F9 Gets a Bit Familiar while Still Being Fast & Furious

Universal

With this many Fast & Furious movies, there comes a point where the allure wanes. You don’t make nine entries in an action franchise without showing some wear and tear.

While it’s by no means a less thrilling entry in terms of car chases and fights, F9—what, no F9st & Furious?—really does show how expected the absurdity has become when the big climax of the film features a change in location that pretty much everyone speculated would happen in the next installment. Thus, a tragedy has befallen F&F: predictability.

Of course, let’s highlight the real draw of the film, that being the stunts. The many escapades of the street-racing mercenaries continue to defy the laws of physics and even aspects of magnetism. Cars perform impossible feats as they zoom through minefields and turn into vine-swinging Tarzan characters. Nearly every protagonist’s car ends up with a few dings and scratches while the heroes remain as bulletproof as an iron-clad A-Team. They’re big, loud, and perfectly absurd, completely on brand for the series known for such draws. But after so many films, we’ve come to expect such ridiculousness that it’s pretty much par for the course by the time a car zooms into . . . well, you’ll just have to see.

The more surprising aspect that doesn’t feel as though it’s firing on all cylinders is the theme of family, the saga’s other (not as revered, often joked about) quality. The previous entries always felt as though they kept some component of the family intact, whether it was checking in on the kids in the middle of a fight or stressing that family is the friends you make along the raceway of life.

It would seem like a script such as F9‘s would have the most family elements yet considering the characters at play. Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) is trying to look forward to the future with his son, who has grown up quite a bit since F8, but needs to go back to his past family problems—namely, his brother, Jakob (John Cena). Dom’s brother hasn’t come up in conversation up to this point in the series, so some soap opera–style reveals and backstory are given for their bitter brotherly feud, which has followed Dom since he was a young mechanic eager to get into racing.

The brothers’ long-lasting falling-out involves the passing of their father that wrote their paths. For Dom, it was a life of crime, drag racing, and dangerous mercenary gigs. For Jakob, it was world domination or at least playing for the team that wants that. Never feeling like he mattered, Jakob hooks up with your average billionaire egomaniac who wants to take over the world with magnets and hacking satellites. Naturally, his attempts at redemption and reconnecting with Dom are far more interesting than making sure the villain’s car crashes or the satellite weapons are deactivated.

Universal

To my dismay, though, F9 probably has the least focus on family despite so many elements that set this up well. The melodrama of Dom’s estranged brother and securely raising his son don’t really ascend past anything more than lightly sprinkled ingredients. John Cena’s inclusion into the central cast feels more like a roster score for Cena than a redemption arc for Jakob. And Dom’s son is practically a waste of a kid who exists more as a bookend emotional core, so forgotten about in the rest of the story that we don’t even know where exactly he is during all the car chases or even see Dom check in briefly. It seems like such a minor complaint, but if the previous FF films could accomplish this aspect, what’s F9’s excuse?

Will that matter to those coming into the film for action sequences of cars doing unbelievable feats? Probably not. But in the brisk pacing, which attempts to shove as many cars and explosions onto the screen as possible, there’s a whole lot of excess in the cast crowding the screen. Remember Charlize Theron’s villain character, Cipher, from the previous film? She’s back here but has so little to do she spends 90 percent of the film in a cage making insults at the dime-store antagonist. Kurt Russell returns to the role of the slick-talking covert ops organizer, but only in brief exposition dumps. Sung Kang makes his big return as Han Lue, but the his revival is clumsily explained in a way that makes it clear it was about getting the actor back first with explanation second. Helen Mirren is also back to once more briefly point our heroes in the right direction as the master criminal Magdalene “Queenie” Shaw. Even Cardi B’s cameo is a confounding one considering she’s playing a one-scene (and one-minute) character who has a history with Dom.

Universal

At the very least, though, the returning characters haven’t lost their charm. Tyrese Gibson still gets in the best straight-man reactions to all the carnage, making the obvious jokes about how they never seem to get killed (a theory further proven when Han returns). Ludacris has the best snarky moments of goofing on Roman, making them the perfect duo for their own special job in the third act. And Michelle Rodriguez can still keep up just as stoic an attitude as Vin Diesel when it comes to butt-kicking.

I looked upon The Fate of the Furious as the series plateauing with its frills, and it pretty much remains on that level for F9. I can’t deny the thrills are still there, but the smaller components that keep the series unique are sadly lacking this time around. Consider, however, that one of the money shots of The Fate of the Furious was a horde of cards being flung through the streets, and F9 features a similar scene. Surely there’s more wild stuff that can be done with cars, but this entry pushes the fantasticality so far that it seems to only be a matter of time before something like dinosaurs or Transformers get involved.

And, at this point, why not?

Universal