F9 got audiences back to theaters by giving them all the absurdity they craved
After a year inside, who could resist the siren call of Fast & Furious on the big screen?
Image: Graphic: Natalie Peeples Film Features F9
Early on in F9: The Fast Saga, the latest entry in the 20-year-old Fast & Furious franchise, there’s a scene where Tyrese Gibson’s Roman Pearce character survives a gunfight with a group of ill-defined Central American soldiers. When the smoke clears, Roman looks around in wonder, considering the implications of his own survival.
Shortly thereafter, a truck falls on Roman, and he walks away unhurt. Later on, he tries to tell Ludacris’ Tej Parker about what this might mean: “Think about this. We’ve now been on insane missions around the world, doing what most would say is damn near impossible. And I ain’t got a single scar to show for it?”
Roman, you see, has come to believe that he is invincible. You could see how he might arrive at that conclusion. The character was first introduced in 2003’s 2 Fast 2 Furious as a glowering tough guy, a sort of stand-in for Vin Diesel, who’d opted not to do the sequel.
But when Roman returned to the franchise in 2011’s Fast Five, Diesel was also back, so Roman was reconfigured as a comic-relief motormouth, a guy who’s always in over his head. Whenever the members of the Toretto crew are out on one of their impossible missions—when they’re parachuting their cars onto a remote mountain road, say—Roman is the one who always thinks he’s about to die and responds accordingly.
In F9, Roman’s dawning awareness of his own immortality becomes a running joke. Tej keeps clowning him, but Roman keeps insisting. But by the time the film reaches its climax, Roman and Tej are both wearing rubber diving costumes, driving a Pontiac Fiero through space. They do not die. Roman, one must concede, has a point.
The Fast & Furious franchise has always been comfortable with its own ridiculousness. The ongoing success of this strange piece of intellectual property is truly unprecedented. Think of it: A cheap and trashy 2001 late-summer programmer with an extended Ja Rule cameo somehow became a whole James Bondian extended blockbuster universe, one that’s dominated global box offices and made billions.
Virtually every larger film franchise has tried to capture some of that Fast & Furious magic, serving up ragtag teams of heroes who come to think of themselves as family. Nobody has captured that feeling as successfully. The cosmic energy surrounding the Fast films simply cannot be replicated.
Everyone involved seems to realize that they’ve struck gold and become a part of something bigger than themselves, and everyone involved seems to savor it. (Ludacris, only cast in 2 Fast 2 Furious because Ja Rule wanted 2 much money, definitely savors it.)
I can’t say that the series became self-aware with F9 because the series has always been self-aware in one way or another. But that whole bit about Roman realizing he’s invincible marks a new step. It’s one thing for a character to have plot armor. It’s entirely another for that character to begin to understand that he has plot armor.
Even as they’ve spiraled off into blockbuster insanity, the Fast & Furious films have always attempted to keep things physical. Whenever possible, the franchise uses real cars and real stuntmen even as they push things into pixelated overdrive.
That’s why I’ve always considered them to be action movies rather than superhero spectacles or whatever. (Genre lines are never absolute, but my one rule for action cinema is that someone has to get punched in the face, and it has to look like it hurts. The Marvel pictures rarely qualify. Fast sequels always meet that threshold.) Still, in the Fast saga, certain characters cannot die.
They’re starting to realize it. In the Fast films, death is always a mere suggestion. F9 was originally supposed to open in April of 2020. When the pandemic hit a month earlier, the producers almost immediately pushed the movie back a full year—one of the early cultural signals, at least to idiots like me, that this coronavirus thing was about to be a big deal.
Before that change in release dates, though, an F9 trailer unveiled one big plot twist: Sung Kang’s Han Lue was back, miraculously all better after being murdered via explosion in 2015’s Furious 7.
This wasn’t even Han’s first time coming back from death; the franchise had twisted itself up into logical and temporal pretzels in attempting to explain why Han was still alive after being exploded to death in 2006’s Tokyo Drift.
Once again, F9 has a long explanation for how and why Han is still alive. But once again, nobody really cares. The world wanted Han back, so Han was back. When that trailer ended with Sung Kang’s reappearance, absolutely nobody was mad about it.
Can you have an action franchise where no one ever really dies? If action cinema is defined by kinetic stakes, can the Fast & Furious movies qualify? The Fast films have always defined themselves as action cinema in ways that go far beyond just gunfights and car chases. They have cast wrestlers and martial artists and action icons: Jason Statham, Tony Jaa, Kurt Russell, Charlize Theron.
They’ve also slid in sly little allusions, too—a pair of villains called the Shaw Brothers, an extended Hard-Boiled homage where Statham gets into a gunfight while cradling an infant. But given the lack of perceived danger, maybe the Fast films are something else. Or maybe the Fast producers have just figured out more effective ways to sell action-cinema spectacle to the world. Maybe they have given us violence without danger.
F9: The Fast Saga has more than its share of beautifully inane action moments. It has a muscle car swinging on a rope like Tarzan. It has a super-magnet that makes cars crash through buildings. It has an armadillo truck flipping over mid-highway chase. It has Martyn Ford, the towering scalp-tatted muscleman who played the bad guy in the straight-to-Redbox underground-fighting classic Boyka: Undisputed, brawling with John Cena on the back of a moving truck and not even flinching when he crashes through a billboard. All of that shit is stupid, and all of it rules.
But the Fast movies have something deeper than all those setpieces, and that’s their deep bench of characters. The Fast cast isn’t exactly dominated by heavyweight actors. (Oscar winners Charlize Theron and Helen Mirren are in F9, but neither is exactly central to the storyline.) But the characters matter.
Vin Diesel, as Dom Toretto, brings a gravitas that he’s never really had in any other movies. Paul Walker had grace. Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris have chemistry. Michelle Rodriguez cuts her toughness with tenderness. The notion of family—of drag-racer superspies who love and celebrate and mourn and cherish one another—is what holds the whole ungainly enterprise together. These are essentially hangout movies with setpieces. Watch enough of them and you’ll feel like the Toretto crew are your friends.
People didn’t want Han to return to the Fast films because they wanted to see Sung Kang shooting people in the head, though it’s definitely fun to see Sung Kang shooting people in the head. We wanted to see Han’s old friends learning that he’s still alive, and F9 gives us that. (F9 even brings back a bunch of Han’s old Tokyo Drift buddies and gives them a moment with him.)
The revelation that John Cena would join the F9 cast was a big selling point—not because it meant that we got a pro-wrestling superstar to replace The Rock, who apparently can’t be in a room with Vin Diesel anymore, but because he was playing Dom Toretto’s brother.
There’s zero physical similarity between Diesel and Cena, which is fine. (Charlize Theron waves it away with an offhand line about how “the Torettos have quite the mixed bloodlines.”) It makes no sense that Dom would have a brother who he never mentioned in any of the previous eight movies or that the brother would turn out to be a hulking superspy, but that’s fine, too.
When Cena first appears, you know that he and Diesel will get into some crazy fights. That pays off; Diesel spearing Cena off of a zipline and through a window is good shit. We also know that Diesel and Cena will eventually bond and that they’ll be fighting for the same side by the end. That also pays off.
F9: The Fast Saga doesn’t take itself seriously, but it doesn’t take itself unseriously, either. Director Justin Lin, returning to the franchise after going off to make a Star Trek movie and some True Detective episodes, understands the weight of expectation.
He knows that most filmgoers won’t remember Paul Walker breaking Shea Wigham’s nose in a couple of previous films, but he also knows that those who do remember will be happy to see Wigham returning with a jacked-up nose. And he also knows that he can explore the Toretto brothers’ past in deep flashback, using long-established backstory to return to the aesthetic of the first film.
In 2021, it took a whole lot to get anyone to go to the movies. The pandemic continues to sputter to an uncertain ending, and some of us still have a hard time with the idea of breathing recycled air with strangers for hours at a time.
The films that did succeed at the box office were the ones that offered reliable, familiar pleasures. It’s a little depressing to see those pleasures, rather than the shock of the new, moving even further to the forefront of the moviegoing experience. But not all of these franchise installments are created equal, and not everybody knows how to give the people what they want. F9 understood the assignment.
Other notable 2021 action movies: With the proliferation of CGI and expert stunt teams, it’s getting a little bit less surprising when mainstream films, movies that might not even fit into the “action” bucket, have crazy fight scenes. As a result, the crazy fight scenes are starting to seem less crazy.
The bus fight in Shang-Chi is great, for instance, but it’s not surprising. The Grand Guignol throwdown in Malignant is surprising, but that’s definitely not an action movie. Still, even with all the movie stars doing wild stunt work, it was truly impressive to see Bob Odenkirk get his John Wick on in the morally layered two-fisted tale Nobody. Odenkirk, a man in late middle age with a hangdog mein and an everyman bearing, stepped the fuck up for that one. In Nobody, everything looks like it hurts. And speaking of bus fights!
There were some other treasures out there, too. Kate, Netflix’s John Wick-esque stylized tragic-hitwoman opera, gave Mary Elizabeth Winstead some beautifully severe fight scenes. (People were mad at a movie where a heroic white lady kills a bunch of Japanese people, which makes sense, but the craft of the thing still swept me away.)
Prisoners Of The Ghostland, Nicolas Cage’s post-apocalyptic samurai Western with mad Japanese director Sion Sono, is batshit fun. The Harder They Fall is deeply stylized, but its Old West shoot-’em-ups are beautifully executed. I really liked Paper Tigers, a small indie action-comedy about three middle-aged schlubs trying to avenge their late teacher.
Mostly, though, pandemic viewing habits had a weird flattening effect on action movies. These big productions that should’ve been spectacles came off instead as half-decent ways to spend another dreary evening in.
Army Of The Dead, Without Remorse, The Tomorrow War, Those Who Wish Me Dead, Boss Level—they’re all fine. Some of them are pretty good, even, But none of them have stuck with me. Maybe it’s the pandemic, or maybe the movies just weren’t memorable enough.
The films that did stick with me were, by and large, strange morality plays from other countries. Below Zero, from Spain, is a nasty little single-location escape thriller with sympathies that keep shifting. Riders Of Justice, from Denmark, is a sort of bleak revenge comedy with a truly powerful central performance from Mads Mikkelsen.
The Swordsman, a 2020 South Korean joint that came to American VOD this year, is the best blind-assassin story I’ve seen in a long minute. Wrath Of Man isn’t a foreign film, though the reunion of Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham feels pretty British even when the whole thing takes place in LA.
As I write this, there are plenty of 2020 action movies I haven’t gotten around to yet. Benny Chan’s Raging Fire is supposed to be some good old-fashioned Hong Kong violence. Copshop looks like Joe Carnahan’s take on the Assault On Precinct 13-style siege story.
One Shot, a Scott Adkins VOD joint that’s structured as a single continuous camera shot, just started streaming on the day I wrote this column. I’m looking forward to all of them, just like I’m looking forward to the moment where leaving my house to see a movie like Copshop won’t seem like such a big deal.
42 Comments
I really just can’t get into the absurdity of these films, or my perceived unlikeability of Diesel. 5 was fun. But I quit at the 20 mile long runway of 6
5 is the best one in the series because it has the perfect bridge of grounded (or “grounded”) action with the sense of fun that the series has; the entire vault sequence is sooooooo fucking gooooooood
Yeah, I feel like 5 pushed it, but genuinely had rules of physics it largely stuck to. Future movies just changed how physics worked from scene to scene. And how time worked. And how distances work. It made all the incredible things seem very ordinary.Also, these movies made The Rock’s charisma seem ordinary, which was a bigger sin. He’s pretty boring in the two I saw. Better in his own movie, which I saw on a plane, but that one was also pretty terrible and full of stupid plot holes. Plus, how is there only one cyborg? Wouldn’t everyone be trying to be a cyborg? If the whole family was cyborgs and everyone else human maybe the physics would make sense
5 is absolutely the best one. It has SO MUCH going for it. The train heist in the first 20 minutes could easily have been the climax in any other action flick, and the Butch & Sundance callback with the jump off the cliff at the end is great. The Rock is like a walking special effect, like a shinier 80s Schwarzenegger and a genius addition to the franchise. But my favorite thing about that movie is the way it brings back a character that died 2 movies earlier without even trying to explain why he’s alive, like the writers just said “Fuck it, we’ll figure it out later”.These movies absolutely should not work, let alone be going strong 20 years after the first one which was barely good enough to deserve a sequel let alone a massive 10-movie franchise. But I think the reason the movies work is they know how stupid they are, but they lean into the stupidity so much that it comes across as sweet and fun, like a puppy that pees on the floor too much.
No one will ever compare to Arnold
At what point was it communicated that Tokyo Drift took place after the events of 6? Did the filmmakers make a comment at some point or did this only become clear after the stinger with Statham?
I think it’s not until the Statham cameo at the end of 6. Which then adds the extra wrinkle of why all the kids in Tokyo Drift use 2006-era technology in a movie that canonically takes place in 2013.
I think in 4 (if that’s the first one released after Tokyo Drift that featured Han) there’s a knowing line he says about going to Tokyo one day. Also, was there long explanation as to how he survived as Tom says? I remember a needlessly detailed flashback/subplot invoking a young woman he saved from gangsters but the actual explanation for not being blown up seemed to be “And I was just not in the car when it blew up somehow because of Kurt Russell”.
Riders of Justice was a great film, one of the best I’ve seen this year.I’m seeing Raging Fire tonight, that should be great fun. Haven’t found a way to see One Shot yet though, no cinema near me seems to be showing it and I haven’t found it online anywhere.
It’s so good to have this back, and I wish Spanfeller and the vultures would open up their wallets a little to pay for more writers.I’ve always figured the endpoint for Fast is the ultimate heist is making a billion dollar budget movie and things become hopelessly entangled in sorting out what is the Fast movie and what is the Fast movie that they are filming. Sort of a Vin Diesel Day For Night, or not quite so meta Last Action Hero.
Bless these films
I want to see an alternate history movie where Ja Rule didn’t turn down the chance to be in 2 Fast 2 Furious, and then over a decade later the Fyre Festival is a massive success with Ludacris at the helm.
“…by giving them the FAMILY they craved.” Fixed that headline.
I love the setpieces in F9. However, I was completely shocked, SHOCKED I say, when I discovered this was the first F&F movie ever which requires watching the entire rest of the series, including Tokyo Drift (which, okay, it’s both the movie that introduced and killed Han), to understand what’s going on.My fiancée made me promise that I’d never make her sit through another F&F movie again, having seen Five and this. And I don’t blame her, honestly. I’ve known people who have watched Five and other later movies and they’ve done just fine, but walking into F9 with only Five as reference was a mistake. Me, I lapped up and enjoyed a lot of the exposition, but that’s because I knew who Cipher was, who the rocket junkies were, why Han being back was such a big deal, etc. But there was just so much exposition in between setpieces that anyone not looking for “here’s why we’re retconning this!” probably just lost it.I love that a lot of these setpieces actually had some character-based context. (Even more than Rome and Tej’s voyage into space, I got a huge kick out of Ramsey’s brief foray into driving.) I love that they set a place aside for Brian at the table, even if I think it would’ve been better if they had his Skyline pulling in on a wider shot as the camera panned up and away from the table rather than explicitly ending on his car in the driveway. But this installment failed to make the lady next to me understand why I loved all that, and I’m kinda sad about that. If I had a screen larger than an iPad (even if it’s a nice iPad), I might have stood a chance in getting her into the series, but I was also hoping this entry would help her get into it.Hopefully by the time Fas10Furious comes out we’ll be able to go out and enjoy THE MOVIES. with our friends, because I know at least one person who won’t want to ride along.
I legit thought that Fast 9 ended with John Cena driving because I forgot that Paul Walker’s still alive in the Fast series.
If the next movie isn’t titled Fas10Furious I will be legitimately disappointed.
Copshop is the best movie I’ve seen this year, it’s a total blast.
I don’t get it, maybe it’s because I’m not enough of a car guy or the fact that it’s mostly mediocre to bad actors. I guess I kinda liked Tokyo Drift for the scenery and the women, it’s not like it’s all MMA watching doofuses that are into the franchise, there seems to be a pretty wide swath of the populace that likes these movies
Yeah, I’ve only seen up to Tokyo Drift and just can’t care about the series. It’s fine, there’s plenty of other stuff to watch.
I haven’t seen any of them and I have absolutely zero desire to. I think it’s mostly because I don’t care about fast cars at all. Not. At. All. There is nothing interesting to me about watching cars go fast, and yet people find it baffling that I haven’t seen any of these.
I have resisted the call of this and the entire Harry Potter series (print and film). No reason, just never got around to it.
Same here. I was just a little too old for Harry Potter when it came out, and I’ll admit that I did have a bit of a smug “I’m not going to read kids’ books” attitude about it for a long time, but really it’s more because there’s nothing about it that really sounded terribly interesting to me.
Vin Diesel, as Dom Toretto, brings a gravitas that he’s never really had in any other movies. I realize it’s only a voiceover performance and may have been dismissed because of that, but still:
I admire your restraint not using the “Superman…” clip.
i will say firing this up after waiting the whole pandemic for it was a blissful moment. i was hooting and hollering, even if this is the worst one of these since 4.one thing that stuck out was how great diesel and helen mirren were in their brief scenes together. diesel always does his thing, and obviously helen mirren is helen mirren, but they had a genuine chemistry that i hope we see more of.
These movies are dumb and silly and fun and they know it and I love it.
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Work Post:Aliens (1986)Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)The Bourne Identity (2002)Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)Die Hard (1988)Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)The Killer (1989)Lethal Weapon (1987)The Getaway (1978)Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)The Wild Bunch (1969)First Blood (1982)Total Recall (1990)Kill Zone 2 (2016)Bullitt (1968)Project A (1983)Kill Zone (2005)The Matrix (1999)Casino Royale (2006)The Terminator (1984)The Way Of The Dragon (1972)Enter The Dragon (1973)The Raid (2012)Blade (1998)Speed (1994)Hard Boiled (1992)The Fugitive (1993)Mandy (2018)The Warriors (1979)Assault On Precinct 13 (1976)Snowpiercer (2013)Wolf Warrior II (2017)John Wick (2014)John Wick: Chapter 3–Parabellum (2019)Fast Five (2011)Face/Off (1997)The Rock (1996)The Chinese Boxer (1970)The Man From Nowhere (2010)Rolling Thunder (1977)Dirty Harry (1971)Taken (2008)300 (2007)Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009)Extraction (2020)Bad Boys (1995)The Fast And The Furious (2001)The Bourne Supremacy (2004)Death Wish (1974)Dolemite (1975)Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)F9: The Fast Saga (2021)The Octagon (1980)
Hard Boiled and The Fugitive are far too low. Bad Boys is low but still too high imo.
Fast 9’s basically the cinematic equivalent of Squid Game to me. As in I came in to watch it with a group of friends and by the half hour mark, I was the only one left. I didn’t kill my friends mind, it’s just that the movie’s so trash that everyone else decided to skedaddle.But Nobody man, Bob Odenkirk had one hell of a weird year, from kicking ass with Doc Brown and a Wu Tang Clansman to nearly dying. But Nobody is a great film and I can’t wait for the sequel.
I love the scene in F9 where Tej assures Roman that their space car will work, because it’s just basic physics, and physics doesn’t lie. I felt like yelling, “You keep the name of physics out of your mouth, Fast and Furious franchise!”
I’ve only watched this one once ( in May 2021, first cinema experience since Feb 2020) and overall really enjoyed it.The big question I had was – what the hell happened with Mr Nobody? He got captured at the beginning and we never heard from him again?I imagine it’ll come back in the next one but it felt like a dangling plot point.
Yup, gave me what I craved out of F&F9: not one, not two, but three 2nd gen Chargers tearing across the screen.
Donnie Yen’s Raging Fire is my pick for best action movie of the year. Some incredible action and performances here.
More accurately:F9 got audiences back to theaters by being one of the first big dumb franchise movies after vaccines and the news made people feel safer but before Delta made everyone remember everything sucks forever
The whole subline of whatshisname going like ‘are we superheroes’ was kinda funny. It poked some good fun at how stupidly invulnerable everyone is. People routinely fly through the air and jump out of cars – or land on cars – or whatever and just stand up like it was nothing.In fact in this movie i’m pretty sure Diesel catches someone WITH A CAR and its seen as a ‘save’ instead of someone crashing into an automobile…
Has Tom not seen No Time to Die yet? Not saying it should be the top spot of this article, but it’s definitely a pandemic success story for an action film, and a much better movie than F9. Considering it’s Craig’s last go in the role and Casino Royale was a top pick for this series not long ago, it seems weird to me that it’s not even obliquely mentioned in the main article or the honorable mentions, which is a shame because I was curious to hear Tom’s thoughts on it.
6 is one of my favourite movies: This one was terrible, nothing happens to move the plot forward, it gets more absurd and takes a few steps back they should end it while they still have the chance.
It’s sad. I remember when A History of Violence entry would have hundreds of posts. So many lively discussions we had. What happened?
I’m not sure, maybe there just isn’t enough to talk about with Fast 9?I would have gone with either No Time to Die (though it’s a so-so movie with good action) or just bucked the trend and gone with Netflix’s TV show My Name which had absolutely fantastic fight scenes.
Before that change in release dates, though, an F9 trailer unveiled one big plot twist: Sung Kang’s Han Lue was back, miraculously all better after being murdered via explosion in 2015’s Furious 7.This wasn’t even Han’s first time coming back from death; the franchise had twisted itself up into logical and temporal pretzels in attempting to explain why Han was still alive after being exploded to death in 2006’s Tokyo Drift.Not sure I get the point being made here. TD is set after F7, his death scene in F7 is a retcon showing what actually happened in TD. So he’s only brought back from death once…Granted it’s absurd he was brought back at all and I’m very much expecting Gal Gadot to show up unharmed in F10 or F11 now.
No love for No Time To Die, especially given that it’s currently outperforming F9 at the box office? I get that F9 may be more of a straightforward “action movie” than NTTD, but c’mon. Not even a mention?Between that Matera pre-title sequence, the Cuba scene with Ana de Armas, that Norway car chase, and the final staircase gun battle, NTTD had some pretty thrilling action beats. And I’d rank it as Daniel Craig’s best Bond film since Casino Royale, certainly in terms of his performance.
Okay now I know you’ve been ignoring James Bond movies since you started this series and that’s always been absurd, but to seriously not even mention No Time to Die here is just plain baffling.It’s not exactly the best Bond movie but it contains some of the best action and stunts in the entire franchise.It’s certainly a far more notable action movie than another bloody Fast and the Furious movie.