Director – Justin Lin, Screenplay – Daniel Casey & Justin Lin, Story – Alfred Botello, Daniel Casey, Jeffrey Kirschenbaum, Justin Lin, Joe Roth, Clayton Townsend & Samantha Vincent, Producers – Vin Diesel, Justin Lin & Neal H. Moritz, Photography – Stephen F. Window, Music – Brian Tyler, Visual Effects Supervisor – Peter Chiang, Visual Effects – DNeg (Supervisor – Daniel Rauchwerger), Factory VFX (Supervisor – Nicholas Cerniglia), lola | VFX (Supervisor – Jeremiah Sweeney) & Stereo D (Supervisor – Thailraju Shri Bindhu Madhav), Visual Effects & Animation – Industrial Light & Magic (Supervisor – Julian Foddy), Special Effects Supervisor – Alistair Williams, Production Design – Jan Roelfs. Production Company – Original Film/One Race Films/Perfect Storm/Roth-Kirschenbaum Films.
Cast
Vin Diesel (Dominic Toretto), Michelle Rodriguez (Letty Ortiz), Tyrese Gibson (Roman Pearce), Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges (Tej Parker), Nathalie Emmanuel (Ramsey), Jordana Brewster (Mia Toretto), John Cena (Jakob Toretto), Charlize Theron (Cipher), Thue Ersted Rasmussen (Otto), Finn Cole (Young Jakob), Sun Kang (Han Lue), Anna Sawai (Elle), Kurt Russell (Mr. Nobody), Michael Rooker (Buddy), Vinnie Bennett (Young Dom), J.D. Pardo (Jack Toretto), Helen Mirren (Queenie), Jason Statham (Deckard Shaw), Shea Whigham (Michael Stasiak), Immanuel Holdane & Isaac Holdane (Brian Toretto), Jim Parrack (Kenny Linder)
Plot
Dominic Toretto is relaxing with Letty and his son Brian when the others arrive to inform him that Mr Nobody’s plane has been hijacked and has crashed in Montequinto. The team race there to rescue Mr Nobody but he is gone. From the wreckage of the plane they retrieve one half of Project Aries, a device that can hack any computer system. However, this is snatched by a team of mercenaries led by Dominic’s brother Jakob, who works for Cipher. The team are forced to go on a hunt that takes them from London to Edinburgh, Tokyo and Tbilisi to retrieve the other half of the Aries device and stop Jakob before he activates it where it will create worldwide chaos.
Fast & Furious 9, also abbreviated to F9 on some of the promotion, was the ninth of the Fast and the Furious films, which have become the single biggest Action Movie franchise in the 2010s, having earned some $7 billion total. The other films so far consist of The Fast and the Furious (2001), 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), Fast & Furious (2009), Fast Five (2011), Fast & Furious 6 (2013), Furious 7 (2015), The Fate of the Furious (2017), Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) and Fast X (2023).
Director Justin Lin is a Taiwanese emigre to the US. He first appeared as co-director of Shopping for Fangs (1997), followed by the indie high school crime drama Better Luck Tomorrow (2002), which led to the mainstream Annapolis (2006). Lin first entered the Fast and the Furious series with The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the third in the series, continuing all the way through Fast & Furious and Fast Five, while the sixth in the series Fast & Furious 6 was handed over to James Wan, before Lin returned here for Fast & Furious 9/F9. Within genre material, Lin also directed Star Trek Beyond (2016) and executive produced Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021). Elsewhere, Lin has produced the tv series’ Scorpion (2014-8), S.W.A.T. (2017-23) and the reboot of Magnum P.I. (2018-23).
It has been fascinating over time watching the Fast and the Furious series progress from being slick car capers that started out simply being about busting a gang of high-end carjackers and similar kinds of heist plots to the equivalent of what the James Bond films used to embody, especially around the Roger Moore era – unserious cartoons driven by big spectacular action set-pieces and introducing fantastical plot devices that have included cyborgs, nanotech viruses and nuclear devices. Because I hadn’t covered any of the other films, I overlooked Fast & Furious 9 when it first came out until I read mention that it took the characters into orbit, which made it definitely fall into being something I would cover, while it also has a magic encryption key that places it in the realm of a Techno-Thriller.
The Fast and the Furious films are really superhero films minus the superpowers. The characters have become like cartoonish superhumans who can survive anything and do stuntwork that goes beyond ordinary physics. Like the MCU, the films have created an interwoven mythology of characters and villains – I wasn’t able to count the number of times the word family was mentioned on screen as though the film needs to convince that these one-dimensional characters have a deeper emotional connection. With the interwound character connections and constant reappearances of characters thought dead, it almost becomes a soap opera with the addition of big action scenes – or exactly the sort of thing the MCU does.
Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez)Car chase with the massive truck in the streets of Tbilisi
The action scenes go beyond absurdity. In the Montequinto scenes, we have:- Michelle Rodriguez being knocked off a motorcycle and thrown forty feet through the air to land on the hood of Vin Diesel’s speeding car with no injuries; Tyrese Gibson’s APC being thrown through the air by an explosion until it is wedged facing downwards between a rock crevasse just above a mine and he manages to survive as the vehicle falls with him inside and the mine goes off; where John Cena drives a car off a cliff where it is then snatched by a plane; and finally Vin Diesel driving off the same cliff but hooking the car on a cable and swinging around on its length to land on another cliff to emerge undamaged.
Elsewhere, we have a number of scenes with vehicles using electromagnets to do everything from snatch pursuing cars through entire buildings and drag in everything metal around the area, including pursuing cars or other vehicles, towards them. In Edinburgh, there is a sequence that involves Vin Diesel and John Cena (or at least their respective stunt people) pursuing one another by leaping across the tops of moving vehicles. The sequence in Tbilisi is another monument to mindless action and mass destruction with the fight around a massive truck in the streets using magnets and an absurd climax where Vin Diesel survives a truck crashing its way through a half-completed building, rolling over and over down a hill and then being hit by missiles to then jump out of it undamaged. Of course the sequence where Tyrese Gibson and Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges are launched into orbit in a car surely hits the height of absurdity for the entire series – it is hard to think what the series is going to have to do to top this.
The film does try to throw in a series of meta-fictional jokes where Tyrese Gibson is talking about his constant invulnerability “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 one single scar to show for it? I mean, look at my jacket. Those are bullet holes from fourteen dudes trying to take my head clean off its shoulders. We’ve taken out cars, trains, tanks. I’m not even going to mention the submarine.” Unfortunately this does seem a little precious given that it punctures the envelope of the unreality within which the Fast and the Furious series exists and bares it open too obviously for audiences to see.
Fast & Furious 9/F9 has good actors, even the award-winning Helen Mirren, shunted into one-dimensional or less roles. Vin Diesel is an actor I seem to be less enthused with every time I see him in something. His delivery here seems even more monosyllabic and gravelly than ever with dialogue stripped down to about one or two lines at a time. His is a performance based solely around requiring us to recognise that he and his tree trunk arms are the epitome of macho cool.
