‘F9’ Reviews Report: Bigger Family, Bigger Stunts, But Looks More in the Past

The reviews of the latest installment in the Fast and Furious franchise, Fast and Furious 9, are out and it has quite mixed reactions. The reviews on google are mostly positive rating 4.9/5 but seems like most of the critics do not feel the same. We are here to give you the appropriate amalgamation of the reviews we have come across so far so that it is easier to choose whether it is worth the time or not.

The film pits Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto and his Fast family against one of their most personal foes yet: Dom's brother Jakob, played by John Cena, an assassin working with a long-time enemy who has his bone to pick with his estranged brother. F9 is directed by Justin Lin, who has helmed this and four other Fast and the Furious films to date starting back with 2006's Tokyo Drift and is also set to direct the next as-of-yet untitled Fast and the Furious installment currently in pre-production. Lin also co-writes the script with Daniel Casey. In addition to Diesel, Cena, and Kang, Fast 9 stars Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Jordana Brewster, Nathalie Emmanuel, Helen Mirren, Charlize Theron, Cardi B, and Michael Rooker. Additionally, franchise cast members Lucas Black, Bow Wow, and Jason Tobin are also reprising their roles.

The movie keeps looking back over its shoulder — at all the spy-team-as-family relationships the series has established, and at one key character we thought was deceased. You could say that when a blockbuster film series is 10 movies — and two decades — old (“The Fast and the Furious” will celebrate its 20th anniversary in just a month), it has more than earned the right to look back. But the way franchises generally work is that good sequels look forward, or at least fixate on the present.

“F9” features several sequences in which a truck that contains a super-powerful magnet goes rushing through the streets of London, attracting all sorts of metal, including a car, which is somehow less boss than it sounds. The movie also has a lot of hand-to-hand combat, too much of it, that happens aboard speeding vehicles. Cena’s Jakob is teamed with several other baddies: the return of Charlize Theron’s tigress-sleek Cipher, plus the millennial Eurotrash slime Otto (Thue Ersted Rasmussen), who’s bankrolling the whole thing. But even with all three, the threat they pose feels generic.

The performances are pretty much what we’ve come to expect over time: Ludacris and Gibson bring the prickly, goofy comedy, with Emmanuel’s brainy banter fitting in just perfectly; Rodriguez and Brewster register actual emotions; Diesel does his national-monument thing. But the jolly inventiveness of the action scenes only underlines how painfully corny the drama is by comparison. One of this series’ trademarks is its overly ponderous focus on the importance of family — the characters can’t go more than 10 minutes without talking about how family means everything — and F9 enlarges the theme by introducing Jakob, who shares a past with Dom that will play out in tortuously earnest flashbacks which give us new insights into this stoic individual. Diesel, who also produces, makes sure that Dom is viewed in a nearly mythic light, and the actor’s gravelly line deliveries, while meant to seem soulful and weary, tend to be unintentionally funny because of the heavily self-conscious gravity he brings to his performance. Taking their cue from Diesel, the cast tends to glower more than emote. The movie might be exhilaratingly ridiculous, yes, but it’s also ridiculously exhilarating.

Final Score: - [7/10]