On my iMac, the F9 key operates as a fast-forward button. For F9, this function is apt. Among the increasingly less fun globetrotting adventures of the clutch-burning covert-ops heroes, this is the franchise’s least-engaging entry since the fourth, 2009’s Fast & Furious. In these films’ ever-widening world, there’s nothing a popped can of nitrous can’t fix … except boredom.
Marking the return of Justin Lin (parts 3-6) to the director’s chair, F9 finds Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel), Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and several others getting the gang back together after receiving a distress signal from the downed plane of their government agent pal (Kurt Russell). In the crash, imprisoned terrorist Cipher (Charlize Theron in an unflattering bowl cut) escaped. She’s working with a new bad guy who happens to be Dom’s long-lost brother, Jakob (John Cena), to find both halves of a device that, once assembled, is some kind of super weapon; apart, the pieces look like Rubik’s Turtle Shell, if such a 3D puzzle existed.
From a chase through a mine-strewn jungle to a chase with a magnetic truck (which would be more entertaining if Michael Bay’s 6 Underground hadn’t already used a similar gimmick), the set pieces show Team Toretto continues to have the most extraordinary luck around. Its members not only defy the laws of gravity, but rewrite all scientific rules, causing stakes to dissipate. I know it’s “just a movie,” but having a meta scene comment on their apparent indestructibility does not excuse lazy screenwriting. Equally apathetic is the brushed-off “explanation” of the resurrection of fan favorite Han (Sung Kang), who “died” in film 3, The Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Since Han is not the first “JK, I’m alive” character, the exercise steers F9 closer to soap opera.
Like a soap, F9 is overstuffed with wholly extraneous scenes dragging the pace (sorry, Helen Mirren and Cardi B), none begging for excision more than Dom’s origin story, which no one needs. Nearly two and a half hours are filled with so many characters and callbacks, it feels like Lin assumes viewers have seen all the previous movies and watch little else than the repeats on CMT.
As was the case for the previous film, The Fate of the Furious, in trying to top each successive sequel, F9 becomes the victim of its own excess. What’s wrong with aiming to make a movie as good as the one before it rather than attempt to go bigger? Once you’ve traveled to space, as Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson do here in the third (or fifth?) act, you’re too far gone to realize you jumped the shark miles ago. —Rod Lott