Fast & Furious: Spy Racers Season 4 Review

July 11, 2021 at 7:57pm
By Jason Stettner

The Fast & Furious franchise just keeps on rolling with this fourth season of the spin-off animated series for kids carrying the subtitle of “Mexico”. I can’t believe it’s already been a number of seasons. This time around the material is continuing the high octane action and aiming to do the whole, outlaw and or rogue agent narrative. It’s mostly just a way to split the team up to some degree, and to continue the action.

I’m starting to feel that some of the core story elements are looping around and not really progressing further. The characters in particular are at a bit of a standstill with one or two getting a slight time to shine while still not necessarily having any huge jumps. That’s fine for a show targeted at the younger audience I suppose, at the same time it would be really cool to have the dynamics of the groups shift further in future seasons.

It is neat that they continue to find neat locations and excuses to keep the group doing their typical antics. You get some re-appearances by certain foes, alongside the introduction of new ones and of course having the group deal with some of the authorities or well their own corporation is a neat dynamic to shuffle things up a bit.

The animation work on this was very interesting, the push towards a realism while still being animated was unique. More depth within the areas this time around as well, yet some emptier moments. It reminded me of “Into the Spider-Verse” to a degree visually.

It worked well for the visuals on the high speed racers that were in action. It was a sort of motion blur, it’s hard to describe but it makes the vehicles come across as very fast. I felt this season actually had some very lovely spots despite the empty desert glow. This also brings in some fun tech, with a varied cast that should hit many individuals on different levels.

The crews have their own unique quirks and I found the focus of their goals to be interesting. The voice acting was fine, the leads worked well and this is a varied group. The new batch of villains were somewhat interesting, but I would like them to go a bit wild and branch out more. Perhaps even take the recurring one to a higher level of conflict against the group as while efficient they’re still clumsy and don’t feel like a threat to the group.

The Conclusion

Fast & Furious: Spy Racers Season 4 is a solid continuation of this high octane animated series, it just isn’t doing a whole lot to evolve the core team. It really does seem like a bit of a loop in terms of the character progression for the core squad. They definitely have some fun with the action, and bring in a number of laughs. It’s obviously aimed at the younger audience, and I believe for that group it hits the mark quite well.

I just wish there were further dynamics to what’s going on to elevate it. The setting was neat, and provided some distinct areas to visit to represent the culture of the place. At the same time the whole splitting of the team at points seemed a bit silly since they should be past those sort of issues by now since they’ve been doing this whole spy racer business for awhile now. The running from the corporation angle was neat, but could have been pushed further.

I liked how they switched how characters were used due to that, definitely a fun change of pace for sure. I look forward to seeing where things head in the future and I hope they build to some sort of bigger arc though as I can’t imagine them going on forever with this and it would be nice to get something more structured towards a bigger end game of sorts if that makes sense.

Fast & Furious: Spy Racers Season 4 Review at Home with Streamed Viewing
Content Access was Provided by Netflix

Rating Overall: 7.0