The ‘Fast X’ Trailer (Watch!)

Everything’s bigger in the Fast and Furious franchise, including the previews. Our first look at Fast X comes in the form of a jumbo-sized, nearly four-minute-long trailer. The penultimate installment of the hugely successful action franchise comes on May 19, and this first look checks all the boxes: dialog about the importance of family, expensive-looking vehicles exploding, a slew of international setpieces, and Vin Diesel wearing a mechanic’s shirt.

Beginning with Rita Moreno, debuting in the franchise as Abuela Toretto, delivering an emotional speech about, you guessed it, family, the trailer introduces Jason Momoa’s Dante, who is poised to be Fast X’s big bad (alongside Charlize Theron’s Cipher). As the trailer makes clear, Dante is related to Hernan Reyes, the drug kingpin played by Joaquim de Almeida in the series seminal 2011 entry  Fast Five. Dante is out for revenge and is targeting Dom’s family, including his son Brian, now aged up to an eight-year-old.

Though this installment looks as glossy and over-the-top as some of the recent features, there does appear to be an attempt to restore the original feeling with a street racing scene. Then again, there’s a scene where Dom’s muscle car gets hooked by two harpoons and crashes a pair of helicopters into each other, so things aren’t exactly grounded here.

The preview for Fast X continues the trend of turning ’90s rap classics into epic orchestral numbers, this time flipping The Notorious B.I.G. and Bone Thugs ‘n Harmony’s “Notorious Thugs” into an operatic nail-biter.

“There’s a war brewing. It’s coming to an end, and it is a race to the finish,” Letterier told Empire. “There will be some tremendous casualties.”

Still, with scenes in three continents, the most impressive cast this side of an Avengers movie, and a 20-plus-year story arc to conclude, even a more grounded Fast and Furious movie has sky-high expectations