Jason Momoa's Fast X Villain Is The Best Fast And Furious Baddie, And It's Not Even Close
Heavy spoilers for "Fast X" to follow.
"Fast and Furious" villains are as wildly different and escalating in goofiness. The franchise has evolved from being about street racers and low-stakes crime to an epic saga about family on the world stage, with seemingly immortal heroes matched by cartoon villains with plans to control nukes and other super weapons.
While plenty of the villains in the franchise are just drug lords and megalomaniacs with control issues who are rather forgettable, the best villains are the ones who take things personally. They don't care about profit or world domination nearly as much as they care about causing the family harm. Out of these, one stands out as by far the most stylish, unhinged, and dangerous villain the franchise has ever seen, Jason Momoa's Dante Reyes.
While Reyes is new as a villain, he has been here for a long time, watching and preparing from the shadows. Dante is the son of Hernan Reyes, one of the more forgettable bad guys in the franchise, and the main baddie from "Fast Five." Dante was there all along, as the family stole the safe vault and dragged it across the streets of Rio, and now he has come for revenge.
'Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos'
In many ways, Dante is the "Fast and Furious" answer to the Joker, a comic book agent of chaos who delights in wreaking havoc. He is not interested in taking over the world or amassing a large fortune. All he wants is to cause pain while laughing it off.
A lot of this has to do with Jason Momoa's performance. As Ethan Anderton wrote in his review of the film, Momoa "goes from being a gender-fluid cartoon character dressed in colorful, flowing fabrics and ample accessories [...] to being a sadistic psychopath in the same breath."
Indeed, in his most Joker-like scene, Dante is seen giving mani-pedis to two henchmen, before it's revealed they are corpses that Dante who he talks to as old pals while they slowly rot.
Dante is also funnier than any other villain in the franchise, one who understands deeply the absurdity of the "Fast and Furious" movies and of the family, and who rises to their level and matches that absurdity. If the family is now full of superheroes, then Dante is a supervillain. He is not a Bond villain like Cipher or a superspy like Deckard Shaw, but someone who laughs it off as he activates a bomb to destroy the Vatican. He never personally pulls a gun on Dom but instead hovers his hands on dozens of other guns as if they were his, and his scrunchy and fashion sense speak louder than words about how much fun he is having.
The ultimate family villain
Dante is not just the most fun villain in the franchise, he is also the most dangerous and deadly, at least when it comes to the family. As mentioned, most of the villains don't really care about the crew until they directly stand in their way, but even the ones that do still don't get close to what Dante does in "Fast X."
Owen Shaw had Letty work with him, but he didn't do any harm to her and she had no idea she was part of Dom's crew because she had amnesia. Deckard killed Han and blew up the Los Angeles house, except he didn't really kill Han, and Deckard has even become part of the family so he isn't a villain anymore. There's Cipher, who did kill Elena and coerced Dom to turn on his family, but she otherwise had no interest in the rest of the family except to clear up obstacles for her plan.
But Dante is different. He is unequivocally and singularly preoccupied with not just killing the family, but killing the idea of them. He does the unforgivable and separates the family and makes them all international terrorists after the Rome bombing, and even causes the death of Jakob (unless he comes back to life in the next one). And if that isn't enough, at the end of the film he also blows up Han, Roman, Tej, and Ramsey, essentially destroying the crew.
No "Fast and Furious" villain has caused as much harm or brought as many laughs as Dante does in "Fast X," and given he is returning for the next one, let's hope Jason Momoa gets to drive more.