| Adventure | Action |
Director: Justin Lin
Producer: Neal H. Moritz, Vin Diesel, Justin Lin, Jeff Kirschenbaum, Joe Roth, Clayton Townsend,
Samantha Vincent
Writer: Daniel Casey, Justin Lin
Release Date (Theaters): Jun 25, 2021, Wide
Runtime: 2h 25m
SUMMARY:
Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto is leading a quiet life off the grid with Letty and his son, little Brian, but they know that danger always lurks just over their peaceful horizon. This time, that threat will force Dom to confront the sins of his past if he’s going to save those he loves most. His crew joins together to stop a world-shattering plot led by the most skilled assassin and high-performance driver they’ve ever encountered: a man who also happens to be Dom’s forsaken brother, Jakob (John Cena, the upcoming The Suicide Squad).
MOVIE REVIEW:
Like most of the movies in the Fast series, this one has half a dozen surprising, exciting adrenaline-fueled moments, but the road between them is long, uninteresting, and nonsensical. Directed by Justin Lin — his fifth entry in the franchise — F9: The Fast Saga seems to lack the creative juices responsible for the mind-blowing stunts in the eighth film (the wrecking ball, the submarine, etc.). Here, almost all of the action is centered around the varied but repeated use of electromagnets, pulling parked cars in front of moving ones, snapping guns away from villainous minions, etc. And some fight and chase scenes are unfortunately shot with jerky camerawork, making them less effective and more confusing.
At least an escape across a rickety rope bridge, a trip to outer space, and other chase scenes are still fun. The movie seems content to prop up these scenes by bringing back various old characters at key moments, hoping that their mere recognition will create a response. Lin especially seems to be on a mission to revisit his first entry in the series, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. But it’s all Dom’s story, dealing with his brother and his past (long flashbacks tell the story), and Diesel handles it with a grim, largely unchanging expression. When the Fast movies are at their best, they roll with the ridiculousness, but when they take themselves too seriously, as F9: The Fast Saga does, they tend to drag.
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