F9: The Fast Saga
Director: Justin Lin (as if he couldn’t just one of these, fix the formula, and move on. Nope he’s made five of these. FIVE!!!)
Writer: Daniel Casey, Justin Lin, Alfred Botello, Gary Scott Thompson
Starring: I am Gro…I mean Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Nathalie Emmanuel, Charlize Theron, Sung Kang, Helen Mirren, and someone that I cannot see
Reason for watching: new release and because I’ve seen the rest of them, I might as well see this one
Number of times I’ve watched it: first time viewing
***
I was completely satisfied with this movie for about a day after I saw it. And then I thought about it for a few minutes and realized that the Fast & Furious movies are stupid. It was and still is enjoyable if you turn off your brain for two hours or so, but it does make me sad when I see the kind of money these movies make. The action is fun sometimes, and there’s a sense of humor in there somewhere. But every time I watch an entry in this franchise and someone isn’t street racing, jumping off something, or getting shot, and I have to listen to Dom, Letty, Roman, or anyone else talk, I realize just how uninteresting and poorly written these characters are. And then when movies like John Wick come out that have amazing and well-shot action, Fast & Furious movies’ best attribute starts to look pretty bland by comparison. On top of that, each movie exists only to top the other one in terms of what ridiculousness happened. The last few entries in this franchise have included the Rock holding a helicopter down from flying away, our heroes outracing a nuclear submarine while driving on ice, and Vin Deisel stomping so hard on top of a parking garage that he breaks solid concrete. Yes, this movie starts to make jokes about the protagonists being invincible, but that doesn’t stop the movie from going so far in the opposite direction that it’s absurd.
*sigh*
I should probably talk about this movie’s specific flaws, shouldn’t I? Well, everything I just said above can be applied here. The setup is the same as usual, some evil person has a superweapon that Dom (Vin Diesel) and his crew are recruited by the government to get. Fights and chases happen. We find out the bad guy is Dom’s long-lost brother Jacob (John Cena) WHO WAS NEVER MENTIONED BEFORE!!! (I know Star Wars got flack for not planning out the Sequel trilogy, and I’m gonna give you grief for doing the same thing Vin Diesel!) The team gets into it with him. Cypher (Charlize Theron) ends up being behind the whole thing to an extent and is set up to still be the big bad for the next movie at least.
Back to the criticism. It makes so little sense from a character perspective that these people we have been following for eight movies are all of a sudden experts at hand-to-hand combat. Dom should be getting absolutely manhandled by Jacob, a trained super-spy and mercenary. None of the other people in Dom’s crew have training that I’m aware of. For a movie with this much money behind it, they really should’ve invested more in the cinematographer. If the action sequences were seamless and easier to follow, it would have been a lot easier to follow.
Look. I know we are all happy to be back and go to the movies. But we have to start accepting movies that are actually of some level of quality. These movies go to 11 all the time and just keep pushing to new levels of incomprehension. Tiresome is the best way to describe my feelings about this franchise. Please go watch something else.
4/10
Until I see another one