F9: The Fast Saga (2021)

PG-13 for cartoonish violence and some language.  Most of this language is associated with childish insults, so it's pretty innocuous.  But it still is a Fast and the Furious film, so just keep the vibe.  These movies, in terms of sexual content, have actually grown more tame over time and borderline on superhero films at this point.  A lot of people should be dead, but few are.  One guy gets blown up with a grenade.  I'm sure there are other quick deaths, but the body count should be way higher than it is.

DIRECTOR: Justin Lin

Is this really the 20th anniversary movie of the first Fast and the Furious movie?  Oh my.  Why am I watching F9 out of nowhere?  I mean, the new movie is coming out.  But the bigger point is that I've watched this many Fast and Furious movies, mind as well just maintain the collection.  While looking for a picture to put on this blog, I ran across a headline for a review of the film that absolutely beat me to the punch on this one.  Don't feel bad for me.  It made me feel validated on my opinions because it was dead on.

"F9 is too much."  One thing that saved The Fast and the Furious franchise is its gleeful absurdity.  The second these movies realized that this story should have nothing to do with reality, the movies got fun.  Even a guy like me who is, unfortunately, hyper-critical at times (some accuse me of liking everything.  It doesn't make me NOT a judgmental turd a lot of the time), I have fun with a lot of the later movies once they abandon the whole car-crimes thing.  But maybe this shouldn't be a franchise comprising of nine/soon ten movies plus a spin-off.  I was thinking of how insane it is that there are a lot of Fast movies and whether or not these movies would have the same cultural permeability that, say, the James Bond movies would have on the zeitgeist.  I can't imagine so.  But then again, my generation is starting to be considered one of the older generations.  The way we view cultural impact is different.  The Fast movies are these silly car movies that clearly people keep coming back to because they keep making them.  I'm sure that Vin Diesel is thrilled about it.  It's the thing that really cemented him in our collective consciousnesses.

But as silly as these movies are, this one is silly even for the franchise.  I've always had a problem with how people just survive things that should absolutely kill them.  F9 isn't ignorant of this problem.  It's this whole subplot / running gag with Roman and Tej.  Someone at their computer had to address the elephant in the room that people are somehow able to survive anything.  But having Roman talk about how no one should be able to survive the things that they survive is the equivalent of "Somehow, Palpatine returned." It's kind of lazy and a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for the franchise.  And boy, it gets really bad.  People don't even seem to get injured anymore.  Dom has no right ot be alive in this movie for one of the accidents, let alone all of the accidents.  There's a scene where Dom drives really fast (I should leave the sentence there) at a cable.  He somehow knows that if he drives really quickly at the cable, it will latch onto the car and swing him across an ungappable ravine.  Okay, that's where most Fast movies end.  We can accept that because the series has told us that physics doesn't matter.  But then the car rappels the cab only to get completely demolished on the other side.  Dom and Letty?  Joking about how crazy Dom is.  That's not okay.  That impact would have killed anyone on the planet.  There was no getting out of that.  At least lie to me and say that they were hurt and there's a time gap where they got better.  

I don't know why I need that lie all of the sudden.  I just know that Dom's little tank at the end was hit by missles and he just rolled out of it.  The other little bad guy survived a lot of that too.  He only died because it was time for him to die.  Action films lose their stakes if people can just walk away from anything.  I keep using James Bond movies as touchstones for action films because I know them very well.  They've also committed this crime in Die Another Day. What I really like about the Daniel Craig movies is that there are these absurd action pieces where physics can be completely ignored.  But Craig's Bond takes damage.  As much of a powerhouse that version of Bond is --similar to the powerhouse archetype that Dom is --Bond often is injured.  The entire premise of Skyfall is the fact that you can't survive everything.  So many people should have died.  I can safely say that there's a good chance that Dom should have died at least a dozen times in this movie.  Nothing matters at that point.  The movie just decides what is survivable and what isn't at any point in the film.

Even worse --and this is a commentary on the whole franchise --death doesn't stick.  I know, the comic book guy is whining about people coming back from the dead, but it's silly when it comes to Dom's world.  No one on the planet has had the real world experience of confirmed death and someone coming back.  We've had people give up hope.  We've had extreme cases of people faking their death without bodies.  But Dom has had two significant people in his life die and then come back.  Man, one of those would have been pushing it.  But two?  Letty and Han can't both live in worlds where their deaths can be faked so realistically, despite people viewing their deaths.  It's so much.  And it's got a lot of "Palpatine returned" elements to it.  A good chunk of this movie is devoted to having Han return.  Listen, I think that weaving Tokyo Drift back into the franchise is kind of fun and nice.  But that explanation for how Han survived is so underbaked.  In fact, like Roman's commentary on invincibility, he's shushed the second that anyone points out that it doesn't make sense.  Death needs to be something with consequences.  This movie even gave Dom a clear goodbye death scene AND THEN IMMEDIATELY TOOK IT BACK.  I'm not talking about a death fakeout.  That's what Roman had.  I'm talking about the sad music, the slow motion fall, AN ENTIRE GRAIN SILO COLLAPSING AROUND HIM, goodbye and all.  You can't keep pulling that card and expect people to have investment in life or death.

The thing that bugs me is that, while lots of franchises have formulas, this is the one that tries to hide it the least.  Something something something spy equipment coupled with ANOTHER of Dom's secret family members who is on the outs.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  I could not tell you what the Macguffin did, not because the movie didn't explain it, but because I just didn't care.  They're all the same.  The threat never really felt real.  I knew that John Cena wasn't going to be the big bad of the franchise. Also, Charlize Theron was in the movie for practically no reason except to remind you that she's the big bad and that everyone is going to have to team up to beat her in the next one.  Golly, if there's ever been something that really sells the notion of a stop-gap movie, it's stuff like that.  If I asked an AI to write a Fast and the Furious sequel, it would look exactly like this. There's nothing new here.  Nothing is a surprise.  It's just explosions and lines about "family."  There's a reason that there's a meme about Vin Diesel saying "Family" a lot.  It's not a motif if that's all you do to make a new movie.  It also makes no sense that Jakob existed before this point.  He would have been the main point of conversation so many times.  It's got that whole, "Everyone knows Spock" thing that Star Trek kind of sucks at.

I'm really on a tear now.  I'm sorry if you liked this movie and it's not like I hated it, but it's silly to the Nth degree.  The magnets?  Listen, each of these movies has its gimmick to make car chases somehow different.  I like the idea of super powerful electromagnets to throw cars around.  It's just that...those magnets were the most trained magnets ever.  They only picked up and spun around what the characters needed them to do.  Instead of being magnets, they were giant hands just swinging cars around.  All this probably comes across as nitpicking, but it's just telltale signs that the series is cutting corners for the sake of money.  It's not like the Fast series is about elevated art, but there's also just not caring to a certain extent. That might be a bit unfair.  I'm sure that there are people behind this franchise who are really gatekeeping the heck out of it.  But if anything, this feels like a quasi-penultimate (I say that because the last "film" is actually split into two movies.) movie that is just getting out of the way of a much more epic film.  I don't know. 

This franchise started off with me scoffing at it.  Then I had a lot of fun with it.  Now I'm back to scoffing, but still having a little bit of fun.  I'd sooner watch F9 over The Fast and the Furious, but that's not an impressive sell.