Vin Diesel’s actionpacked ‘F9: The Fast Saga’ is great, big, stupid fun.
Some movies are too enormous to be streamed, no matter how big your TV is or how much you’ve spent on the sound system. “F9: The Fast Saga” was supposed to premiere more than a year ago but was postponed until it could be shown safely in theaters, and that was the right decision. This movie doesn’t fit inside your house.
It’s huge, it’s stupid and it’s wonderful. It’s a total blast and an invitation to put your mind into suspended animation for two giddy, ridiculous hours. If you’re looking for a movie to escape into, you cannot do better than “F9.”
This is the ninth installment in the “Fast and Furious” franchise and one of the better ones, combining several winning elements. Its action choreogra
phy is brilliant. It’s a weird form of talent to envision action sequences that surprise, thrill and top themselves, and being able to do that over and over.
The imagination of the filmmakers is further unbound by their willingness to be outrageous. Early in the movie, Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto drives off a cliff. So what? Anybody can drive off a cliff. But Diesel drives off a cliff and steers the car in midair. You can’t find entertainment like this elsewhere. Then he crashes, and the car rolls about a halfdozen times — he’s not wearing a
seat belt but, of course, he’s fine.
Yet this movie is not a comedy. It’s funny, and the filmmakers know it’s funny, but the characters most emphatically do not — and that becomes important. It allows moments to be silly without the movie becoming silly. The actors are directed as though they were enacting a drama as consequential as the Cuban Missile Crisis, which gives the audience permission to take the story seriously, at least to whatever extent we can follow the story.
As for that story, there’s apparently an orb. It’s in two pieces and looks like an ornate hamster ball. There’s also an activation code. If all three elements fall into the wrong hands, the world is doomed.
For obvious reasons, the bad guys are after it, and Dominic and his team are out to stop them. You might think that the military, the Defense Department and the CIA might also be involved in such a matter. You might expect the Navy SEALs would have a role to play. But no, the fate of the world is once again in the hands of a small group of fastdriving computer geniuses.
And this time it’s personal, because the head of the bad guys is none other than Dominic’s brother (played by John Cena)! Their paths diverged years ago. We are told some of the backstory in totally confusing flashbacks set in 1989, with other actors playing the duo. For Dominic, they cast a guy who looks nothing like Diesel, and for the brother they cast a guy about a foot shorter than Cena. Fortunately, with this movie, it really doesn’t matter if you know what’s going on.
All you need to know is that Vin Diesel is the guy, because he is. These movies constitute their own genre and Diesel embodies it. His look is extreme — a shaved head and muscles on top of muscles — but he’s always true and grounded, and he’s wellpaired with Michelle Rodriguez, who seems wild enough and downtoearth enough to be married to a guy like Dominic.
A movie can’t just be crazy, lest it go off a cliff and never land. It also needs a human core, and Diesel and Rodriguez are it.