Fast & Furious 9 review – high-octane thrills with a touch of franchise fatigue

As the Fast and Furious movies have continued to ramp up the vehicular mayhem with every new installment, bringing us some of modern cinema's most insane and largely physics-defying action set-pieces, a certain type of affectionate in-joke has circulated among the franchise's exhilarated fans. Something like: “What will they do next? Go to space?”

Uh, about that. So here we are with Fast and Furious 9, the tenth film in what is arguably the most unexpectedly successful movie franchise ever. Sometimes, it is necessary to take a minute to process just how far the Fast and Furious has actually come. How it went from a much-maligned and very macho series about drag racing to one in which its cast of ostensibly “normal” human beings jet-set around the world trying to prevent the global apocalypse. All the time, they somehow remain impervious to injury or government intervention. It makes zero sense. Essentially, they are secret agents. Spies. What is going on?

The running gag of the Furious movies is that they’re getting bigger and stupider with every installment, of course. The mythology is like play-dough. It can be handled like putty and reshaped with the spirit of an eight-year-old calling the shots. Dead characters come back to life. Family members who’ve never been mentioned before suddenly step out of the shadows. Elements are lazily retconned on a whim. The nonsense is part of the fun. What keeps it all from falling apart is the series' trademark sincerity – the constant mulling over the importance of family, its allegiance to the bond drawn between its cast of paper-thin characters.

This chapter (which feels like the last, but isn't) continues in that same vein, with muscular car-obsessive Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) now living a peaceful life out in the middle of nowhere in order to take care of Dom's young son. But it's an unsatisfying existence for two people who gets their kicks at high speed, so when the old crew (sorry, “family”) turn up with a new dangerous mission, they jump at the chance.

As with the previous instalments, which can only really exist in the mind as vague blurs, I could not tell you what happens in Fast and Furious 9, a fun-in-the-moment but somewhat middling addition to the canon. Its exposition-heavy screenplay tells a story about a rich dictator's son who's hellbent on tracking down an item he can use to control the world. Charlize Theron's villain from the previous movie also returns, albeit with a weird new bowl cut, and so there's plenty of double-crossing and long-winded speeches about power and control.

Certain to find itself pegged as “the one with all the magnets,” F9 is mostly just an excuse for more of the same mindless, globetrotting action – Edinburgh, London, Tbilisi, Tokyo – and close-ups of characters delivering stoic one-liners with their backs turned to whoever they're talking to. But who goes to these things for the plot, anyway? There is a jungle car chase through a mine field! There is a magnet plane! There is a scene where Vin Diesel defeats twenty-five armed men single-handedly with his bare fists! You will already know from that description whether this sounds like a good way to spend a Friday night.

In perhaps the film's most interesting conceit, director Justin Lin – who also kicked off the new wave of heist-orientated films with Fast Five – imagines this as the franchise's Godfather Part II, bringing the series full circle with frequent flashbacks to Dom and his never-mentioned-before little brother (played as an adult by franchise newcomer, John Cena, who puts in a performance so wooden and uncharismatic it's as though he's made entirely from CG). That the back-and-forth narrative pays homage to the series' more humble beginnings is a nice touch, but it doesn't quite stick the intended emotional landing because the chemistry between Diesel and Cera is non-existent and they never read as brothers.

Did I mention they go into space? In one unforgettable sequence, double act Roman (Tyrese Pearce) and Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) are literally fired out of the atmosphere in a rocket-propelled car, the franchise equivalent of Indiana Jones stepping inside the refrigerator to withstand a nuclear blast – the only difference is that the fans actually wanted this. Where do we go from here? To another planet? On this evidence, you wouldn't put it past them.

It's all very watchable, though there is an element of burnout here that was not apparent in the previous films, a sense of spinning the wheels in order to keep the convoluted storylines going, the screenplay constantly stepping over itself to untangle the mess of its continuity. The action sequences are inventive, but have lost a bit of their inherent wow factor, while the broad humour rarely hits its mark. It might be time to park these cars for a while – or it would, were there not two more installments currently in the works. Even where family's concerned, though, we could all do with a break sometimes.

Fast & Furious 9 is now in cinemas.