There will be spoilers for Fast X ahead.
At this point, we can all accept the fact that Fast & Furious is basically a superhero franchise in everything but name, with the increasingly preposterous adventures of the core crew easily on a par with anything the Avengers get up to over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
In fact, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Dominic Toretto and the family could probably hand Earth’s Mightiest Heroes their asses on a silver platter if the occasion called for it, and it wouldn’t even stretch suspension of disbelief to breaking point. That’s both one of the best and worst things about The Fast Saga, but the final moments of Fast X have reinforced that the franchise really needs to stop utilizing one of the MCU’s worst recurring tropes.
We are of course talking about the fake-out death, which has been pulled out so often by Kevin Feige’s outfit that whenever somebody dies, nobody really believes it. That’s become increasingly true over the years in regards to Fast & Furious, too, but things were take to a whole new level when Gal Gadot’s Gisele suddenly pops out of a submarine having fallen out of a moving airplane a decade ago. We’ll no doubt get an explanation, but you can guarantee it won’t make any sense.
Let’s look at the list, though, and that’s when you see the point really hammered home. Gisele? Killed and brought back from the dead. Han? Killed twice and brought back from the dead. Letty? Killed and brought back from the dead via amnesia. Roman? A truck fell on him, causing shocked faces all-round, but he was fine seconds later. Jakob Toretto? That remains to be seen, but we’ve been conditioned not to buy into it.
Fake-out deaths rarely do anything but lessen the consequences, and at this stage, who really cares who lives or dies when it doesn’t mean anything?