“F9: The Fast Saga” (2021), Equally Ridiculous as the Rest, Doesn’t Quite Live Up (Part II/II)

(Continued from Part I)

The biggest weakness of F9, though, is in the script and character development. The central story of the film revolves around the relationship between Dom and his brother Jakob (John Cena). It spends a good chunk of time trying to develop the history of the two through flashbacks of their youths (played by Vinnie Bennett  and Finn Cole respectively) but I wasn’t the only one surprised to hear that Dom has a brother; Roman and Tej, Dom’s adopted family, also quip sarcastically when Dom mentions that he has a real-life brother.

Jakob, who’s been trying to live up to Dom his entire life, has teamed up with Otto (Thue Ersted Rasmussen), a filthy rich son of a dictator, to get a hold of Ares, a weapon so advanced that it can hack into anything that has a microchip. The explanation of how this works doesn’t make much sense, but it’s just a pretense anyways for the bad guys to destroy the world and the good guys to stop them, with the Toretto brothers pitted against each other.

It’s hard to avoid the feeling that the Toretto sibling conflict is unnecessarily manufactured. The series has built up such a strong sense of a large brotherhood that it can barely fit all the characters into the movie’s running time; this movie exacerbates the problem by bringing back Han Lue (Sung Kang) to life (if I count correctly, this is the second character of the series that’s come back to life). Rather than introducing a long-lost family member, the film would have been much better off building on the existing relationship and throwing in a compelling villain.

And there the film falls woefully short. Otto is no Hernan Reyes (in “Fast Five”) or Cipher (in “The Fate of the Furious”) in intimidation, and Rasmussen noticeably lacks the screen presence of either Joaquim de Almeida or Charlize Theron.

This entire movie feels like a lost opportunity. For a good length of time, the Toretto gang splits up to go on and chase after different things, an odd decision for a “buddy” film that’s at its best when the gang is working together. The movie shot on-location around the world, yet it leveraged the scenery in London, Edinburgh and Tbilisi (in Georgia) only marginally. The characters occasionally talk as if they know they’re in a movie, but the script doesn’t go all in on the “we know we’re in a movie” joke so these lines feel awkward.

Perhaps “F9” is evidence that this series is running out of steam. It’s only possible to go so far with a single premise, and it’s a statement of the quality of the series that this film, certainly above an average blockbuster, is not in a league with the rest.