F9 movie review & film summary (2021) | Roger Ebert (2024)

I didn't have many notes on "F9," the latest installment in the "Fast and Furious" series, but one near the top of the first page could stand in for the others:"Oh, sure, why not?"

That was in response to a moment showcased in trailers and ads, wherein street racer and thief turned globetrotting super-spy Dominic "Dom" Toretto (Vin Diesel)evades pursuers during a jungle chase by triggering the rocket booster on his souped-up vehicle, soaring off the edge of a cliff, and using a cable he's fired into a mountain on the other side to swing him and his wife and espionage partnerLetty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez)to safety. LikeTarzan on a vine. That's the kind of film this is:an "Oh, sure, why not?" film. James Bond meets the Road Runner cartoons.Remember in "Commando," when John Matrix, held hostage by a dictator's goon on a commercial flight, kills him in his seat with a neck snap as the plane is preparing for takeoffwithout anyone noticing, then crawls into a landing gear housing and drops into a swamp conveniently located at the end of the runway?Or when the good guysin "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" leap out of a crashing plane with an inflatable yellow raft instead of parachutes, inflate the rafton the way down, plop onto a snowy mountain embankment at an angle that leaves them all unharmed, and slalom till they get to a river?

"F9" is like that. All of it.

If, as more than one fan has noted, the "F&F" films have turned intoan international,multicultural, hip-hop-friendly answer to James Bond, the last few have been Roger Moore-era Bonds.The only question is whether this new one is "Moonraker" or "Octopuss*." Ivote"Moonraker" because a satellite figures into the plot. I would describe said plot in more detailif I thought I could keep it straight, and if Ithought it mattered, but it doesn't. Plot was never the reason people went to these films. The appeal lies in the chases and stunts, the bruising fights and mythic posturing, in the repeated invocations of [rumbling Vin Diesel voice] FAMMMM-LY, and in the soap opera/professional wrestling-style storytelling, which allows bad guys to become good guys and introduces new characters that we're told mean the world to an established character even though nobody in the previous films mentioned their name before.

In "F9," the character isDom's long-lost brother Jakob Toretto (John Cena), who disappeared from Dom's life in 1989 after being blamed for a car crash that killed their car-racer dad. In the present day, Dom is living off the grid with Letty and their son whenRoman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) show up to inform them that national security bigwig Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) captured their old antagonistCipher (Charlize Theron, introduced in "The Fate of the Furious"), but the plane taking her to prison was attacked by rogue agents and crashed in the fictional Central American nation ofMontequinto. Cut to Montequinto, where the gang combs through the wreck while dressed as if they're going to a barbecue. Turns out Jakob is behind the crash and brought Cipher to his boss,a young, richNorthern European psycho named Otto (Thue Ersted Rasmussen). Otto wants to acquire and assemble two halves of a top secret device that can control the security networks of every country on the planet. He also has a dad who is referred to but never seen. (Cast Mads Mikkelsen in the tenth film, you cowards.)

The espionage aspect gets even more complicated from there. And, asin most entries in the back half of this franchise, none of the twists matter in any meaningful sense, except when they jack into the idea of Dom's band of brothers and sisters as an improvisedfamily of outsiders, onethat sometimes includes people related by blood but more often is based upon shared values, loyalty, and a willingness to die for the tribe. To that end,Diesel and Cena take the "long lost brother who did a heel turn" thing drop-dead seriously. They play it like it's grand opera. I guess this is the most admirable and risky way to play it—kudos to any actor willing to look ridiculous, which is constantly a risk in this series—even thoughthere are times when you might recall that in other projects, both Cena and Diesel have been funny, and nobody asked them to even smile here. It's all dark-and-stormy, all the time. After a certain point Cena's scowling, glowering, and jaw-flexing gets a bit dull. You may start wishing the movie would skip ahead to the big confrontation between Dom and Jakobthat Settles All Family Business. The concluding moments between the charactersare moving, though, in a World Wrestling Entertainmentsort of way.

The action set-pieces are thrilling and intentionally hilarious, though the digital effects and compositing vary in quality. Some shots bring fantastic panoramas and impossible stunts to life in a way that makes you believe they could happen. Others look like images from that horrible early aughts era when Hollywood filmmakers asked effects houses to do things the technology would not yet support. There's a gleefully deranged subplot about two-thirds of the way through that gives fans what they've been only half-jokingly saying that they wanted from the franchise for years now. And the Montequinto section suggests what might happen if Dom and company visited Jurassic Park (the CGI'd shots of cars and trucks on winding rainforest roads are so gloriously primeval that you wouldn't be surprised if the crew wasattacked by velociraptors).

What else do you need to know?There's a truck chase at the end that could've been an outtake from the 2007 "Speed Racer," and a long action scene where a character rappels from one end of a city to another, or so it seems because the sequence goes on for what feels like half a day, the rappeller defying both gravity and city planning a la Spider-Man. Helen Mirren has a cameo as Magdalene Shaw, mother of Deckard, Owen, and Hattie Shaw, a sixtysomething jewel thief who dresses like Helen Mirren anddriveslikeFrank Bullitt. Dom rides shotgun as Magdaleneroars through London at night. Magdalene delivers exposition with a sexy smirk.Dom asks clarifying questions. They might as well besitting in a coffee shop.

Characters you thought were dead turn out not to be (again, a standard trope in both wrestling and soap operas) and characters who are presented as evil turn out to be good, or at least not beyond redemption(ditto; the franchise also goes the other way when it feels like it).Like the Bond films and "Mission: Impossible," theseare superhero movies where nobody wears a cape, although the red leather pants that Cipher sports when she's imprisoned in a glass box have a Catwoman-goes-to-Studio 54 exuberance. (You can tell director Justin Lin loved the leather pants because he keeps Theron in them all the way through the film. Theron delivers many of her lines while looking over her shoulder, the better for the audience to admire how much time she spends at the gym.)

Gibson and Bridges make a splendid comedy team, as always, and Rodriguez grounds her scenes with Diesel in emotional reality, giving them a weight that the rest of the film doesn't have, and mostly isn't interested in.Diesel holds the thing together through sheer mopey majesty. Middle-aged Dom isa depressive he-man, a sad sack doom-racer. Lin photographs him as if he's a posthumous statue of himself.It's startling to realize how long Diesel has been playing Dom and how much the character has changed. Dom is Diesel's Rocky Balboa, his Indiana Jones.In the first movie, he was an antihero, a badass who was good when circ*mstances required it (like his other great recurring character, Riddick). At some point, though, maybe after the last film he did with Paul Walker, Diesel started to seem bigger, older, and more tragic: Domweighed down by responsibilities to his family, and Diesel perhaps by his commitmentto a franchise he has a stake in.

Now Dom swaggers more deliberately, brokenly, gut-first,his face radiatinghard-won wisdom, his hamhockarms arced in a pincer shape. He'sPopeye the Sailor cast asAtlas, setting the worlddown only to kick ass. He kicks much ass in this one. There's even a scene where Dom fights a dozen guys barehanded. At one point in the melee, Lin, practically winking at us, cuts to an overhead shot of the combatants piled on Dom like children piled on an adult. Dom has stopped moving. Is he dead? Hell, no. Bodies will fly through the air like potato sacks. The character and the franchise are indestructible.

Available in theaters on June 25.