Fast And Furious 9 Movie Review — Laws Of Physics Rewritten

After Years Of Challenging The Impossible, F9 Decides To Challenge Frontiers Instead, Throwing Logic Outta Window

Looks suspiciously like a Power Rangers poster isn’t it?

This review contains massive spoilers, so don’t come near until you have seen the movie!

Midway through the movie, Roman (Tyrese Gibson) goes all meta and exclaims the ridiculousness of not having a single scratch on his body despite having just been shot at by hundreds of bullets. They have taken out planes, trains, tanks submarines, and none of them have suffered as much as a bruise. He then comes to the enlightened conclusion that they — referring to all the members within the FF gang — are basically indestructible. What was supposed to be a comical moment lead by the pack’s joker, became -in our opinion- the only part of F9 that made logical sense. As far as I could remember from watching all the movies within the franchise, this was probably the only time a character actually took time to acknowledge just how ridiculous the FF movies were becoming. Roman has within a split second, became the audience.

Gone were the days where it was just about souped-up cars being used in jaw-dropping ways to execute even more astounding heists. Now, cars can basically stand in for planes, tanks, and even goddam space rockets. Yes, you heard it right, a car, in bloody space. How? Don’t even ask. There has to be a point when the director, cast, and producers got together, did a script read, looked at each other, and just laughed out loud. Flying cars you say? Cars with extraordinarily strong magnets you say? Cars that can withstand the pressure of freaking outer space you say?

Why not?

“That was exactly the face I thought you would have when I told ya the plot”

Plot is generic enough. Most of the films in the franchise have the same one anyway. Some world-ending/domination/controlling device falls into the wrong hands, and the FF gang has to get it back. The slight plot twist — the person who stole the device is…Dom’s brother (John Cena). Who basically did that because…Dom (Vin Diesel) was an asshole to him when they were kids. And in the end redeemed himself by…helping Dom get back said Doomsday device from the hands of Cipher (Charlize Theron), possibly the only baddie in the FF franchise to stay bad and evil. If this premise sounds familiar, it's because it’s virtually the same plot as FF7 with the exception of Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) being Owen Shaw’s (Luke Evans) brother instead. Deckard was pissed off with FF gang being an ass to his brother Owen, so he stole some Doomsday device, got the FF gang after him, ran circles around them, before finally redeeming himself and “joining” them. The scriptwriters must be like “Nah, no one is gonna care about the plot, so lets just save some time and focus more on how to break the laws of physics”.

Honestly if there had been a semblance of a scientific explanation on how the characters and the cars they use are able to do the things they do, I might have been more invested in it and perhaps use the “it’s a movie after all” excuse. But there is a line between “Awesome!” and “Wtf?”, and this movie is too far gone into the latter. Magnets on cars were “Awesome!” because they took a bit of time to explain it through exposition, and showing us how it visually works. May have been a bit of stretch to say a magnet retrofitted into a car could generate enough power to push other cars away, but hey, it’s plausible. Then there is the “Wtf?”. Early on in the movie, a speeding car was crossing a narrow wooden bridge. Halfway through, the wooden bridge snapped off. 10/10 a car of that weight, traveling at that speed, with two full sized passengers in it, would fall all the way to the bottom of the mountain, doesn’t matter how fast you were moving. The speeding car somehow managed to cross the rest of the bridge, defying gravity, physics, and whatever science is present in the modern world, and came up from THE SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN. Like it could suddenly climb.

A rare jackie chan cameo

My mind kinda switched off after that.

The FF franchise was about family..ok, fine, is still about family. A little tenuous with all the brothers, sisters and mothers suddenly popping out of nowhere — still, a nice little cameo by Dame Helen Mirren playing Deckard Shaw’s mum, basically in a glorified uber driver role — but the “We da Family” theme is still strong. The heart that was present in earlier installments is now gone though. You don’t get that warm fuzzy feeling at the end of the movie anymore. In it’s place there is a Paul Walker sized hole the creators are trying their dammest to fill with whatever ridiculousness they could find, and it’s dragging the whole franchise down into the hole with it.

I heard they even have a Jurrasic Park crossover coming up.

He had to appear again.

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