I watched Fast & Furious 9 without seeing any of the other films. Now I want to buy a Jeep
I watched Fast & Furious 9 without seeing any of the other films. Now I want to buy a Jeep Who says you need to see the first eight films of the Fast & Furious franchise to understand the ninth one? Well, a lot of people, actually. But that didn't stop me from giving it a go nonetheless Thomas Barrie After a year and a half of cold turkey, I reintroduced physical cinema-going into my life this week with the celluloid equivalent of a gram of pure brown-sugar Kandahar heroin. Like smack, my drug of choice has a number of street names. Some call it F9, others prefer Fast 9 or F9: The Fast Saga. To me, it is simply Fast & Furious 9.
When the day of release arrives, I go in totally blind. I've never seen any of the other films, despite them raking in a cool $6 billion or so collectively since 2001. My knowledge of the Fast & Furious franchise is as follows:
Other than that, I canvass some friends on whose behalf I'm ashamed to admit are big franchise fans, even as they approach their late twenties, and they give me a few cryptic pointers for the film, such as: "They're street racers turned avengers" and "The plot twist that you won't see coming is the baddie is a sibling of one of the main cast" (both of which make sense) and "There are a few flying cars too. And a guy who was definitely dead, now alive and everyone is chill with it" (…right?) and "This one will most likely involve them taking over the ISS, tuning it up with a new spoiler and then racing the Martian ISS back to earth" (on that, I am totally lost). Most enigmatically, I'm told, "They like to live life a quarter mile at a time and family is everything."
Armed with this knowledge, I slurp down a cortado in Pure in Waterloo station, head through the concrete tunnel that leads under the roundabout to the BFI Imax and ready myself for two and a half hours of full-bore, asphalt-burning action.
In the cinema lobby, I spot a couple of men in three-quarter cargo shorts and, with a frisson of excitement, I identify them as my fellow Fast-heads. We're soon joined by a group (a school trip?) of teenagers who will take up the entire back row of the screen and who will later cheer when London first appears during the movie. "A Whole New World" by Zayn and Zhavia Ward, from the Aladdin soundtrack (I google the lyrics), is piped gently into the carpeted space where you can buy sweets and slushies and I realise, with a start, that I have never been to this Imax as a civilian, only for press screenings. I feel like an imposter.
In the screen itself, the Disney tunes have been swapped out for a playlist of mumble rap and a slideshow of promotional images from the film is cycling through on repeat. Muscled men of indeterminable age and impossibly small women look out purposefully from the screen, sitting on cars with their arms folded. This, I will soon learn, is a classic pose for those involved in the Fast franchise. I recognise Rodriguez and Diesel among our heroes to be, with a surge of pride, and another face seems familiar too, though I can't place it. After a few more rounds of the promo slideshow, I realise who I think it is and make a note to check later: "Is Ludacris still in it??" (Reader: of course he is.) Ahead of me, a small child with a gelled quiff is taking selfies with his dad, which is sweet. I'm at the very earliest screening on the first day the film is out in the UK and the people around me seem genuinely excited to be here seeing the film. It makes for a nice change from the siloed way we tend to watch movies now – in bed, alone or in pairs, on a 13-inch screen – and even being in a cinema at all, mid-morning on a weekday, feels like a privilege.
And then the film begins.
After a brief instigating scene involving Diesel and Rodriguez living on an idyllic farm with a sweet child called Brian, two men – one of whom is definitely Ludacris – and Missandei from Game Of Thrones turn up and show the couple a video of a man named "Mr Nobody" asking for help because a person named "Cipher" has attacked his plane somewhere over Panama and stolen… something. Presumably, these characters were all established in the previous films, so it's entirely on me that I don't know who they are, but, nonetheless, at this point "Mr Nobody" could refer to literally any of the men I've seen in F9 so far. But I get the point: there's a MacGuffin and only a significant quantity of petrol fumes and bullet casings can deliver it back into the hands of the righteous.
Clad in white wife-beaters and looking serious, the gang heads to a fictionalised Central American country called "Montequinto", where they find Mr Nobody's downed plane and subsequently brutalise a small army of conscript soldiers, who you feel sorry for the moment Roman (I learn that that's one of the men's names) begins pumping bullets into them from a stolen Kalashnikov. I learn that Missandei from Game Of Thrones is the group's resident computer whizz, because she has an English accent and that everyone else is basically muscle. But I still have questions about Diesel and his friends and their precise legal status: how do they afford all these cars, planes and weapons? Are they, like, private military contractors? Are they regulated? Do they have to do risk assessments and expense forms for these missions? Do they have to bid for mission contracts through a formalised government process? Then someone mentions that Mr Nobody is in the CIA and so I'm happy to assume he's backing them.
There are some very cool moments, including when the group drives over a minefield at 80mph, outrunning the half-second delay on the triggered mines. A jet picks up a car in mid-air. The tone is smart-stupid and all the ideas are creatively dumb. The action is very 12A: people are hit and thrown from cars but nobody ever bleeds or bruises.
And then John Cena appears and the film hits its metaphorical nitro canisters. With a suitably tragic backstory that I won't spoil here, he is the brother of a member of the core cast and he has teamed up with Cipher (who I discover is Charlize Theron with an Angela Merkel bowl cut) to take control of a big, dangerous weapon system called Ares that Mr Nobody had access to. Theron and Cena's chemistry is palpable, even when she tells him, utterly deadpan: "Your chin. It's distinctive." And she's right, of course, because he's John Cena and he's very jawy and every time he comes on screen I hear his WWE theme tune.
I already feel like a small child who has had too much excitement at his own birthday party, who has to be put to bed while the other kids are still blazing through their respective sugar highs. I check my watch: we're only 40 minutes in. Every 20 minutes for the rest of the film the action moves to a new city, including Tokyo, London, Edinburgh and, weirdly, a scene at Hatfield House. During a wonderful three-minute car chase round Fitzrovia and St James's, Helen Mirren appears as a sort of Cockney crime boss granny and then Cardi B pops up as the leader of an Interpol swat team (!?) and exchanges a few pleasantries with Diesel. "Two queens!" I write in my notes. But the trip up to Scotland is less fun, as all the Americans pronounce it "Edin-boro" and crack low-hanging Harry Potter jokes. Honestly, guys, I think you're better than this. Luckily, redemption comes in the form of a very relatable car chase, in which Missandei "drives" through Edinburgh's Old Town (a millennial Londoner, she hasn't passed her test yet), smashing into things and pulling handbrake turns like a woman desperate not to find herself on the road to Kilmarnock.
I won't spoil the rest, but, rest assured, space features ("Orbit," Roman intones wondrously. "That's outer space. That's another level"). It's mindless 12A pabulum, just inoffensive enough to work as well in Mumbai as in Milton Keynes, as in Chengdu, as in Lagos, as in Austin. Case in point: Diesel and Cena wear these jewelled crosses around their necks – but are they actually religious? Does their (presumably) Catholicism change how they choose to act in the film at any point? Of course not, because that would tie them too closely to a messy, real-world identity. So, instead, the crosses just become a cute metaphor for a generic corporate idea of "family" and "doing the right thing" – even though, for Cena's character, that means hijacking a network of satellites and threatening global security. The characters aren't exactly complex, but, then, that's the point. F9 is like a medieval morality play, but instead of the Bible it's all based on Jeep's five-year brand strategy. In sum, I've never seen a film so long with so little actual content.
I have more time for the Fast franchise, though, than stuff like the MCU, because it doesn't quite suck all the film industry's oxygen and talent up in quite the same way. It is undeniably a lot of fun and the villains, frankly, are the best bit. Cena and Theron are awesome. If this is going to be the dominant global box office force for the foreseeable future, I can live with that. I even sit through the end credits and am rewarded with a mid-credit scene, though, naturally, I don't understand its significance, even if I recognise the British hardman who appears in it…
But I have one final question: why do the characters keep drinking their beers so ostentatiously? Then I remember another fragment of sage advice I had been given by my friends: "They drink loads of Corona with the label turned toward the camera and their hands in an awkward position so it's in full view." And with that, I'm suddenly thirsty. I head out into the sunlight, blinking, and look for a shop that stocks the world's most valuable beer brand. Maybe I'll start saving for a Jeep too.
F9 is out now.
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