The tread is starting to show with F9, the latest installment of the shockingly evergreen Fast & Furious series. It’s wise that Vin Diesel, the leading creative driving force behind the longevity of Hollywood’s oddest blockbuster title, has acknowledged they have two films left in the tank. (As a non-car guy, that’s about as far as I can go with car puns.) In spite of this, F9 boasts an impressive defiance against franchise fatigue. The film isn’t winning over any skeptics, but to die hard and casual fans alike, it delivers what it’s promised: soap opera-level interpersonal drama against a backdrop of loud, over-the-top action and heartfelt sentiments of family (Italics required).
To the uninitiated, we started this quarter-mile-at-a-time with 2001’s standalone The Fast and the Furious, a decent remake of Point Break replacing surfing with street racing. To say the series has expanded in scope is a hilarious understatement: the films graduated from a localized crime thriller to globe-trotting, end-of-the-world spectacle. For reference, when we met Ludacris’s Tej Parker in 2003’s 2 Fast 2 Furious (what a sentence to write), he ran a local body shop and occasionally MC’d midnight street races. Eighteen years and five films later, Tej is now one of the premiere hackers in the world, called upon by international intelligence organizations to thwart global terrorists. The best of these movies have utilized and distilled this silliness into it’s secret sauce, resulting in the 7th highest-grossing film franchise of all time. All time!
F9 reunites the team, this time against newcomer John Cena’s Jakob Toretto, the younger brother of Diesel’s Dom Toretto. Has anyone ever mentioned Jakob in the previous eight installments? Are the filmmakers trolling us by presenting Cena and Diesel as full-blood brothers? As with so many questions with this franchise: it doesn’t matter. Implausible retcons and overdone melodrama are the bread and butter of these movies. Director and co-writer Justin Lin returns to the series (having helmed installments 3 through 6), and his creative influence is felt throughout the film. While Cena’s character is too flat to imbue the desired emotional stakes, Lin again takes advantage of the extended cast to keep us invested. The diverse, charismatic ensemble has been Fast & Furious’ essential ingredient, and F9 is no exception. Diesel remains earnest as ever, which has always been key to selling the silliest dialogue and line readings. It’s not a subtextual reading; Diesel says as much in interviews that he sees these movies as dramatic works. We snicker at the clinking of Coronas at the Toretto family BBQs as someone makes a toast to la familia…but it is kind of touching.
Another element that deserves praise are the suitably outrageous set pieces. Props to a tweet by @sagehyden: “the best thing about F&F is that, if you are falling through the air, it doesn’t matter how fast everything is moving, if you land on a car, that means you’re safe.” For the first time, the movie even directly addresses the invincibility of our heroes, a lamp-shading that actually pays off near the climax of the movie. The action is loud, the stunts mock our conception of physics, and again the story demands cars are needed, even when the action sends us into the literal stratosphere. It makes no consistent sense, but my lizard brain still likes it when the good guys’ cars used magnets as a superpower against the bad guys’ cars. Vroom, vroom, etc.
It’s clear that the series likely reached its creative and critical apex with Fast Five and Furious 7. (I love typing out the titles of these movies.) The franchise has a winning confidence in its own absurdity, but what sets it apart from other blockbusters is the sincerity of the material. This has been bolstered by the well-documented behind-the-scenes friendship and tragedy, which has retroactively imbued a silly franchise with actual dramatic weight and gravitas. Even the most uninterested viewer will be moved by Furious 7’s pitch-perfect tribute to Paul Walker, a sequence so disarmingly emotional that I have actual goosebumps writing about it. These films have always been buoyed by the metatextual conversation around them. The meta-narrative around F9 is a return to the big screen after a year of theatrical uncertainty. F9 was one of the first movies to be delayed in the wake of the spreading pandemic; one year removed, it opened to a $70 million weekend, the first true return to pre-COVID box office numbers. One of this spring’s theatrical ads for F9 featured Diesel waxing poetic about a return to theaters: “The movies!” It’s that same Diesel earnestness that dares us to laugh or wonder agape, “Is—is he serious?” It’s unclear how much longer this franchise can maintain that balance, but F9 continues to delicately walk that line and deliver the spectacle that fills cineplexes in the first place.
F9 is currently in theaters. It runs 143 minutes and is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, and language.
