F9: The Fast Saga

I’ve mentioned how I love the naming convention of all these movies. Each of them is different, which I feel makes each movie unique. However, I feel like they fumbled a bit with this one. All of the previous titles were able to incorporate either “Fast” or “Furious” in the title. This one’s literally just a letter and a number, F9. The title I use for this review is an alternative title for the movie. Officially, it’s just F9. I could’ve come up with a bunch of title options better than that. The Fast and Furious, The Furious 9, The Fast 9, The One Where They Start Referencing Family More Than Necessary, I could keep going. Let’s start getting way more creative than just a letter and a number. The movie titles don’t have to get shorter and shorter as time goes on.

Living out in a rural area, Dom and Letty have established a life of peace for themselves and their son Brian. One day, Tej, Roman, and Ramsey show up unannounced after having received a distress signal from Mr. Nobody. After finding the signal’s origin, they all go and attempt to rescue Mr. Nobody, albeit, after having to convince Dom to get back in the game. When they discover the signal’s source, they find what Mr. Nobody was trying to protect, half of a strange device later revealed to be Project Aries, the incredibly dangerous weapon capable of controlling any form of computer on the planet. While attempting to allude local military, they are intercepted by Jakob Toretto (John Cena), a highly-skilled covert ops agent and estranged brother to Dom and Mia. Now Dom and his team must attempt to stop Jakob from getting the other half of the weapon and causing a global catastrophe.

This movie is kind of a weird one compared to the others. It fits within the overall timeline of the series, but it feels disconnected in a way. It seems like its sole purpose is to introduce the character of Jakob Toretto. He’s not event he primary antagonist. The primary antagonist is Otto (Thue Rasmussen), the son of a diplomat who finances Jakob to steal the Project Aries device. Otto is just some guy. He has no connections to any of the other main characters. His entire motivation for stealing the device is that he’s rich and wants to run the world. His only connection to the other characters is that he hires Jakob. It’s not like Otto is that compelling of a character to begin with, but if you take Jakob out of the story, Otto becomes significantly less interesting. If the writers found a way to make Jakob the primary antagonist, I think the story could’ve been much better.

As you watch F9 and put it in context with the direction of the franchise as a whole, you can see how the filmmakers want to start moving towards a franchise finale. At some point in the series, they decided that they needed to conclude the story of Dom and his family. They might still make movies under the Fast & Furious umbrella, but the main story couldn’t last forever. Similar to how Fast & Furious 6 kicked off a new story arc, F9 feels like the start of the finale. If the filmmakers want to close out the story, they need to bring back some old characters, right? A number of past characters show up and play important roles in the movie, most notably, Han and Mia. It’s easier to bring back Mia since she never actually died, but they had to do some weird and corny retconning to Han’s story to find a way to make it kind of believable that he’d still be alive. I’m ok with this since I like Han, but it does start to cheapen character deaths when they are brought back later. F9 wasn’t the first in this series to do this, but it certainly isn’t the last.

Some other old characters get there time to shine. We get to see Sean, Twinkie, and Earl (Jason Tobin) from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift come back to help Dom and the crew. Canonically, I think the three of them are only supposed to be somewhere in their twenties, but time clearly isn’t their friend if that’s the case. However, one of the more welcome additions to the cast is a brand new character, Jakob. John Cena does a great job portraying the estranged brother of Dom and Mia. You can tell that Jakob was deeply hurt by his apparent exile from the family. It’s a nice change of pace for John Cena and his acting career. Up to this point, he had only really played the upstanding good guy in action thrillers and family comedies. He gives a believable performance in this new villainous role. I would love to see him play these kind of characters more often. I’m sure he would like to branch out a bit, as well.

An interesting thing about this movie is that it calls back to some lore that gets mentioned early in the franchise. In the first movie, it gets established that Dom’s father died in a fiery car crash during a stock car race and that he nearly beat a guy to death with a wrench. We get to see both of those story beats acted out, sort of. We don’t actually see much of the beating, but we do see the car crash that killed Dom’s father. Along with these story elements, we also get to see younger versions of Dom’s original crew, in particular, Vince and Jesse. These call-backs are a nice way of reminding the audience of where this franchise started. It wasn’t always flipping over giant convoys and flying old cars into space. Dom and his crew were these small-time street racers just trying to make a living.

Speaking of flying cars into space, the filmmakers really start to throw logic and reason out the window. In my review for Fast & Furious 6, I said that movie’s where the filmmakers started to say “Screw it!” when coming up with ideas for big stunts. With F9, it seems like that’s there whole motto. That’s why we love these movies. You want to swing a car with a bridge cable over this giant gorge Tarzan-style? Let’s do it! Can we strap rocket engines onto a Pontiac Fiero and make it go into outer space? There’s only one way to find out! Should we make Dom a blatant superhero for no apparent reason? Obviously! It’s easy to forget that these movies are meant to entertain, not be realistic. Who cares if these things could or couldn’t happen in real life? I want to see giant magnets pull a car through an entire building. These are the kinds of things we’ve come to expect from this franchise. Anything less, and it would feel weak.

Director Justin Lin returns for his fifth outing leading the charge. He brings back his unique knowledge and skills on how to use practical effects to make things come to life on the big screen. Obviously, he didn’t film Dom’s car swinging through the air. However, he did film the car going over the cliff and landing on the other side. No, stunt drivers weren’t actually using powerful magnets to attract and repel cars. That was done using air cannons. While we’re talking about super powerful magnets, that whole sequence is one of the top highlights of the movie. Cars are flying everywhere, the team’s expertly timing their moves to take down the enemy, and Jakob gets to have a high-speed fight on top of this giant convoy vehicle. I’d call it a truck, but there’s no way you could call this thing just a truck. All of the spectacles perfectly blend practical effects and CGI to present something incredible. Justin Lin sure does know how to step things up a notch.

Of course, one thing that seems to be a natural response to these giant spectacles is realizing just how totally ridiculous these stunts are. Sometimes, you can’t help but to laugh when you watch them. These are supposed to be super impactful and tense moments, but they’re undercut by the humor that can come from the utter craziness of the situation on screen. I feel like you lose a lot of the thrills the filmmakers want to evoke. It doesn’t help that they include self-referential humor into the dialogue. At some points in the movie, Roman points out how he thinks they must be invincible. He reflects on all of the adventures they’ve been on up to this point, yet none of them have so much as a scar to show for it. This is funny and all, but it just adds to the loss of tension that’s already there from laughing at the ridiculous stunts.

I feel like I need to preface this next part by saying that I love Jordana Brewster as Mia Toretto, and I’m glad to see her back in the franchise. Also, I’ve already gushed over the sendoff they did for Brian O’Connor and how they handled Paul Walker’s death perfectly. Now that we have that out of the way, I feel like bringing Mia back into the series leads to some issues with Brian’s role in the Fast & Furious universe. Mia ends up helping Dom and the gang with their mission in this movie. Brian is stated to be making sure their kids are safe. Honestly, I don’t feel like there’s any real reason why Brian can’t also be involved in the mission. If either Brian or Mia were to join the mission, I think the other one should be there also. Both of them are capable of contributing. They could find a way to have their kids looked after, no problem. Relegating Brian’s role to these one line explanations feels like a disservice to what he’s done for the series. Of course, by no means do I think they should bring Brian back to help with the missions. Trying to do so would be an insult to Paul Walker’s legacy. I don’t think Mia should be written off entirely and never seen again, either. I just think if either Brian or Mia can’t be involved in missions, then the other shouldn’t be involved, as well.

Even though this just feels like a 143-minute introduction to Jakob Toretto, it delivers on the entertainment value. The action gets cranked up, the pacing keeps things interesting, and all of the characters are in their element. Even though Cipher stays in a box for the entire movie, she still feels like she’s running the show. Of course, as entertaining as it is, this movie still has its issues. They could all be summed up by saying this franchise seems to have grown bigger than it can handle. They’ve already gone to space. Where can they go from here? At the end of the day, this is a fine movie that knows what it’s about. It’s not trying to shake up the formula too much. Having callbacks to earlier moments in the franchise is pretty nice. We even get to see everyone drinking Coronas again. After the four year gap between this movie and the previous one, F9 is a good way to bring people back into the franchise, as long as they can accept it for what it’s become.