F9: The Fast Saga (2021).
“…something, something, something, family.”
Directed by Justin Lin
Written by Daniel Casey and Justin Lin (and probably Vin Diesel)
Starring Vin Diesel and his family, John Cena, Charlize Theron, cars, and magnets
The Stage.
Dom is living off the grid (again) when he’s recruited for one more mission (again) to find some ball that reprograms something so that bad people can rule the world or whatever. And then a lot of stuff happens with cars and magnets.
The Review.
By now you should know exactly what you’re walking into when you purchase a ticket to see a movie in the Fast & Furious franchise. Over the course of 20 years, they’ve cultivated a world in which physics and mortality don’t apply, and in this film, they flat out tell you that they don’t give a fuck. There are a few instances in F9 in which characters ponder their own invincibility aloud to the audience and make fun of the importance of physics, as if to say, “Yeah, we get it, we just don’t care, so if you care, you’re watching the wrong flick.”
The film starts off with a smashing action scene in which the “family” trounces through a Central American jungle with sports cars, motorcycles, and tanks. Every few minutes the danger is upped by things like landmines, helicopters, and bridges, none of which pay any attention to how things work in the real world. The action ramps up later in the film with big fat controllable magnets, which again make zero sense in how selective they are with what they stick to, but they’re fun nonetheless. Tej, who has gone from a mechanic who could barely put ejector seats in cars to a super hacker with unlimited resources somehow outfits each car with these super magnets with their own custom controls (a task which would probably take a whole company of engineers months to build) within a few hours and that’s when some incredible carnage starts taking place. It’s utter nonsense, but it’s also really fun, even if you know that the stakes aren’t really that high because the humans are made out of concrete and no one ever dies no matter what happens to them.
The worst parts of F9 happen when we float back to Dom’s childhood as he and his brother witness their dad die in a racing accident. Teenage Dom isn’t a great actor, looks nothing like Vin Diesel, and is also about a foot taller than his little brother. This feels very weird when the brothers meet face to face later in the film and the younger brother is a little bit taller than big bro, which I’m sure had everyone thinking that either Jacob hit puberty VERY late or Dom has somehow shrunk by 13 inches. The flashbacks could have easily been portrayed to the audience via dialogue and saved us twenty minutes of screen time. The comedy is totally lame this time around and some of this is due to the editing, which struck me as especially poor. Certain jokes and scenarios could have benefited from tighter editing, the movie felt like its timing was just really off. A little more time chopping things up and bringing in someone to punch up the script could have really paid off.
The End.
In summary, and hear me out…as I reflect on the latest two hours I spent with Vin Diesel and his family, I cannot help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, we’re the dumb ones. Maybe the magnet aspect of the script is an allegory for family and Vin, under a pen name of course, is really trying to tell us that although family may repel from each other and cause destruction, at the end of the day, it’s always going to come together at the end. Or maybe the movie is just dumb as shit.
