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

Get it at Amazon.

With a snazzy Trans Am and snazzier mistress, big-city New York bizman Ray Harper (a feature-debuting Omar Tucci) drives to rural Crawford County to convince the local yokels of a $150 million project to develop their rural farmland. This pitch goes over as well as a Scientology service, but said mistress, Brooke (fellow first-timer Marlene Malcolm), cheers his spirits by gifting him a brand-new compass. Foreshadowing alert!

So Ray and Brooke are kidnapped by a trio of rednecks who pray for societal collapse and whose leader, TJ, looks uncannily like multishirted serpent Steve Bannon. “What’s this aboot?” asks Ray, revealing the movie in all its Canadianness, as the couple is boated to a nearby heavily wooded island for a lovely picnic.

Totally kidding; this ain’t no picnic. Instead, Ray and Brooke become unwilling participants in the most dangerous game: the one in which they’re hunted like animals — a Death Hunt, one might say.

Quoth TJ, “Once you’ve hunted humans, animals just don’t cut it,” so their craven disregard for life at least was built with purpose. Director Neil Mackay (the similar Battleground) needn’t have shown the Confederate flag for us to understand that TJ (Terry McDonald, Mackay’s Sixty Minutes to Midnight) and his gang are evil, but I’ll take it.

As the game begins, Ray doesn’t run so much as lightly shuffle toward a pleasant jog. Brooke fares better — much better — even in capri pants and a cami crop trop. With squibs aplenty, Death Hunt is simple, lean and adds nothing unexplored to the subgenre. Still, I give Mackay credit for not taking this into I Spit on Your Grave territory; refreshingly, rape isn’t even on the minds of the men — much to the bafflement of Brooke, who’s told by an offended captor, hilariously, “We’re married!”

In part because Mackay has stripped the premise to its core elements, but more because Malcolm gives it everything she’s got, this flick works. It’s also beautifully photographed, which rings of irony considering it’s “aboot” the ugliest of humanity. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.