The Fast Saga Reaches Space, and Finds Nothing Left to Race

Nine films in, the Fast & Furious franchise has run out of road. F9 wants to be a family drama and a globe-trotting heist picture at the same time, and it does neither well. Justin Lin returns to direct for the first time since Fast & Furious 6, and he brings back Sung Kang’s Han Lue, a character the series killed off and now resurrects. That resurrection is the film’s best idea. Almost everything around it is noise.

Trailer, via The Fast Saga.

Dom Toretto and the Brother He Buried

The plot turns on a retcon. In 1989, Jack Toretto dies in a late model race on a short track when rival driver Kenny Linder clips his bumper and the car catches fire. Dom beats Linder nearly to death and goes to prison. While serving his sentence, Dom decides that Jakob — his younger brother, who worked on their father’s stock car engine the day Jack died — killed him. On release, Dom challenges Jakob to a race, his 1967 Dodge Charger against Jakob’s 1992 Ford Mustang Foxbody. Jakob loses and leaves Los Angeles.

That is the wound the film keeps picking at. John Cena plays Jakob as a master thief, assassin and high-performance driver, and also as Mr. Nobody’s rogue agent. The tagline promises that not all blood is family. The screenplay, by Alfredo Botello, Lin and Daniel Casey, spends 143 minutes proving the opposite.

Project Aries and a Plane in Montequinto

In the present, Dom is retired, raising his son Brian with Letty. Roman Pearce, Tej Parker and Ramsey arrive with bad news. Mr. Nobody’s plane was attacked by rogue agents, who abducted Cipher and crashed in Montequinto, a fictional Central American country.

The team searches the wreck and finds half of a device called Project Aries, which can hack into any computer weapons system. Jakob’s private army ambushes them and steals it. Michael Stasiak helps the crew escape to a safe house at the Caspian Sea. Mia, Dom’s sister, arrives to help.

The device is a hack-any-weapons-system box. It is the ninth version of the same errand. Lin stages the set pieces with competence, but the stakes never rise above the level of a video game objective.

A Cast List That Reads Like a Reunion

The film’s real pleasure is its roster. Vin Diesel anchors the thing as Dom, and Michelle Rodriguez returns as Letty Ortiz. Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris bring the comic relief as Roman and Tej. Nathalie Emmanuel is back as the hacker Ramsey.

Then there are the returns that matter:

• Sung Kang as Han Lue, a member of Dom’s team who was believed to have been killed
• Jordana Brewster as Mia Toretto, who has settled down with her partner and their two children
• Helen Mirren as Magdalene “Queenie” Ellmanson-Shaw, mother of Dom’s former enemies Deckard and Owen
• Kurt Russell as Mr. Nobody, the intelligence operative who runs a covert ops team
• Charlize Theron as Cipher, the criminal mastermind and cyberterrorist
• Michael Rooker as Buddy, an auto mechanic who worked on Jack Toretto’s pit crew

New faces include Finn Cole as a young Jakob, Anna Sawai as Elle Lue, Han’s adoptive daughter, and Thue Ersted Rasmussen as Otto, an aristocrat’s son who finances Jakob. J. D. Pardo plays Jack Toretto. Vinnie Bennett plays a teenage Dom, and Diesel’s own son, Vincent Sinclair, plays a young Dom. Azia Dinea Hale plays a young Letty. Siena Agudong plays a young Mia.

That is a lot of names. It is also the problem. F9 keeps introducing people and then handing them nothing to do. Mirren appears, delivers a line, and vanishes. Russell is a plot device. Theron sits in a chair and explains things.

Han Lue Comes Back From the Dead

The film’s one genuine emotional engine is Han. Letty and Mia fly to Tokyo to investigate his connection to Project Aries. The franchise has spent years treating his death as a tragedy, and F9 finally pays it off. Kang plays the role with the same easy stillness he brought to the earlier films, and the film is better whenever he is on screen.

But the screenplay treats the resurrection as a puzzle piece rather than a wound. Han’s return should wreck Dom. Instead it advances the plot. The film keeps reaching for feeling and settling for exposition.

A Release Date That Kept Moving

F9 was originally scheduled by Universal Pictures for April 19, 2019. It was delayed. The production timeline tells its own story of a franchise in flux.

Filming ran from June 2019 to that November, with locations including London, Edinburgh, Tbilisi, Los Angeles and Thailand. Brian Tyler returned to compose the score. F9 is the first film in the franchise since 2 Fast 2 Furious in 2003 not written by Chris Morgan. That break shows. The series’ long-running scribe knew how to build a set piece around a theme. Lin, Botello and Casey build set pieces around a device.

The Rock Is Not in This Movie

Dwayne Johnson’s absence hangs over the film. He appeared in the previous four entries, and in January 2019 he confirmed he would not return. Jason Statham also does not return as Deckard Shaw, though he makes a cameo in the mid-credits scene.

Cena is the attempt at a substitute. He is a gifted comic performer, and the film gives him almost nothing funny to do. Jakob is written as a brooding rival, which wastes the one quality Cena reliably provides. The Dom-Jakob conflict should cut deepest. It plays as a squabble over a dead man’s engine.

The Score: 5.8 of 10

F9 is a franchise running on memory. It brings back Han, it brings back Mia, it brings back Queenie, and it asks the audience to feel something about a brother who did not exist until this installment. The action is competent and the cast is deep. The script is not.

Lin directed Fast & Furious 6, the high point of the series, and he knows how to stage a chase. But a franchise cannot survive on set pieces alone, and F9 has no idea what it is about. The tagline says not all blood is family. The film spends its runtime insisting that all of it is.

The Han Lue resurrection is the one decision worth defending. It corrects an old wrong and gives Kang a role the series should have given him years ago. Everything else here is a retcon in search of a reason.

F9: 5.8 of 10

F9 · Fast & Furious · John Cena · Justin Lin · movie review · Vin Diesel