Few things are certain in life, but one thing you have been able to depend on for a good long while is that the release of a new installment in the Fast & Furious franchise every few years is an inevitable pop culture event, with the franchise growing ever larger in terms of both the number of installments and the scale of its bombastically ridiculous stunts and purposefully paper-thin excuses for plots.
In the ninth installment of the main film series, our heroes once again struggle with threats to their core concept of family, just as they yet again have to save the world from a dastardly villain who wants to achieve an equally dastardly goal by using a MacGuffin of some description.
As such, the film fulfills its brief as a feature designed solely for switching your brain off and completely forgetting about reality for a couple of hours.
However, not all ridiculousness is good ridiculousness, and even die-hard fans of the franchise may be getting more ridiculousness than they bargained for this time around.
While the Fast & Furious franchise has long since become aware of itself – and as a result created a loyal fan base who are fully in on the joke – the franchise is unfortunately starting to become something of a victim of its own self-awareness. It may seem that anything goes when dealing with purposefully ludicrous action movies, but even when the laws of physics are completely ignored and a franchise deliberately showcases more and more absurd scenarios with increasingly hammy dialogue, a franchise should still have a certain degree of belief in its own premise, and F9 simply does not have the sincerity of its predecessors.
Not only has the franchise taken a turn toward flat-out slapstick comedy with F9, but the latest film also lacks the finesse and grandeur that made the latter half of films so successful. Deliberately silly as the films may be, they are nonetheless well-executed with a knowing charm that is hard to resist, and F9 largely fails to deliver genuinely entertaining action set pieces when our heroes do things with vehicles that the laws of physics do not support.
The melee also leaves something to be desired, with the fight scenes not only being few and far between but also quite underwhelming, something that is considered a cardinal sin in the world of action. With the likes of the John Wick and Mission: Impossible franchises having set a high standard for fight choreography in Hollywood, a larger-than-life franchise like Fast & Furious should not be pulling its punches in this department either, but it sadly does not manage to pack its usual punch neither literally or figuratively.
Fans of the franchise who know the memes and understand that the Fast & Furious franchise is about pure, unadulterated fun will likely still have a good time with the ninth installment, but for those who are looking to start their descent into the wild world of Dom Toretto & Co., F9 is much too hammy for its own good and it simply does not convey the same type of vibrant recklessness that the franchise is known for.
Nonetheless, F9 is a fun communal experience as a cinema-goer that brings plenty of laughs, but where the laughs of the previous films were due to one’s inner child being thoroughly entertained, the laughs this time around are more a result of a disbelief of how awkwardly absurd the franchise has become, and the filmmakers need to put more effort into the upcoming installments lest they become cinematic car wrecks of the worst kind.
Verdict: 6 out of 10.
*******
Produced by Neal H. Moritz, Vin Diesel, Jeff Kirschenbaum,
Joe Roth, Justin Lin, Clayton Townsend, Samantha Vincent
Screenplay by Daniel Casey, Justin Lin
Story by Justin Lin, Alfredo Botello, Daniel Casey
Based on Characters by Gary Scott Thompson
Directed by Justin Lin
Starring Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson,
Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, John Cena, Jordana Brewster,
Nathalie Emmanuel, Sung Kang, Michael Rooker,
Helen Mirren, Kurt Russell, Charlize Theron
