Overstuffed F9 Remains Magnetic as It Doubles Down on Self-Aware Stunts and Earnest Drama

As F9 comes to a close, marking two full decades since frenemies evolved into family, machismo found macho enlightenment, and street racers became super-spies, the son of Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) zooms a toy car around in the air, his imagination running wild. “You drive like your dad,” chuckles Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty, Dom’s amnesiac wife who isn’t the boy’s biological mother, because at the time, Dom thought she was dead. This is the Fast & Furious franchise in its elemental form: Over-the-top vehicular fantasias held together by gym rat soap opera (or 3-in-1 body wash opera). This latest entry marks the return of director Justin Lin, who helped guide the series’ evolution from Tokyo Drift to Fast & Furious 6, and while he struggles with how unwieldy F&F has become, his undeniable understanding of what makes these movies tick keeps the film roaring along.

Lin’s still adding new characters and twists to this high-octane telenovela as often as prefixes, retconning deaths and introducing long-lost brothers as easily as he moves from simply defying physics to defying astrophysics—as easily as he turned street-racing spies into globe-trotting superspies. The crew, including the newly domestic Dom and Letty, is pulled back into the world of…whatever it is they do…once again and their impossible mission (which they always choose to accept) has to do with another globally destructive techno-MacGuffin and a globally destructive flesh-MacGuffin: Dom’s younger brother Jakob (John Cena), excommunicated from the family for sins that become apparent over the course of extensive flashbacks. It goes from the Fast & Furious to the Past & Curious. Associated with all this world threatening is Charlize Theron’s bowl-cut baddie Cipher, back from the previous movie. Small world, right?

In fact, the number of characters and callbacks stuffed into the film approaches critical mass. Without Lin’s tonal mastery of the movies’ earnest silliness, or with just one or two more subplots crammed into the chamber, a chain reaction could shake the whole operation apart. It’s not that it’s ever too dumb (maybe the only impossible feat for this franchise); it’s that there’s simply too much gumming up the works for the usually pristine stupidity to be at peak performance. It starts to feel a bit like a latter-day superhero team-up or Star Wars sequel (a series that F9 namechecks in Theron’s best joke of the film): The cost of service, not just to fans but to the ever-complicating story threads, is pace.

There are simply so many characters, subplots and locales to wrangle that the movie stalls as often as it soars, and any hope of a newcomer following the plot (admittedly, low on the priority list) is lost. But dozing off for a well-earned nap as Lin idles the 145-minute film for a rapport-exploiting heart-to-heart, stand-off or quip-laden piece of banter only makes his setpieces feel more invigorating. The ideas are dumber, the self-awareness greater, the family bigger than ever.

As Dom’s uneasy relationship with Jakob becomes clear—over the course of explosion-laden jungle races, rooftop chases and posh sitting room brawls—F9’s knowing relationship with its own cartoonishness balances it out. One of the funniest gags sees Tyrese Gibson’s Roman openly speculating if he and the rest of the crew have plot armor. Are they actually invincible? The gang realizing that they’re all in a movie seems like it could honestly be the next step, with them turning their cars towards the camera and bursting out of the fiction like Daffy Duck in Duck Amuck.

Stunt-jokes that stood out from previous entries, like catching someone thrown dozens of feet in the air on the hood of your speeding car in order to prevent injury, are now commonplace. Diesel and Cena’s bodies crash through walls and highway signs like titanium Kool-Aid Men, cross necklaces swinging wildly around the thick necks of these Ed Hardy hardbodies. But this enjoyably tactile superhumanity isn’t the NOS injection for F9’s engine. While both come too late in the film for my taste (leaving much of the film hanging on how pleased you get seeing the admittedly amusing returns of Sung Kang and Lucas Black), two innovations keep F9 on the cutting edge of ridiculous action: Magnets and rockets.