Fast & Furious: Spy Racers Season 5 Review

September 2, 2021 at 6:41pm
By Jason Stettner

The Fast & Furious franchise just keeps on rolling with this fifth season of the spin-off animated series for kids carrying the subtitle of “South Pacific”. I continue to can’t believe it’s already been a number of seasons. This season hinges on some past foes coming back into the spotlight and a bit of a test of one’s skill. This is where Tony Toretto (Tyler Posey) has been taken and they’ve begun scanning in his driving abilities in order to create a special artificial intelligence.

It’s up to the squad to rescue their friend and deal with this menacing AI that has all of the neat skills and talent that their friend has. It’s an interesting premise for sure, and they work with it well. The show also dives into the re-learning my skills bit, but I wish they would have focused on that more. It seems like the trauma of losing one’s ability to drive was washed over quite quickly. Something that I would imagine would be quite traumatizing to most members of the team.

They also give some further context into the lives of the more adult members of their team and continue to provide some crazy stunts. They also go wild here in dropping the actual name of the show in which I got a chuckle out of for sure. There’s the typical action, over the top moments and more of the squad gets a chance to show what they’ve got which was nice to see for sure.

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. This season once again looked really neat presenting some open beach views and also a couple moments in the water which mixed things up visually quite a bit. 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 different batch of villains were somewhat interesting, but I would like them to go a bit wild and branch out more. It feels like they continue to recycle some foes and there’s so much room for creativity when it comes to their enemies and I feel they’re not hitting the full potential.

The Conclusion

Fast & Furious: Spy Racers Season 5 is a fine dive into the South pacific providing many intense vistas, over the top driving action and of course some car based drama. It’s about the same as past seasons, yet at the same time I feel as though we’re retreading what we’ve seen in the previous seasons.

I wish they would branch out further and do something more wild with the concepts at play here. I liked the whole needing to re-learn driving skill concept and that just wasn’t taken as far as it could have been. The whole adult angle of learning to work as a team instead of just leading everything was well done.

A nice subtle sort of backdrop side story to the forefront conflict the kids were engaging with. I would like some sort of overall story to take place at some point, it just seems as though each season is just random mayhem with cars, which is fine too I suppose. I just can’t help but feel there’s more potential for this one.

Fast & Furious: Spy Racers Season 5 Review at Home with Streamed Viewing
Content Access was Provided by Netflix

Rating Overall: 6.6