F9 (2021)
2/5
Towards the end of my marathon of the Fast and Furious films – at this point I had admittedly skipped Hobbs and Shaw as it didn’t seem wholly necessary being a spin-off – I finally managed, a bit late of course, to see the latest instalment: F9; or Fast 9; or F9: The Fast Saga. One of those.
Before I sat down for the screening, though, earlier on in the day (about half an hour earlier) I sat down to receive my first vaccine dose from a distribution site just over the road. I of course spent the first fifteen or so minutes after having done so sat in a room with all the other recipients, waiting for any particularly worrying side-effects, but none seemed to come, so I departed for the cinema. Everything was fine as I sat through the trailers in that dark, warm room, but around twenty minutes into the film, I started to feel my eyelids getting heavy, starting to droop.
I think the last time I’ve ever felt something similar to this – this battle to retain consciousness while something on a large screen before you tries its damnedest to grip you – was during my last 9 AM screening at university, the night before which I had almost certainly stayed up a little too late not being fun and drinking with any of my friends or flatmates, watching another film and forgetting the time.
Now, at the time, sitting there in the auditorium, I thought ‘huh, that’s weird.’ Immediately, I stopped focussing on the film and began considering whether or not my vaccine had started its work; considering whether or not I might need help getting home – having driven myself the half an hour it took to get there. It was only later, however, upon the raising of the lights after the credits had started their slow crawl, that I realised that actually no, it hadn’t been the vaccine nudging me ever closer to the precipice of deep sleep, it had indeed been F9.
This time around, Toretto (Diesel) and his crew-turned-family – bolstered by the return of Jordana Brewster as Mia, this time in a far more active capacity, but noticeably suffering for its lack of Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham – are confronted by a foe from rather closer to home than Dom would perhaps like. That is his younger brother, Jakob, who is here initially played by Peaky Blinders’ Finn Cole in the film’s rather odd turn to the usage of flashbacks to explore the Toretto familial canon.
Flashing forward to the present, it appears Dom has finally started a family of his own, quietly raising his son Brian alongside Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), away from the noise of his storied career as a street-racer? (What would you call him, or any of the crew for that matter, at this point?)
The peace obviously isn’t to last, though, and Dom and Letty are pulled back into the fray when news arrives of Mister Nobody (Kurt Russell), whom I will never understand as not having turned into a villain by now, being shot out of the sky – losing with his plane the previous instalment’s villain, Cipher (Charlize Theron) who had apparently somehow been apprehended off-screen.
Upon investigation of the crash-site, the crew soon discover that Nobody’s manifest not only included their slippery past adversary, but also yet another MacGuffin for them to concern themselves with: the Ares device, which allows its wielder to hack into any weapons system on the planet; a device obviously split in two so that the crew will have something to go after. When Jakob, played by John Cena when not in flashback, reappears as a kitted-out super-spy (we’ve never seen this before), it dawns that he too is on Ares’ trail and this (I think at this point fourth in the series) race to the technological Holy Grail will be what we’re watching unfold for the remaining hour and a half or so.
By my unimpressed account it’s probably clear that no new ground is being made in the plot department, but I’d also suggest that the same is the case when it comes to the characters, arguably the single-most important part that most fans still flock to the series for.
Disappointingly, Diesel still lacks any kind of on-screen charisma and is still not being served well by being thrust into the fore as anything more than a supporting character. Clearly, though, Diesel/Toretto’s vacuum of personality must be genetic as Cena – generally someone I associate as oozing the same kind of charisma that The Rock and Statham both do – is also reduced to a muscular marionette for the plot to throw about in the hopes that his backstory might imply emotional weight. To be clear: it doesn’t.
And the same is true for the rest of cast. Everyone’s putting on the same act. Gibson as the ever-hungry Roman Pearce has always been entertaining but even his act is wearing thin, unable to bring more than a couple half-chuckles with his bombast. Ludacris as Tej and Nathalie Emmanuel as Ramsey are both given more to do here as was always going to be the case with such a technologically focused plot, but by-and-large they’re mostly there to spout technobabble, flip some switches and type dramatically – but only when it’s convenient dramatically.
Hell, even Sung Kang as Han, probably the character with the most interesting writing behind him, doesn’t get to do much that he hasn’t done before and starts to grate.
Returning alongside Brewster is director Justin Lin, the man behind Fast Saga films three through six, who took a two-film hiatus from the franchise to direct some smaller projects and the third Star Trek film, Star Trek Beyond. I probably don’t need to even say it, but Fast 9 really isn’t the glorious reprisal fans might have hoped for from him and, if anything, solidifies him in my mind as a middling-at-best filmmaker.
Lin’s reunion here with Tokyo Drift alumni Lucas Black and Bow Wow doesn’t glow with the kind of garish neon-gold noughties nostalgia you might hope it would. Instead, it stands as another stark reminder of the scrappiness and endearingly un-self-aware hilarity the series has progressively moved away from.