There are moments in F9 when the eighth sequel to 2001’s The Fast and the Furious threatens to turn into a meathead, gearhead version of Luigi Pirandello’s seminal postmodern 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author.
It’s Tyrese Gibson’s wisecracking Roman, of all people, who attains a seeming sense of meta-awareness as he comes to realize that there is absolutely no way that he should have been able to survive the endless gauntlet of deadly dangers he and his family have faced in movie after movie.
Roman thinks that he and all of his associates might have become invincible or immortal, but the more reasonable and true explanation is that the family doesn’t die because they’re the heroes of a series of crowd-pleasing action blockbusters.
Heck, even when members of the family do die, they have a funny way of returning, especially if they’re fan favorite Han. In F9, Han does what he does best: come back from the dead.
I am so deeply immersed in this wonderfully wacky world that, on multiple occasions, Fast 9 seemed to respond directly to my criticisms and commentary.
That happens for the first time just before Roman has his big revelation on the uncanny nature of his uniquely charmed compatriots. In a series of sequences that are preposterous and far-fetched even by the franchise’s insanely lenient standards, the family does things like drive through a literal minefield with massive automobiles while being chased by the bad guys without suffering a single casualty.
What I learned from F9, and, as we have established, Neil deGrasse Tyson is the science advisor for all of the films, ensuring that they are all highly accurate, is that you can totally drive a car through and over a minefield without suffering so much as a scrape.
You just need to be sure to drive forcefully around and through the constant explosions, and you’ll be fine! Every member of the family should die a violent and horrible death twenty or thirty times in F9’s first twenty minutes alone.
Yet you better believe that everyone makes it to the film-ending family barbecue alive and intact after somehow surviving a wild gauntlet of dangers that would kill anyone who isn’t a fictional character in an action blockbuster.
Roman is an unlikely but shockingly effective audience surrogate in F9. He’s comic relief, but he also says the things that we’re thinking but that the other characters can’t talk about because, unlike Roman, they do not sense that they are not real.
This meta strain pops up first when the team learns that Dom, their fearless leader, has a secret brother he never talks about who is, like Dom, one of the most impressive people in the history of the universe.
Roman asks what kind of person has a sibling who “also happens to be some kind of super spy with his own private army, who literally drives like a bat out of hell, who preplanned an aerial jump and landed at the bottom of an airplane?”
The answer, of course, is a Toretto. The Torettos are a whole different breed. They’re not like the rest of us.
As a fan of the Fast and the Furious franchise who does not know how to drive an automobile, I’ve spent a fair amount of time wondering why seemingly every character in the films turns into Dale Earnhardt the moment they get behind the wheel.
Isn’t there a single character in this world who is not a good driver? Or doesn’t know how to drive at all? It’s taken nine films, but we finally get a satisfying answer to that nagging question when family member Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) confesses that she doesn’t know how to drive.
Ramsey is, of course, the world’s greatest hacker. She also looks amazing in a bikini. This sharply contrasts with Charlize Theron as Cipher, who is also the world’s greatest hacker and looks like a supermodel.
Being the world’s greatest hacker and being in the upper 0.000000001 percent of human attractiveness should be enough for anyone. You shouldn’t need to be a speed demon behind the wheel as well.
When Ramsey is forced by circumstances to drive a truck, she leaves wreckage and destruction in her wake, but this is perhaps the only time someone has fucked up cars because they don’t know how to drive and not deliberately, or out of malice.
Emmanuel is a deft comic actress who picked up an Emmy nomination for her work opposite John Travolta and Kevin Hart in the Quibi meta action-comedy hit Die Hart. She nails this delightful bit of automotive slapstick in what is also the only scene in the entire franchise I could relate to as a non-driver.
But before F9 can take a turn towards the post-modern and meta-textual it begins, preposterously but gloriously enough, with Dom, Letty and their son Li’l Brian (as opposed to Paul Walker’s big Brian) living in the country.
Dom and Letty have traded in lives of non-stop thrills and danger for a Green Acres existence. They’re Ma and Pa Kettle, a more extreme version of American Gothic, but they do not find their peaceful new lives entirely satisfying.
I was on board for two and a half hours of Dom and Letty whittling in rocking chairs, raising chickens, mending fences, and inviting neighbors over for potluck dinners.
This bucolic interlude does not last. The Family informs Dom that Kurt Russell’s Mr. Nobody is missing and that Charlize Theron’s Cipher, the hacker who killed the mother of his child, has escaped custody.
Dom and Letty—who looks like the beloved matriarch of a Vermont lesbian farming co-op in her overalls—irresponsibly ignore their responsibilities to the farm and fly back into action.
Letty rides a motorcycle carelessly through the jungle, and my dumb brain fretted, “She better be careful! She could easily get hurt if she makes even a minor mistake.”
I apparently forgot that in the world of Fast 9 the good guys never die, and if they do, they come back from the dead. Even Paul Walker’s Brian is still alive and doing good in the film’s fantasy world even though the actor playing him very famously died in the kind of fiery wreck that everyone survives here.
Dom and the family’s latest assignment gives the film a chance to shift focus from Dom’s surrogate family of drag racers/world-savers to his biological family, which is every bit as outsized and colorful as the family Dom created by first committing crimes and then preventing them.
John Cena is the latest Texas-sized bruiser to enter the arena as Jakob Toretto, Dom’s evil and bitter brother, a James Bond/Jason Bourne type ALMOST as impressive as the most amazing man ever to drink Corona and mumble extensively about the importance of family.
Cena can be very funny. Like the best action heroes, he has a sense of humor about himself and the ridiculousness of his curious profession. Yet he eschews comedy and self-awareness here for intense familial psychodrama rich in flashbacks involving the young Dom and Jakob and their tragic, doomed racer father, who left behind some very big shoes Dom was more than capable of filling.
Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham share with Cena that comic sensibility and light, self-aware touch, but they are off having side-adventures in Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw, so it falls to Ludacris and particularly Tyrese Gibson to handle the comedy.
Gibson’s character essentially heckles the movie that he’s in for being a wish-fulfillment fantasy for little boys of all ages and genders where he can actively chase death with everything he has, yet somehow emerges from his misadventures without so much as a scratch.
A gritty reboot of the franchise would have the whole family hopelessly addicted to painkillers due to the grievous injuries they received all over the world. But if you’re part of the family, you’re invincible and impervious to pain.
Late in the game, Fast 9 indulges in a blatant act of fan service by bringing back Bow Wow’s Twinkie and Lucas Black’s Sean Boswell for the benefit of all eight people who enjoyed Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift and wonder what happened to them.
Good news: they’re still buddies! And they’re still addicted to speed, as in going very fast, not crystal meth. In fact, they’ve built a rocket car that seems like it could never possibly work.
F9 has a hilarious lack of reverence for these forgettable small timers. They’re posited as ugly Americans/gleeful idiots even if they eventually receive a sort of redemption when TEJ AND ROMAN FLY THAT ROCKET CAR INTO OUTER SPACE.
Just when it seems like the series cannot possibly get any sillier or more preposterous, it turns briefly but delightfully into a blockbuster variation on the classic UPN show Homeboys in Outer Space.
As the sole realist in the Fast and the Furious universe, Roman has to point out the sublime absurdity of two guys from the hood kicking it in outer space in an intergalactic hooptie.
Incidentally, when I Googled “How many times does Han die and come back from the grave in the Fast and the Furious movies?” one of the things that popped up was an article answering the question, “Have the Fast and the Furious gotten too ridiculous to take seriously?”
It made me laugh and laugh because if you take the Fast and the Furious movies seriously, then you SERIOUSLY misunderstand the nature of their appeal.
Even when it’s playing it relatively straight, the movies in this wildly excessive series are impossible to take seriously.
That’s what makes them so great!
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