Warning: SPOILERS for Fast X are ahead!
As CinemaBlend’s own Eric Eisenberg pointed out in his Fast X review, Jason Momoa’s Dante Reyes is essentially the Fast & Furious franchise’s version of The Joker. This man with a few screws loose thrives on chaos and won’t hesitate to kill, whether his victims are planned targets or even people helping him out. Case in point with the latter, arguably the most disturbing scene in Fast X is when Dante is chatting with some of his goons while painting their toenails, only for the audience to learn that they’ve both been murdered at his hands. While the moment was pretty grim, it turns out Universal Pictures had no problems including it in this 2023 new movie release.
Director Louis Leterrier shared this information while appearing on ReelBlend after host Sean O’Connell asked if the studio had any kind of “pushback” for that specific Fast X scene. As it turns out, the filmmaker hadn’t even intended for the scene to be included in the movie’s final cut, but rather as an additional piece of content to be shown at a later date. Leterrier recalled:
No! They forced me to put it in. I honestly will tell you. They asked me to put it in, not forced me. They asked me to put it in. I shot it almost as a joke. Not really a joke but almost ‘Wouldn’t this be great for a DVD extra thing.’ You always see Dante as a peacock, always showboating for the world. How is he intimately? What’s his everyday life?
After flashing back to the events of Fast Five to show what Dante Reyes was up to during that movie’s climax, Fast X brought the villain into the present day narrative by having him show up at Cipher’s base and blackmail her minions into serving him by threatening their loved ones. Unfortunately for two of them, rather than dying while trying take our Dominic Toretto and his allies, Dante decided to kill them himself, as we see their corpses taped to lawn chairs, with their eyes forced open and frozen drinks in their hand while Dante, dressed in a brightly-colored robe, monologues about the next stage of his plans while painting their toes. After he’s done, Momoa’s character heads off to make new preparations while his “friends” stay for the rest of the “party.”
The Fast & Furious franchise is no stranger to violence, but this felt like it was ripped straight from a horror movie, and it reminded viewers that Dante has more than a few screws loose. Louis Leterrier would have been more than comfortable just having this be a deleted scene for Fast X’s home media release, but as he said below, Universal was insistent this be widely seen:
I put it in, we started test screening it. And frankly the studio was like, ‘Yeah, we have to put it in. It’s crazy, but let’s do it.’
Dante Reyes is sitting comfortably in the final minutes of Fast X, with Dom and his son Brian surrounded by explosives, and Dante’s surprise ally, Alan Ritchson’s Aimes, having shot down the plane carrying Dom’s team. So it’ll be interesting to see how Fast & Furious 11 (which Louis Leterrier is returning to direct) gets our heroes of their sticky situation, but however it happens, we can undoubtedly count on Jason Momoa’s baddie casting more trouble afterwards. Who knows, maybe he’ll even be back for Fast & Furious 12, assuming this franchise’s finale does indeed get extended into a trilogy like Vin Diesel indicated.
Fast X is playing now in theaters, and along with quite the cliffhanger-y ending, the mid-credits scene also leaves some big takeaways and theories to consider for the next couple years. Keep checking back with CinemaBlend for news regarding what we can expect from Fast & Furious 11.
