" leaves behind plenty of questions for
the next installment of the franchise to answer. Here's what happened in all the furious action.
Warning: Spoilers for "Fast X" ahead!
Dominic Toretto has faced a lot of trouble in his life, from international supercriminals to
members of his own family, but he's never faced anyone quite like Jason Momoa's Dante Reyes,
a psychotic mastermind with a major grudge against the Toretto crew.
"I'm Dante. Enchante."
Dom and his friends killed Reyes' father and stole the family's money stash back
in "Fast Five," so Dante views Dom as the source of all of his suffering. He
makes it his mission to make Dom suffer in kind.
Dante sets to work dismantling the entire Toretto family, and he more-or-less succeeds by the end
of the film, leaving almost everyone in some kind of dangerous limbo. Dom himself narrowly
escapes Dante's wrath atop a dam in Portugal. He finds himself in the water below with no means of
escape as Dante prepares to explode the whole dam and bring it down around Dom and his son Brian.
Moments before, Dom remarks that Dante's one mistake was leaving him with a car,
but now he doesn't even have that. It's hard to imagine how he finds
his way out of this one. We'll have to wait until the next film to find out.
John Cena's Jakob Toretto was only recently welcomed back into the family fold after
years of estrangement and resentment. After redeeming himself at the end of "F9," Jakob
devotes his time and considerable talent to protecting Little Brian at all costs,
taking him to a secret hideout and then trying to help him escape with Dom.
"'Sup?"
"Uncle Jakob?" "Your dad sent me."
It's clear throughout that Jakob is also still carrying a lot of guilt over
his previous actions. He wants to be a good uncle and a good brother to prove that he's
earned where he is now. That desire, and the guilt behind it, culminates late in the film,
when Jakob realizes that he's lost Brian to Dante and only has one move left:
Sacrificing himself so Dom can get to his son. Despite Dom's protests, he goes down in a blaze
of glory, taking out Dante's men and clearing a path for his big brother to keep fighting.
The film is moving really fast at this point, so there's little time to mourn Jakob,
or to even confirm that he's actually dead. It seems like he's probably gone,
but the fallout of his sacrifice is very much yet to come.
Michelle Rodriguez's Letty Ortiz is sort of the odd woman out of the Toretto crew after the job in
Rome goes very wrong. It makes her the last major fighting chance the family has against Dante.
Letty gets picked up by the Agency very early on, and she's taken to a black site where she's
forced to share a cell with Charlize Theron's Cipher, who's already had a run-in with Dante.
The two women don't get along, to say the least, but Letty realizes Cipher has a way out of the
black site. When she gets word from Brie Larson's Tess that there's hope for the family yet,
Letty decides to team up with Cipher for an escape. What she thinks will be a quick way out,
though, eventually leads to the reveal that she's stuck in Antarctica. We leave Letty
alongside her former enemy, with no real idea of what's happened to the rest of her family.
Dante's attack in Rome throws the family into chaos,
and the Toretto crew spends the rest of "Fast X" divided. But at least Tej,
Roman, Ramsey, and Han have each other. With few resources, thanks to Dante's hacking,
they hop around the world in search of weapons they can use to head out and help Dom. They
finally get a planeload of support that will drop them right into the fight in Portugal.
What they didn't count on was a last-minute betrayal. Aimes,
who had been the acting director of The Agency and was supposedly helping Dom,
reveals himself as Dante's longtime ally just in time to hop up with a missile launcher and shoot
down the plane. The last we see of Tej, Roman, Ramsey, and Han, they're running for cover in
the back of the plane. The plane crashes around the side of a mountain and bursts into flames.
The back of that plane was loaded with all kinds of cool tech they could use to escape,
and if Han's very existence has taught us anything,
it's that Toretto crew members are pretty hard to kill. So odds are we'll see them all again.
It's not clear how Aimes managed to get to such a significant post within The Agency,
but Mr. Nobody is in hiding, and Little Nobody is seriously injured in the Rome incident, so he's
the man left in charge. Tess tries to fight him on it, but Aimes' standing with the organization
is such that she can't usurp his authority or stop his initial efforts to take down the Toretto crew.
Aimes later endears himself to Dom, then even later doubles back and betrays him.
It turns out that Aimes has been working alongside Dante for a full decade,
ever since the heist in "Fast Five," and his presence in The Agency was the leg up
that Dante needed to achieve his goals. He may have compromised the whole organization.
Dante Reyes spends a lot of time talking about suffering, and that his father was killed 10
years earlier. By the end of the movie, he seems to have achieved his goal of squeezing out every
ounce of suffering from Dom that he possibly can. Every member of
the Toretto crew is either apparently dead, missing, or in dire mortal peril.
"I am the man who's going to break your family, piece by piece."
So, does that mean Dante won? We know the long answer to that question is some version
of "No," because there's still at least one more movie to go after this one. But for the moment,
there's definitely an air of victory here, if only because it's going to take what's
left of the Toretto crew time to pick up the pieces. The big question, then, is:
Will Dante let all this winning go to his head and make a big mistake?
Jason Statham's Deckard Shaw is only in "Fast X" briefly, when Han decides to go
to him for help in securing resources to keep up the fight against Dante. But his
quick appearance is quite significant. For one, it's the first time the pair have met
since Shaw seemingly killed Han years ago. It also reveals something even bigger about Dante's fight.
"Let's dig some graves."
While in Shaw's hideout, Ramsey discovers that the money Dante stole from the crew's accounts
has been used to hire mercenaries from around the world and send them after everyone who's
ever helped the Toretto crew do anything. That means dozens of people are now targets,
including Shaw's own mother, Queenie, who tried to help Dom get out of Rome earlier in the film.
With his mother in the crosshairs, Shaw springs into action, loads up his gear,
and heads out in hopes of keeping Queenie safe. He's not part of the main fight against Dante, but
he is heading into something dramatic and probably very bloody, leaving us to wonder how that fight
goes. We'll just have to see what the next film will reveal about Shaw's personal mission.
Several new faces emerge throughout "Fast X," including Tess, Mr. Nobody's daughter who believes
in Dom no matter what the rest of the Agency says. There's also Daniela Melchior's Isabel,
a Brazilian street racer who also happens to have ties to Dom's past. She's the sister of Elena,
Dom's former lover and Little Brian's mother, who died in "Fate of the
Furious." Isabel's ties to the Toretto family push her to help Dom fight Dante,
and Dom's instinct to protect his family pushes him to protect Isabel at all costs.
By the end of Dom's adventures in Rio, Tess is seriously wounded and Isabel
is very nearly killed by Dante. Dom makes the decision to put the two women together,
asking Isabel to drive Tess to a hospital, leaving them both seemingly safe from Dante's
influence for now. So far, they're relatively minor allies, but thanks to the mercenaries
looking for everyone aligned with Toretto, they're now in the crosshairs once again.
Mia Toretto, played by Jordana Brewster, has been in and out of her family's battles
in recent years, spending a lot of time off in hiding with her husband Brian and
their children. In "Fast X," she hangs around to visit with her Abuelita, played by Rita Moreno,
in Los Angeles. She then watches Little Brian while Dom and Letty head to Rome.
When The Agency comes for them both, Mia works to fight them off alongside Jakob,
who takes Brian and tells Mia to head back to her own family.
By the end of the film, as far as we know, Mia is safe with her husband and children,
back in hiding while the fight goes on without her. But we also know that Dante has sent hired
killers after the entire family, and while Mia is good at staying hidden,
she might not be able to stay hidden forever. Once she hears about what's happening with Dom,
though, she might not want to stay hidden, so don't be surprised if
she pops up again in the next movie, ready to fight alongside her brother.
For years, Mr. Nobody was a crucial ally to the Toretto family, a leader with seemingly
infinite resources who saw enough potential in Dom and his crew to shield them from the
fallout of their missions. His protege, Little Nobody, picked up that baton after Mr. Nobody's
injury and remained a major supporter of the family while Mr. Nobody went into hiding.
Now, thanks to Dante's machinations, both Nobodies are out of commission. Mr. Nobody is gone,
Little Nobody is injured, and The Agency is in the hands of a turncoat. So Dom and his family
have lost some critical support at the time when they need it most. That said,
neither of the Nobodies is dead, and they got to leadership positions in
an international spy agency because they're smart, strategic, and know people. It wouldn't
be surprising at all to see one or both of them come roaring back in the next film.
Cipher begins "Fast X" in a pretty low place. Dante tracked her down,
blackmailed all of her men, and used her own resources against her,
leaving her nearly dead and in the hands of The Agency. But while Cipher's been down before,
she's never been down for long, and she reveals that she has an escape plan.
"She's a monster to battle with, I gotta say."
At the Agency black site in Antarctica, Cipher reveals that she's not out of options after all,
and summons a submarine like the one she commanded in "Fate of the Furious" up out
of the ice. That's impressive enough, but the real jaw-dropping reveal is that she's
working with none other than Gal Gadot's Gisele Yashar, who seemingly died in "Fast & Furious
6." Gisele's presence after years away raises a whole new round of questions,
including how Han might react when he sees her again. Cipher is clearly still full of surprises,
and those surprises might just force Dom to team up with her.
Dante's war will clearly keep going into the next film. It's a big story,
so it keeps going after the credits roll.
In the film's mid-credits sequence, Dante targets another former Toretto
ally who played a major role in the death of his father: Luke Hobbs, played by Dwayne Johnson,
who delivered the fatal shot to Hernan Reyes in "Fast Five." Hobbs discovers
that Dante has tracked him down, and hears a message that "the devil" is coming for him.
Naturally, Hobbs doesn't back down from the fight. The question now is how his fight with
Dante will connect to Dom's, and vice versa. The last time we saw them together within the films,
they were allies who'd just finished a mission that reunited the family. But
Hobbs has been off on his own for a while, so it's hard to tell just how close they'll get.
Dom and Mia's grandmother is only present in "Fast X" for a few minutes early on,
but she leaves a lasting impression. Like Dom, his grandmother has endured tremendous loss,
and she's learned through that loss to value and protect the family that she has left. For Dom,
the fight is much closer, much more tangible, even when all he's doing is teaching Little B
to drive. So when his grandmother tells him that with his family by his side,
he can do anything, that really means something.
Dom clings to the idea that if he sticks with the ones he loves and has faith,
they can survive what's coming for them, no matter how bad it gets. We don't get to
see how he deals with the latest round of losses right away, since the film ends on
a cliffhanger. But we do know where Dom's focus is and what he values, because Abuelita told us.