In the Flesh: F9: The Fast Saga

I almost admire this franchise’s total disregard for title consistency. What the fuck is F9: The Fast Saga supposed to mean? What kind of insider knowledge of the production of and mythology behind this deeply weird series would it take to unravel the mystery of how that title made sense to the people who created it? At the same time, there’s no possible reward of an explanation that could justify the effort needed to uncover it. That’s F9 in a nutshell, a great big complicated machine full of moving parts and completely and totally inconsequential both piece for piece and as the sum of all its elements. It has nothing new to say or do, no insight to offer into its returning characters as it yanks them for the umpteenth time from their eternal backyard barbecue for another plunge straight into the jaws of death. Or out of them, in Han’s (Sung Kang) case.

For no apparent narrative reason and with no payoff beyond deflating the series’ already flaccid stakes, Han returns from the grave to rejoin his old pal Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel). It feels like the straw that breaks the series’ back, a final admission that what we’re doing here has more in common with making action figures kiss than it does with telling a story that means something. Even with Justin Lin back at the helm there’s no more inertia, no more sense that any of this is leading anywhere but to the next near-identical entry. Even the brief return of Helen Mirren’s Queenie Shaw, who enjoys perhaps the series’ only real chemistry with Vin Diesel, can’t resuscitate a film with no interest in being alive. We even get an evil Toretto, Jakob (John Cena), to remind us that the land of real thoughts and complete ideas is receding quickly into the distance in the rearview mirror.

Cena, who has proven himself an adept and flexible actor elsewhere, is pretty much a mobile frown here. There’s nothing to his performance as Jakob whatsoever. No texture, no pathos, nothing. Finn Cole as young Jakob in the film’s extensive flashback sequences has a much more believable heat and heaviness to him, and Vinnie Bennett does excellent work as a younger Dom, but asking viewers to invest in a sort of Toretto mythology is a bridge too far for a series that began with two guys duking it out in LA street races. The thin connective tissue keeping the Fast and the Furious movies watchable has been stretched beyond its breaking point, and all there is to be found on the other side of that membrane is a deep and tedious emptiness as vast as the interstellar void through which Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Ludacris) navigate their rocket-powered Pontiac. A whole lot of nothing, after all, is still nothing.