F9, the tenth entry in the Fast & Furious universe, now ranks as the franchise’s third major letdown in a row.
The Fast Saga (as it’s now known) has always been over the top, no question, but at this point, the memory of Furious 7’s skydiving cars feels as grounded as Steve McQueen racing his ’68 Mustang through the streets of San Francisco.
The exact moment I checked out of this series was when a bunch of Toyotas roared over an ice floe to outrun a nuclear submarine in 2017’s The Fate of the Furious. Two years later, with the ridiculous spin-off (and Dwayne Johnson’s massive ego trip) Hobbs & Shaw, I remained checked out. And last night, with the audaciously dumb F9, the rest of my goodwill evaporated.
This used to be the best franchise going, and I’ve been its biggest fan since day one, but watching F9 is like listening to a dumb little kid tell a story: And then, and then, and then they drove a car into outer space and crashed it into a satellite!
Okay, son, I think it’s bedtime.
What started 20 years ago as a street-racing saga found new life in the heist genre with 2011’s sublime Fast Five. Not content with that, the series then morphed into a men-on-a-mission franchise until finally settling on super spies who drive around the world to save it.
Well, F9 is a superhero movie. There’s just no other way to describe it. What we have here is a ludicrous superhero movie where a handful of mortals from East L.A. make cars fly, take massive beatings and walk away without a scratch, and fall from great heights without injury.
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Oh, and they return from the dead.
Let’s not forget all the resurrections.
Another big problem is all the unnecessary fan service, which bogs down the first 90 minutes with several contrived sequences, like the one where Helen Mirren’s Queenie outruns the British police as she spouts exposition. Oh, and not only does Tokyo Drift’s Lucas Black show up (mostly to stand around and grin), so do three other characters from that movie, including the resurrected Han (Sung Kang) — who walks around looking every bit as bewildered by his return as we are.
Like something out of Super Mario Bros., CGI’d avatars leap from speeding cars to speeding trucks, a motorcycle outruns landmines (don’t ask), a car drives off a cliff and with a twist of its wheel captures a cable that slingshots it to the other side, and then, and then, and then Dom pulls down a whole building like Hercules!
Let’s not forget the little things… Charlize Theron’s boring Cipher spends most of her time in a glass cage (don’t ask), and I kept wondering how she goes to the bathroom. After Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is exploded 60 feet into the air, Dom (Vin Diesel) maneuvers his speeding car, so she lands on his hood … So, uhm, instead of falling 60 feet and hitting the ground, she’s saved by falling … a … mere … 58 feet? And why does the super-villain circle the streets of London in a massive military vehicle that’s basically a giant billboard advertising “Super-Villain on Board?”
When not insulting our intelligence, F9 bogs itself down expanding its mythology with the endless explaining of things — or, in the case of Han’s resurrection, over-explaining things. Holy man is that unnecessarily confusing. As is the arrival of Dom’s brother Jakob (John Cena), a back story told in an endless series of flashbacks that, in the end, make Dom look like a total moron. He not only assumes the very worst about his brother for no reason but does so based on a piece of exposition so clunky Ed Wood’s estate might want to think about suing for plagiarism.
Eventually, after 90 minutes of episodic exposition and superfluous action sequences, F9 settles down in its final hour with what’s supposed to be a slam-bang finale — which is almost all CGI with no sense of peril or suspense. Without exaggeration, my guess is that $150 million was spent on this final hour. Still, not a moment approaches the thrill of watching the truck robbery sequence in the one that started it all — 2001’s The Fast and the Furious.
To me, at least, the biggest development is that this is now Vin Diesel’s franchise and Vin Diesel’s alone. After sharing the primary spotlight with the late (and greatly missed) Paul Walker for five chapters, and Dwayne Johnson for four, F9 rests entirely on Dominic Toretto, which is a shame with such a terrific ensemble.
Finally, the chemistry between Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson) is no more. Also missing is anything resembling sex appeal, but such is life in the era of the prudish, anti-fun Woke Gestapo.
We’re now promised two more entries in the Fast Saga, and maybe it can save itself with a down-and-dirty reboot, but as of right now, for me at least, this franchise ended perfectly with Brian’s farewell in Furious 7.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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