Seatbelts on, Fast fans – the saga is approaching its final few quarter-miles. Hollwood’s ultimate vehicular action series is readying its tenth instalment, Fast X, for the early part of the summer, designed as the first part of a double-whammy send-off for Dom Toretto and co. – and Empire has the world-first look at the latest chapter. See above for a fresh peek at Vin Diesel’s pedal-to-the-metal hero, ready to ride once more with his iconic Dodge Charger. Picking up after 2021’s F9: The Fast Saga, the stakes are raising even higher for the Fast family in Fast X – the continuing threat of Charlize Theron’s ever-lurking villain Cypher bolstered by Jason Momoa’s incoming villain Dante (read more about him here), and twists and turns that will once again have the NOS-boosting crew fighting among themselves.
“There’s a war brewing,” teases incoming director Louis Leterrier, who picked up the reins from filmmaker Justin Lin after the shoot began. “It’s coming to an end, and it is a race to the finish. There will be some tremendous casualties.” Side-switching has long been an integral part of the Fast DNA (it might as well be in every villain’s contract that they’ll return in the following instalment as a hero), and fans can expect a considerable reshuffle of the team as we head into the endgame. “People are going to need to take sides,” Leterrier warns. “Alliances will need to be made. Good guys will become bad guys, bad guys will become good guys.”
When Leterrier joined the production weeks after cameras started rolling (with long-term Fast director Lin citing creative differences as he exited), he stepped up to ground the film in more ways than one – especially after F9 saw the series come closer than ever before to breaching the final frontier with its skybound rocket-booster car. “I’m more practical than other directors, and I brought it back to earth,” he says of Fast X. “We went for real stunts, which we’re enhancing with visual effects. We shot in LA, London, Rio, Portugal. We blew up Hummers flying around Rome. There’ll be some iconic imagery in this one. You will see: as long as Dom Toretto is behind the wheel of a car, there’s nothing he cannot do.” We’ll raise an ice-cold bottle of Corona to that.
Read more about Fast X in the upcoming issue of Empire – to be revealed soon. Fast X comes to UK cinemas from 19 May.