The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-
Look, I hate these movies. I’ve been consistent and open about my hatred of these movies. However, like with The Conjuring, I try to be as objective as possible with every new entry. In this case, I don’t even think that hardcore fans of the series will find much to love here. With stale action scenes, several key characters missing and a plot that’s nearly nonexistent even by Fast & Furious standards, this movie didn’t even annoy me so much as it bored the shit out of me.
The plot is some of the laziest, McGuffin-chasing horseshit that I’ve seen since….well, since I saw The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard last week. That’s just bad timing, though, as both films would normally take home the gold in the “Least Fucks Given While Writing a Screenplay” category in a given year. Mr. Nobody’s (Kurt Russel’s) plane is taken down by mercenaries and, as a top-ranking government agent, he naturally doesn’t send a distress signal to the military or CIA or NSA. Fuck no, he sends a distress signal to Dom (Vin Diesel) and company. They go to the site of the crash (I would like to remind everyone that they aren’t soldiers) and discover that they need to find the pieces of a device before the bad guys do. The device can disrupt electronic devices or something. Who gives a shit. They need to get the thing before the bad guys get the thing. The movie doesn’t really even care what the thing is.
As for the bad guys, Charlize Theron returns and the film’s big addition to the franchise is John Cena as Dom’s little brother. The film provides an extensive backstory about the long-lost backstory and the rather tragic backstory about Dom’s father, who was apparently a NASCAR racer. These flashback scenes made me ponder a couple of things: 1. I bet this was originally a separate script before the writer realized he could use it as the backdrop of this nonsense and 2. How did the existence of Dom’s brother and all of these life-altering events never get mentioned in the eight previous films? These motherfuckers lecture me on the value of family five goddamn times per movie, but Dom never mentioned having an actual brother? When you dickheads are sitting around eating corn on the cob at the end of every fucking movie and talking about family being the only thing that matters in life, you never, not once, thought to mention this motherfucker? I understand that sometimes elements are introduced out of nowhere when a series has gone on too long, but, no, I’m not accepting this. It was more credible to find out that Jason is a body-hopping demon in the ninth Friday the 13th than it is to find out now that this asshole has had a brother this whole time.
Other than the introduction of Cena, the big soap opera twist here is the reintroduction of Han, whose initial death scene in Tokyo Drift has been retroactively expanded upon so many times that it seems intentionally hilarious at this point. By the time the 15th movie comes out, we’ll find out that that was a clone of Han in Tokyo and the real Han was being bukkaked by aliens on Pluto at the time. However, even with the addition of Cena and Han, the film suffers greatly from the complete absence of The Rock and Jason Statham and the very brief appearance of Kurt Russell. Without them, Vin Diesel is left to carry the movie largely on his own and, without those charismatic actors around him, we are brutally reminded that Diesel is a void in which charisma goes to die. These are ensemble films and the weaknesses of the series become even more glaring when the better members of the ensemble are missing in action.
Even the action scenes feel oddly tame this time, which is also likely a side-effect of The Rock and Jason Statham not being around. The physics-defying scene, featured in all of the trailers, of Diesel attaching his car to a bridge and using it like a slingshot, takes place in the first 20 minutes and most of the other action stems from the film’s odd obsession with magnets. The film does finally do what we have been waiting for, though, and takes the action into outer space. However, even this felt oddly anticlimactic. I never thought that using a Pontiac Fiero to ram a satellite in outer space could be boring, but this movie somehow pulled that off.
I’m struggling with how to grade this because, while the movie bored the hell out of me, it didn’t piss me off as much as some of the previous entries. However, I did feel every second of this film’s agonizing 2.5 hour running time. That’s a long fucking time for so little plot, folks. Maybe long-time fans will find something to enjoy here, but this series is running on fumes at this point. I am, however, looking forward to finding out that Dom has had a long-lost sister this whole time, played by Rhonda Rousey. See? This shit practically writes itself.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F9_(film)#/media/File:F9_film_poster.jpg
