F9: The Fast Saga AKA Fast 9 (Review)
Fast 9 Should Have It’s License Revoked
Fast 9 expresses the apparent sentiments of the cast and crew with its official title, F9: The Fast Saga. It’s not only an uncreative and awkward title, but a lazy display of just how little the franchise actually cares anymore. F9? More like a big FU to the audience. Hell, even Fast 9 is exactly the same as Fast Five. This lack of effort and originality spreads into the new characters and action sequences with eye-rolling results.The series was never exactly grounded in reality, but there was at least an effort to maintain a suspension of disbelief in the insane stunts. That went for the ridiculous, yet ambitious plots for the previous movies. Fast 9 displays an arrogant assumption that the idiots paying money to see these movies will eat up any slop shoveled in front of them. That attitude makes it nothing more than a bloated, muscle bound soap opera recycling Bond villain plans and boldly declaring that it has no idea how magnets work.
Despite the warnings from chiropractors, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) is back behind the wheel driving fast while furious. This time the gravelly voiced gearhead is angry that a Blofeld-class WMD has been stolen from his old spymaster buddy (Kurt Russell). Once more he buckles his ever-growing adopted family (consisting of Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, and Nathalie Emmanuel) into the minivan of adventure and sets out to save the day. That is until he discovers the enemy this time around is his long lost brother Jakob Toretto (John Cena), who happens to be a former ultra spy/assassin. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Dom also has to deal with the return of his greatest villain, Cipher (Charlize Theron), who is once more pulling the strings. Can Dom drive fast enough to defeat his brother and the laws of physics in time to save the world? After 9 of these flicks, it’s safe to assume he does. The question though is whether he should.
I stand by my words that Fast 9 simply doesn’t care about “the idiots paying money to see these movies.” It’s a bold statement, but one that I plan to prove with only a few minor spoilers (if you’ve seen the trailers, you know most of them). Let’s begin with exhibit A: John Cena. Look, I’m a huge fan of movies that allow him to show off his deadpan humor and physical comedy while still being a badass (see: The Suicide Squad). This time, he plays Vin Diesel’s brother. Just let that sink in for a moment, because it’s such terrible casting that Fast 9 even has a character comment on the lack of resemblance as though that makes it acceptable. Cena though is forced into the role like a square peg through a round hole, and it’s painful to watch, considering how wonderful he is in other movies. This almost feels like a passive aggressive dig at Dwayne Johnson by “replacing” him with another wrestler turned actor while attempting to put butts in seats by using his name on the poster. Either way, Cena is given an embarrassingly flat role hastily cobbled from action movie stock characters. That’s enough about exhibit A though.
Exhibit B: The Fast 9 scripts have devolved into a mess of soap opera and spy tropes smeared across paper like a toddler’s finger painting. A long lost brother, who has never been mentioned before, despite having ties to people we’ve encountered and being a world class spy/assassin in a franchise that’s featured a lot of world class spies/assassins? That’s insulting. A long dead character brought back to life after revealing the tragic accident that fans actually witnessed was an elaborate hoax? How, you ask? That would be a spoiler, but it’s just as poorly explained. Why? Well, the lost brother idea was already taken and “faking-their-death” was the next open box on the Soap Opera bingo card . The threat this time? A top-secret device that can take control of every weapons system on the planet once it’s uploaded to a satellite. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that same exact convoluted mcguffin has been used in nearly every spy series since the Cold War started.. More importantly, it’s one so far out of character for the heroes that it’s embarrassing. Up until this point, the protagonists were a collection of roguish under-dogs-adrenaline-junkies atoning for their criminal pasts. Now they’re basically spies with attitude (aka xXx).
Exhibit C is the most damning of all for Fast 9 and that’s just how stupid the spectacle has become in the franchise. It’s pushed my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point before, but it always held because of how engrossing the batshit insane machismo behind it was. The franchise used to ask the audience to hold their beer while they punched physics in the face. Everyone understood that it was ridiculous, but there was still an underlying desire to see if they could actually “do it.” This time around, they drive a car in space. To rub salt into the wound, Fast 9 doesn’t even try to justify how that is even hypothetically possible. Instead, the smart characters say “because numbers,” and everyone nods. All of the action scenes reach this level of stupidity that even their own “physics” and “logic” come into direct conflict. One character even starts to suspect they all posses “plot armor” at one point. It was a legitimate struggle to get through Fast 9, especially once Justin Lin started playing with magnets. I’m both horrified and morbidly curious to see what crap they come up with next in the franchise.
Fast 9 is a 2 1/2 hour car wreck in every regard. Scratch that. Fast 9 is a 20 car pile up with no survivors. Scratch that. Fast 9 is a flaming 18-wheeler loaded with rocket fuel jack-knifing out of control towards the puppy orphanage. I can keep going with the crash analogies, but the point is that the movie is an accident that never should have been made. The only enjoyable aspect was watching Charlize Theron toy with the rest of the roided out cast. She easily had the most BDE of the entire cast. Despite Fast 9, I would totally watch a spin-off movie starring her character as a criminal mastermind. At this point though, I might only be looking forward to the spin-offs (perhaps Jakob and Hobbs or Han and Shaw?). Either way, I hope the next director at least puts in the effort to talk to a scientist or at least read a wikipedia article before making it. Fast 9 is literally so far away from the original world of the Fast & Furious franchise that the only car it references by name is a Pontiac Fiero.
