Mark Reviews Movies: F9

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 24, 2021

"As long as we follow the laws of physics, we'll be fine," says a character in F9, preparing for one of the most ludicrous missions in this series—if not the most ludicrous one. That's saying a lot, as those who have followed the Fast and/or Furious movies know quite well.

These characters—who have gone from street racers, to career criminals, to a team of crime-fighters, and finally to international spies of sorts—have gone on plenty of ridiculous missions, involving a variety of outrageous stunts. They've skydived in cars and launched cars from one skyscraper to another (Those two stunts were just in the seventh and best installment of the franchise). They've taken on other cars, tanks, planes, and even a submarine in their souped-up automobiles.

The reason this particular mission and this particular stunt stand out even from all of others, though, isn't just the sheer, preposterous nature of it. It's also that a character and the filmmakers actually acknowledge the existence of the concept of physics. We laugh, because, if any of these movies even considered the physical laws of the universe, all of these characters would have been dead or severely injured a long time ago.

It's a kind of double bluff on the part of screenwriters Daniel Casey and director Justin Lin. Yes, they know all of these stunts and schemes are silly and almost certainly impossible, but if they tell us the opposite, we'll at least know they're in on the joke, too.

Whether or not this logic makes any sense is irrelevant at this point. These movies have become little more than big-budget, globe-hopping cartoons, which just happen to feature real people and real vehicles—save for the many, many moments when visual effects are employed, because neither of those real entities could do the things the characters and cars do in these movies.

Lin, who's no stranger to this series or that philosophy (In addition to the third installment, he oversaw the fourth, fifth, and sixth entries, in which all of the outlandish stuff really started—mostly in unconvincing fashion), genuinely buys into the notion of this installment as a live-action cartoon. That gives its many action sequences, which are often pretty imaginative and at times ingenious, a winking sense of the absurd. It's almost enough to make us overlook how dull the familiar plot and the attempts to add even more levels to the series' ongoing melodrama are.

Now a father, Dom (Vin Diesel) has more or less retired from his career as a street-racing, thieving, and/or crime-fighting spy, spending time on a farm with his wife Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and young son. When a few of his old teammates—Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges), and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel)—arrive with a mission involving potentially world-ending stakes, Dom and Letty put aside their quiet lives for yet another adventure.

This one involves a MacGuffin called Ares, which can allow one to take control of anything that uses any kind of computer code. Whatever that may mean, obviously, doesn't matter. The point is that it would give someone absolute power. The other point is that the someone looking for the device is Dom's long-lost and previously never-mentioned brother Jakob (John Cena), who also may have killed their father (All of that drama plays out in a series of lengthy, distracting flashbacks).

What more can be said of the plot? There's a lot of pursuing information across different countries, providing an opportunity for each member of the now-extensive cast to do something. Helen Mirren has a glorified cameo as the classy London-based thief, and Charlize Theron's Cipher is locked up in a glass cell, just waiting to participate in the climax.

Since her brothers are involved, Mia (Jordana Brewster) gets in on the action, and like any soap opera worth its salt, a character we believed to be dead for several movies turns out to be just fine and ready for a lot of fighting and driving. Meanwhile, Roman starts to suspect that all of them might be invincible, and given his multiple close calls with a single landmine in one scene, he might have a point.

None of this, again, really matters, except that it serves as an excuse for and a bit too much of a distraction from all of that fighting and driving. There are some exceptionally silly sequences here.

The first involves a chase through a military-occupied jungle, where the foes keep coming, the team has to maneuver through a minefield, and the remnants of a rickety wooden bridge give Dom a chance to test out centrifugal force—off a cliff and across a wide chasm. The centerpiece is a lengthy chase through the streets of Edinburgh, where a hyper-powered magnet causes a lot of destruction and some respite for people fighting next to it. The climax is yet another chase, although there are even more of those magnets for this mission—and the payoff of even greater spectacle. As for the most-ludicrous of these ludicrous plans, let's just say that gravity isn't as big a concern for its success.

As for the big question, is F9 any good? By this series' standards, it's near the top of the heap—massively and knowingly silly at its best, not quite enough so at its worst.

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