Fast 9 - Review Thread

Absolute trash. And none of it terribly fun or exciting. Tyrese can't carry these as the only jokester, been getting diminishing returns since 6 or 7 here and it's really getting long in the tooth.

The insane Dom-Jesus storyline and scene in the giant.... Shaft? Was absolutely insane. Leddy just jumped down there? And baby sitter Brian? Wtf?

That's a shit sandwich. And it's 2.5 hours long.

4.5/10

F9: The Fast Saga(6/26/2021)

It’s funny, as I exited the theater where I had just seen the ninth installment of “The Fast Saga,” a movie filled to the brim with car crashes, explosions, and production value, it was a much more humble piece of pop culture that entered my mind: The Office (US version). Obviously this wasn’t because there were many direct similarities between the two, rather, it was because of series trajectory. That sitcom lasted nine seasons, and a lot of fans would tell you that this was probably at least two seasons too long. Series star Steve Carrell left the show at the end of the seventh season and those last two seasons done without that central character were never really the same and many would say things would have ended more cleanly if they hadn’t happened. On the other hand, there was at least some funny stuff to be found in those last two seasons and there’s a legitimate argument to be made that closure on a sitcom is over-rated and that it was probably better to have those last couple of seasons than not to have had them. In a lot of ways “The Fast Saga” is in a similar place. The seventh installment (Furious 7) was the last film in the series to feature original star Paul Walker (albeit for more tragic and unexpected reasons than the aforementioned Steve Carrell departure) and there were certain ways in which that film kind of felt like a final victory lap for the franchise that ended on a (for this series) appropriately corny note. But this was never a series known for dignified restraint and it wasn’t long before they announced a follow-up called The F[8] of the Furious and now there’s a follow-up to the follow-up called F9 (or F9: The Fast Saga depending on what poster you’re looking at) here to make a case for even more outlandish action, soap operatic twists, and speeches about the importance of family.

F9 takes place a few years after the events of The Fate of the Furious and sees Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his wife Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez) trying to take a stretch away from their usual adventures to try to raise the child that came into their lives in that last movie. This is disrupted however when Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Ludacris), and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) roll up and let him know that they’ve retrieved an SOS transmission from their former intelligence contact Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), whose plane appears to have crashed in a (fictional) Central American country called Montecito while trying to transport the villainous Cipher (Charlize Theron), who had been captured in an off screen operation. Much of the crew decides to go out to this crash site given their history with Cipher, but Dominic only decides to go after noticing on the transmission that the man behind the attack may have been his long lost and apparently evil brother Jakob Toretto (John Cena), a suspicion that is confirmed when he confronts Jakob in the jungles on that mission. From there the crew needs to split up to take down Jakob, Cipher, and an Eastern European Dictator’s son (Thue Ersted Rasmussen) and keep them from getting a super weapon, a mission that will take them to far flung places like Tokyo, Cologne, Edenborough, and Tbilisi.

Doing a full review of F9: The Fast Saga in many ways feels a touch unnecessary. Here’s the TLDR version: If you liked the last three or four Fast and Furious movies and are hungry for more this movie will probably be what you’re looking for. But I should probably at least try to go a little deeper than that. The main thing that distinguishes this installment of the franchise from what came before is likely the John Cena character and what the emergence of this long lost brother does to put Dominic Toretto’s obsession with (chosen) family in a new light. The film contains several flashbacks to Toretto’s youth where the two brothers are played by Vinnie Bennett and Finn Cole which dramatize what caused the two siblings to had their falling out. I might argue that these flashbacks could have been a bit briefer than they were, and I’m not sure how much anyone was really dying to learn the origins of what led Dom into a life of crime prior to the events of the first film, but there are worse directions this could have gone in a ninth installment of a franchise. The other development this time around, as revealed by the trailer is that the character of Han has been resurrected once again through yet another retcon of what happened in the crash that supposedly killed him between the second and third acts of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. I’ve got to say, I’ve never really understood what it is about this character that makes the producers think he’s worth this much trouble; Sung Kang is a fine actor but it’s kind of a nothing character and at this point it’s really starting to seem like no one is going to be staying dead for long in this series.

So I’m not sure this is really a sequel that’s overburdened with brilliant new plot ideas but I was pleased to see that a lot of the action still felt fairly fresh. Like all of these movies the chases here are quite silly; an early chase through a jungle has a rather dubious idea of how landmines work and there are several moments that exist in clear defiance of various laws of physics, but the movies have always been pretty shameless about that kind of stuff and later in the movie they manage to do some pretty cool stuff by rigging vehicles with high powered magnets, which I appreciated. If anything the movie probably just needed to be trimmed a bit. I sort of get why these movies have ballooned into being two and a half hours each what with how unwieldly that casts have become what with their refusal to let any character die and stay dead and I imagine this thing would have been even longer if backstage drama hadn’t jettisoned The Rock and Jason Statham into a spin-off. At this point the franchise almost feels like what the MCU would be if they did Avengers movies every time instead of doing solo films in-between. The results are stretched out movies and that’s especially felt here in the movie’s middle act when various cast members are off doing separate missions and it really slows down the pace. The whole series is clearly pressing its luck at this point and I do hope they have it in them to just wrap up the current storyline soon and move on, but for now they haven’t quite lost their goodwill and I’m willing to give the current installment a pass.

*** out of Five

sounds great.

Probably Furious 7, though since Fast Five they're all pretty consistent.  

I would say I may well have been less generous to F9 if the had been no pandemic and it had actually come out on time last year. The extra little break between installments helped, and frankly, it's been a very long time since I've been able to see a stupid summer action movie in theaters.

I've given this series WAY more chances than it deserved with me.  Even before this movie supposedly jumped the shark, it was already too dumb and too empty for me; I haven't liked a single one of the others, including Hobbs & Shaw.  So, I'm not even bothering with these anymore.

Call them by their Japanese Wild Speed titles: www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/fast-furious-japanese-titles-1234977075/amp/

Wild Speed
Wild Speed X2
Wild Speed X3: Tokyo Drift
Wild Speed MAX
Wild Speed MEGA MAX
Wild Speed: Euro Mission
Wild Speed: Sky Mission
Wild Speed: Ice Break
Wild Speed: Super Combo
Wild Speed: Jet Break

I will say Jet Break is the worst Wild Speed movie since MAX.

Since the next two movies are supposed to be split in two, I'm going to put my bet on them titling the next one simply "Fast" and part two simply "Furious." Seems just inane enough for them to do. Or they could title them "Fast: Part 1" and "Furious: Part 2" to drive IanTheCool even more bonkers.

This does make me want to do a ranking of the Fast & Furious movies in terms of how stupid the title is.

The obvious title for the next one is Fast 10 Your Seatbelts.