If you were to do a shot every time somebody in a Fast & Furious movie makes mention of family, there’s not a chance you’d be able to remember anything that happened onscreen. It isn’t just a tagline, though, with Fast X proving it by healing a bitter divide and drawing a line under one of Hollywood’s most high-profile feuds.
While the reasoning behind Dwayne Johnson’s surprise return as Luke Hobbs have already sparked many theories that include a big pile of cash and his desire to find his name attached to a guaranteed box office hit after a couple of high-profile setbacks, you just knew Vin Diesel was going to tie it back to the F-word eventually.
Surprisingly, though, he didn’t say it outright when breaking his silence on the matter in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, but it’s not hard to infer what he’s getting at when he explained how he managed to convince The Rock to renege on his word and be reabsorbed back into the fold.
“The conversations have been going on for a while. The conversations are what makes the best movie? What feels right for a franchise? How do you make as many people happy in this world? And both of them clearly make people happy. Underscore that with this running theme of unity that prevails in the Fast and Furious saga, and it’s a match made in heaven.”
What is that running theme of unity of which he speaks? That’s right; it’s family. While there were plenty of other returns and cameos dotted throughout Fast X, it was Johnson who seized the majority of the headlines for obvious reasons. He said he wouldn’t be back, and everybody believed him, but now the gang is back together and almost at full strength for their final stand against Jason Momoa’s scenery-chewing Dante Reyes.