F9: The Fast Saga
When it comes to the Fast & Furious series, five films must be the breaking point for moviegoers’ brains.
After all, it was the fifth installment, Fast Five, that catapulted the saga from a joke to action movie royalty, spawning four more official films and one spin-off, all of them wildly profitable.
While I’m not willing to crown these movies with much beyond a paper diadem from Burger King, and I still haven’t seen chapters 2-5, there is a sense that Vin Diesel & Co. have worn me down piecemeal over the course of two decades, to the extent that I’m starting to see glimpses of why so many people love this series.
That’s not to say F9: The Fast Saga is a good movie. It’s as brainless as anything in this long-running story thus far, but also (considering what I’ve experienced) probably its most entertaining chapter to date.
Director Justin Lin returns for his — you guessed it — fifth F&F film, and the first of them not written by Chris Morgan. Though the script by Lin and Daniel Casey (Kin) is as unambitious, unambiguous, and unintelligent as Morgan’s contributions, having Dom Toretto (Diesel) face off against his long-lost brother Jakob (John Cena) encourages greater audience investment than past chapters involving the Toretto extended family trying to stop Global Terrorist X, whose history with them involves a long, sobering backstory that’s simultaneously simple and overly complicated.
And yet, F9 is still very much a “trying to stop Global Terrorist X” movie, necessitating the chase for a MacGuffin, inspiring more painfully unfunny banter between Dom’s colleagues Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Ludacris), and producing such a comically inane degree of miraculous injury avoidance that it inspires Roman to posit if they’re superhuman.
Having two of modern cinema’s worst actors hash out the film’s core drama severely hampers the Toretto brothers’ fraught storyline, but contributions from Charlize Theron, Michael Rooker, Helen Mirren, Kurt Russell, and Lucas Black elevate the talent pool without putting the core cast to too much shame.
And whether it’s the mental mush talking or if Lin has legitimately upped his action filmmaking game, the apparent clear visuals and steady stream of go-for-broke, well-executed, physics-and-logic-defying set pieces — including a long-teased space mission and a use of magnets that would make Jesse Pinkman proud — deliver consistent mindless entertainment.
That these sequences work despite the confidence that no harm will come of our heroes, especially seeing how dead characters keep returning with increasingly ridiculous explanations for their survival, is perhaps F9’s greatest victory. It’s not enough to warrant all that much praise, but for now, a BK crown will do.
Grade: C. Rated PG-13. Now playing at AMC River Hills 10, Biltmore Grande, and Carolina Cinemark.
(Photo: Universal Pictures)
