‘F9’ reaches new heights of absurdity: Movie review

In the first really spectacular action scene of F9, our heroes realize they need to drive through a literal minefield at 80mph or more — any slower, and they’ll get caught in the explosions when the mines go off. So zip over them they do, at exhilarating speed, leaving fantastic destruction in their wake. It’s the movie’s approach to storytelling in a nutshell: If you can just move fast enough, with any luck you’ll outpace the mess before it can catch up to you.

For another movie, that might be a flaw. For F9, it’s a selling point. As the series has grown more and more baroque over the years, with enough fake deaths to rival any daytime soap and action so ridiculous it makes your typical Marvel climax look grounded, some of its more recent installments have seemed to be running on fumes. But F9, directed by Justin Lin — the man who helped shepherd the franchise from cheesy Point Break knockoff to nine-figure action extravaganza in the first place — reaches heights of absurdity that break through into the transcendent. By the time one character is reassuring another that “as long as we obey the laws of physics, we’ll be fine” while simultaneously breaking every law of physics, there’s nothing to do but sit back and gape with glee.

‘F9’ is here to overwhelm you with light and sound until your head feels emptied of anything but the metallic clang of colliding cars.

Even by the standards of a Fast and Furious movie, F9 crams a dizzying amount of stuff into its 149-minute run time, and it tears through them at such head-spinning velocity that the dizziness becomes part of the pleasure. While the overarching plot is easy enough to follow (it’s yet another globe-trotting chase for a MacGuffin with the potential to destroy the world) the details pile up like so many smashed cars on the side of the road. You can stress yourself out trying to keep up, or you can simply give yourself over to the faith that the screenplay (by Lin and Daniel Casey) will get you eventually, like Dom (Vin Diesel) swerving his car at the last second to catch a friend on his hood before they splatter all over the freeway. Which, naturally, is something that happens several times in this film.

And anyway, they’re just excuses for the film to make its way back to the franchise’s foundational themes of ever-more-insane action and ever-more-earnest proclamations about the importance of family. On the former, it delivers and then some. Cars soar across canyons, launch into the sky, and tear through entire city blocks thanks to the power of magnets. (Magnets are a whole thing in this movie, and they’re maybe the best thing to happen to this franchise since cars.) Much of it is not very believable; if common sense doesn’t tell you that none of this could possibly be real, the vehicles flying around with the weightlessness of the pixels they really are should tip you off. 

But it often looks super cool, thanks to Lin’s eye for propulsive action, which is what matters, and the film knows that, which matters even more. F9 goes ahead and lampshades its silliest tendencies with a running joke about Roman (Tyrese Gibson), the team himbo, thinking back to their previous adventures and becoming increasingly convinced that something more powerful than mere luck has kept him safe through the years. It’s self-awareness teetering at the edge of outright chaos — since, you know, he’s right — which might be the only way to handle the fact that none of this makes a lick of sense.

Less effective are the film’s attempts to dig deeper with its feelings. Jakob, a new character presented as a long-lost Toretto brother that everyone conveniently forgot to mention until right now, is incorporated into the story through mopey flashbacks to his and Dom’s youth, which in turn forces actor John Cena into a perpetual sulk that ill suits him. Worse, his and Dom’s unconvincing angst overshadows should be the emotional linchpin of this installment — the return of Han, a character so beloved that the entire in-universe timeline was rearranged to keep him around longer. While Sung Kang makes the most of his limited time onscreen (my audience cheered practically every time he appeared), it’s hard not to expect more after all this time.

But that old family feeling comes flooding back in the film’s lighter moments, which can feel downright cozy despite spanning half a dozen countries over three continents. With cameos by everyone from Helen Mirren (of Hobbs & Shaw), to Shea Whigham (of Fast & Furious), to Han’s Tokyo Drift buddies (Lucas Black, Bow Wow, and Jason Tobin), F9 often feels like a stroll through an old neighborhood where you still know everyone, and everyone knows each other. Even the villains (like Jakob and Charlize Theron’s Cipher) seem to be connected through some adjacent social network of their own.

True, you have to not think too hard about all the people that aren’t included in this community — given all the destruction on display in F9, one has to assume the bystander body count is somewhere in the tens or hundreds of thousands. But it’s easy enough not to, given how furiously F9 careens over every new plot twist. It’s not here to offer subtlety or wisdom or make you feel bad about all that property damage. It’s here to overwhelm you with light and sound until your head feels emptied of anything but the metallic clang of colliding cars and the faint echoes of Vin Diesel mumbling about family — to do proper big-screen blockbuster movie stuff, in other words. After a year at home, could anything sound better? 

F9 is only in theaters June 25.

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