F9: The Fast Saga – Review: F9 Is Audacious, Silly, and Lots of Fun
Quick thoughts: Grade – B- – Fast 9 is wildly silly, occasionally unfocused, and lots of fun. Director and writer Justin Lin has created a truly bonkers film.
If you are looking for a film that has a total disregard for logic, gravity, human life, and focused storytelling, Fast 9 is the movie for you. The 10th installment in the Fast & Furious franchise will put a smile on your face as it goes to space, destroys hundreds of cars, and features some glorious flashbacks that fill us in on Toretto family history. It comes nowhere near the quality of Fast Five or Furious 7, but it does go out of its way to make sure the audience gets its money’s worth.
Fast 9 focuses on what happens when Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew battle his estranged brother Jakob (John Cena), who wants to put together a mysterious device that will make him rich (there’s more to it than that, but it gets overcomplicated). To battle Jakob, Dom, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Chris Bridges), Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), and Mia (Jordana Brewster) travel around the world and engage in car chases, fist fights, and action scenes that go wildly over the top. During these battles, supporting players such as Queenie (Helen Mirren), Han (Sung Kang), Twinkie (Shad Moss), Stasiak (Shea Whigham), Earl (Jason Tobin), and Cipher (Charlize Theron), pop up to blow stuff up, or move the plot along to its next bonkers location. It’s a lot, and the 60% Tomatometer score is understandable because the film is nowhere as focused as its predecessors – and it legitimately becomes a superhero bonanza that has forgotten how grounded the franchise used to be (don’t worry, the characters are aware of this).
While watching, you might find yourself saying “what, huh, when, where, why?…..Yes!” a lot, because it goes places that are extreme by Fast & Furious standards. During the 143-minute running time, you will see Dom Torreto attach a car tire to a swinging rope, defeat dozens of henchmen with ease, and wear a plethora of sleeveless t-shirts. The action can get a bit oppressive, but it’s nice to see Nathalie Emmanuel and Jordana Brewster contributing more to the plot, as they get standout moments to drive around, contribute jokes, and get in on the action. Also, it’s really cool to see Sung Kang and the Tokyo Drift crew back in the fold after Han was supposedly killed off in Tokyo Drift. It’s always been annoying watching Jason Statham in the Fast franchise, because his character Deckard Shaw supposedly killed Han (and many other innocent people), and yet somehow became an honorary member of the Fast family. Han’s return makes Statham’s character much more appealing, and opens up new and exciting doors for future Fast movies
Final thoughts: F9 is a blast, but it goes to such extremes that I’m a bit worried about future installments because I really don’t want bigger sequels.
Here are my updated rankings (Yes, I love 2 Fast and Tokyo Drift a lot).
- 2 Fast 2 Furious
- Tokyo Drift
- Fast & Furious 6
- Fast Five
- The Fast and the Furious
- Furious 7
- Fast and Furious
- F9
- The Fate of the Furious
- Hobbs and Shaw
Movies, Films & Flix 
F9 just shows what I met in my last post and my comments on this site and on Twitter. Susan in Deep Blue Sea a person who tried to find a cure something good for the world was considered a villain and someone that should paid for her actions. Vin Diesel in the Fast and Furious saga did illegal things with his family never paid for his actions. But yet him and his family are considered badasses and fun to watch. This shows me the level of stupidity that people are at, but what am I saying just look at the beginning of the pandemic where people bought toilet paper because they thought by wiping your ass you weren’t going to get the virus. People should start getting their heads out of their asses and start seeing who is really good ones and who are really the bad ones in movies.