Movie Review: 'F9 The Fast Saga'

I have an emotional connection to the Fast and Furious franchise. As a young critic, I became quite pretentious, quite early on. I wanted to be highbrow and talk about film art and look down my nose at blockbuster movies. I wanted to be a snob though not admit that I was a snob. This turned out to be a soul sucking endeavor as I was something of a fraud. I forced myself to deny the simple pleasure of a spectacle just so I could claim the clout of watching obscure art movies that I wasn’t really enjoying.

Don’t get me wrong, I do love a good, pretentious, low budget, foreign, art piece. There are several that hold a warm place in my heart. But, after seeing The Fast and the Furious I had to force myself to recognize that there was a place in my heart for pure, dunderheaded spectacle as much as there was room for high art. Indeed, my movie loving heart has swelled to welcome each of the Fast and Furious movies over the years. These movies occupy a place in my heart as comfort food.

In the Fast and Furious franchise, or The Fast Saga, as some marketing refers to it, I found a respite for my mind, a place of pure, silly, fantasy. Where others embraced superheroes, Hobbits, or Wizards, I found my Zen, my happy place of empty calories and unbridled giddiness in the fast cars and buffed up action heroes of The Fast Saga. The Fast Saga fulfills a need I have to uncritically enjoy something and still get paid to write about the experience.

F9 picks up the story of Dominic Torretto (Vin Diesel) as he finds his way in a life of domestic bliss. But, not all is as serene as it appears. Dom certainly loves spending time with his son, Little Brian, and his beloved Letty (Michele Rodriguez), but it is apparent that there is something missing in their lives. This is especially true for Letty who isn’t cut out for life on the farm. She longs for the danger of fast cars and fistfights, dodging bullets and derring do.

She gets her chance when old friends come for an unexpected visit. Roman (Tyrese), Tej (Chris Bridges), and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), arrive on Dom and Letty’s farm with dire news. Their employer, Mr Nobody (Kurt Russell), has possibly died in a plane crash. He managed to get a message to his team as he was crashing somewhere in South America and now the team needs to get to the crash site in order to recover whatever he’s left behind.

Naturally, this is some kind of world-ending technology that if it falls into the wrong hands it could cause some unspecified global disaster. You know, the usual stuff for our car racing heist squad. Surprisingly however, Dom rejects the mission. He’s afraid to leave his son and appears to want to stick with his quiet new life. This lasts all of a night. While Letty leaves immediately to jump back into action, Dom took a night to decide he would get back into action, leaving Brian with his Uncle Brian (a nod to the late Paul Walker).

The mission to this unnamed South American crash location is classic Fast Saga. The team must evade a corrupt and dangerous military, retrieve the incredibly dangerous device, and evade the team of big bads who are after the device. The last part is the most intriguing as here, we meet our villain. The villain reveal has been out there for some time now, the trailer for F9 The Fast Saga debuted well over a year ago and spoiled the big surprise.

Professional wrestling legend John Cena has joined the Fast family as Dominic Torretto’s brother, Jakob. Jakob is a world class spy who has gone rogue and is taking a multi-million dollar payoff from the spoiled rich son of a European dictator. Bottom line, they need the device for world domination and it will be up to Dom and the Fast family to stop them from taking over the world in some convoluted fashion.

Oh, but John Cena is not the only big reveal on the F9 cast list. Ever since F9 was first being promoted, fans were teased with the return of a Fast and Furious cast legend. That return is the resurrection of Han Lue (Sung Kang) who was believed to be dead at the hands of Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw at the end of Tokyo Drift. Thankfully, Han is not dead and, in fact, he has a key role to play in the goofball plot of F9: The Fast Saga.

Of course, we don’t go to The Fast Saga for plot. We are here for pure, dumb, spectacle and director Justin Lin delivers in a big way. The opening heist features a plane that catches a car in mid-air and flies away. This is followed by Dom somehow managing to have his car grab what remains of a rope bridge and swing the car to the other side of a large gorge in a tremendous middle finger to both logic and physics.

It’s an outlandish scene and things only grow more outlandish as the story progresses. Director Justin Lin is one of the most bold and crazy directors working today. Lin delights in taking the ludicrous and making it even more outrageous. In F9: The Fast Saga this includes taking members of the Fast family to space. Yes, Space, this is not a joke. In fact, Lin claims that the science behind sending these characters into orbit is actually the most accurate science in the whole movie.

Regardless of how insane that sounds, I just adore Justin Lin’s imagination. The whole of The Fast Saga under his direction has been flawless in its commitment to being as loud, dumb and over the top as possible and I cannot get enough. F9 is perhaps not as all encompassing in its silliness as the previous Lin helmed sequels, but it more than makes up for the occasional lull in the narrative by taking characters from this franchise into OUTER SPACE!

This is literally both a muted Fast Saga Movie, eager to indulge a little family drama and soap opera nonsense, and a movie where non-astronauts, former car thieves, go into outer space. The remarkable goofiness on display is a wonder to behold. As a long time fan of this franchise I was deeply pleased with F9: The Fast Saga. This movie is exactly the brainless thrill ride I was looking for. It’s not my favorite of the franchise, that’s reserved for the glorious schmaltz of the final Paul Walker entry in The Fast Saga, Furious 7, but it is nevertheless, another satisfyingly silly entry in this empty calorie franchise.