F9 review: The Fast and Furious franchise spins its wheels

It’s been more than twenty years since we first met Dominic Toretto, his “live life one quarter-mile at a time” lifestyle, and the rest of the family, but ten movies later, the Fast and the Furious franchise is still pumping out new installments. The latest film in the saga, F9, brings back a veritable truckload of beloved characters from earlier films – but despite the return of several fan favorites, the film spins too many plates and fails to deliver a coherent new chapter in Dom’s story.

Starring Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, and a baker’s dozen of other Fast franchise mainstays, F9 sees Dom go head to head with his until-now-unknown brother Jakob (John Cena), who Dom blames for the death of their father. When Jakob aligns with spoiled Oligarch’s son Otto (Thue Ersted Rasmussen) and cyber-terrorist Cipher (Charlize Theron) to gather the pieces of a device that can control any computer on the planet, Dom and the rest of the family gear up to take him down – running into old friends including Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) and Han (Sung Kang) along the way.

If there’s one word to describe F9, it’s excess. The film is filled to the brim with flashbacks, characters, info-dumping, and action setpieces – but the sheer volume of content in the film makes it difficult to digest and unnecessarily convoluted.

We get the sense that F9 set out wanting to do right by both the fans and the many, many characters floating around the Fast universe, but in setting out to include as many veterans as possible, nobody really gets the time they deserve to shine. Though their appearances are a fun callback to Tokyo Drift, Sean, Twinkie, and Earl could’ve been cut from the film without losing any significant beats.

The other big returning player is, of course, Sung Kang’s Han, who infamously met his demise at the hands of Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) at the end of Fast 6 (or, in the middle of Tokyo Drift, if you’ve got your timelines straight). Now that Shaw is a full-fledged member of the family, though, Han’s murder couldn’t go unanswered, so Kang returns to the Fast universe at long last – though not in the grand fashion we might’ve hoped.

Though we’re happy to see Han back, he’s hardly done justice for such a well-loved and iconic character – his role is minuscule and feels shoehorned in the already overstuffed plot. Han’s miraculous return from the dead deserved its own installment of the franchise – not just to be an afterthought in F9.

In terms of the story itself, it’s standard MacGuffin Fast and Furious fare. This time around, instead of a God’s Eye hacking program, it’s an “Ares” device that can control any computer – but rest assured, it’s still as uninspired and overcomplicated as any tech gadget the family has stolen in previous films. Supplementing the uninspired plot device, though, is the villain of the piece – Jakob Toretto, who proves one of the more compelling and memorable baddies of the franchise, though that’s not saying much.

The film opens with a flashback to Dom, Mia, and Jakob’s father in his fatal car crash, and frequently cuts to flashbacks as it intermittently lays out the story of Dom and Jakob’s beef over the years. The flashbacks tire quickly and overstay their welcome (even Michael Rooker’s presence can’t save them), especially when the intense, sepia-toned brooding is juxtaposed with Tej and Roman goofing around in space.

In the present day, though, Jakob makes for a solid villain – a good physical match for Dom in hand-to-hand combat, and involved enough in Dom’s life that we do actively care about what happens to him at the end of the film. F9 also sees the return of Jordana Brewster’s Mia – who plays beautifully off of Cena’s Jakob and provides the film with some of its most tender moments.

Jakob’s sidekick Otto (Thue Ersted Rasmussen) is a breath of fresh air as well – energetic, lighthearted, and just cliche enough to make for a fun secondary antagonist. Jakob and Otto function perfectly as a duo – which makes the inclusion of Cipher a little mind-boggling, considering she’s even more inactive here than she was in Fate of the Furious.

It’s easy to forget she’s in the movie entirely – yet another film that wastes the immense talents of Theron, and pads its runtime an extra 15 minutes or so by trying to find a way to shoehorn Cipher into the plot, only to let her get away yet again so they can use her in the sequel. Otto, the more interesting of the new villains, is unceremoniously fridged in the final act – though if Han can come back from the dead, who’s to say that anyone in the franchise stays dead anymore.

A few of the film’s small army of characters work beautifully as one-and-done appearances: Helen Mirren’s Queenie Shaw is always a delight (and reminds us of how much we miss the rest of the Shaw family), and it’s always good to see Leo and Santos pop up again. On the whole, though, the film has far too many characters and doesn’t know how to use them properly.

Most players feel interchangeable in terms of narrative function – F9 is in desperate need of a second male lead, a role that would usually be filled by either Brian or Hobbs. The job would (theoretically) fall to Han, but as we mentioned, he’s another casualty of the film’s inability to figure out what to do with its massive ensemble of near-identical characters.

The massive cast also doesn’t help reduce the bloated runtime – at two hours and twenty-five minutes, it isn’t exactly a slog to get through, but it doesn’t breeze by either. If anything, the film moves too fast, refusing to let the audience digest a scene or enjoy character beats – more interested in moving to the next big action setpiece. On the topic of set pieces, “magnets” are the name of the game in F9. It’s a fun element to bring to a fight the first time, but the device gets old rather quickly, especially when it’s the singular quirk for a majority of the action sequences.

Between Tej and Roman’s space adventure and the military-style gunfights, this is the least car-centric of the Fast movies yet, which shouldn’t come as a shocker considering the franchise hasn’t seemed interested in being about street racing since Fast & Furious, but it’s still a letdown. For all the Internet memes about the Fast franchise going to space, Tej and Roman’s rocket-fueled orbit feels not only shoehorned in but also staggeringly anticlimactic – which is odd for a franchise whose calling card is gravity-defying stunts.

Despite the fact that it brings back more Fast and Furious characters than ever, F9 somehow manages to feel removed from the rest of the franchise – it moves too fast to really savor character beats or determine turning points in narratives because of how the film flies through each scene. The most effective character moment (outside the brief Jakob/Mia scenes) actually comes in the mid-credit scene, which we’re praying that Hobbs and Shaw 2 will expand on, whenever it comes out.

In an attempt to be the biggest and best Fast and Furious movie yet, F9 ends up with too much going on – refusing to let up on its audience, and not in a good way. Though Otto, Queenie Shaw, and the return of Han are highlights, the action is a dime a dozen, and there’s even less of a connection to street racing than ever. If you’ve stood by the franchise for the last nine films, F9 likely won’t turn you off the franchise, but for fans looking to see beloved characters finally get their chance to return and shine, the film is a letdown – a messy cluster of what the franchise thinks fans want instead of where the narrative should move next.

Are you planning to see F9 this weekend? Sound off in the comments.