F9: The Fast Saga (AKA Fast & Furious 9, or just F9) contains no more than a few minutes of verisimilitude—which I suppose is fine if your target audience’s reality is spending 16 hours a day playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and huffing lighter fuel.
So, the art of motion pictures has developed from an initial rudimentary level through innovation and improvisation brought about by successive geniuses like Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Roeg, Scorsese and Tarantino—much like how jazz or blues musicians expanded on what came before, to produce something new and better.
Somewhere along the way, post-Lucas and Spielberg, Hollywood was taken over by dopes in suits who determined that we don’t need story-telling—or reality at any level—and that the way to make movies was to to fill them end-to-end with action sequences so absurd you could not even consider suspending your disbelief, and break it up every thirty minutes or so with scenes of wooden expository dialogue.
The plot of this monstrosity, as far as I can discern one, is a macho intra-familial type thing about redemption and intimidating your first-degree relatives by taking steroids and driving fast in Costa Rica, Bangkok, and Outer Space.
Fast & Furious stalwart Vin Diesel has a certain kind of low-key charisma, but deploys an expression I’ve only ever seen used onscreen by Tom Cruise or, in real life, people recovering from enemas. I imagine it is intended to convey deep emotion. In terms of range, he makes Sylvester Stallone look like Meryl Streep.
John Cena and Lucas Black are so ugly they would not have been cast in movies made earlier than 1980, except as extras in Hammer Horror flicks—while acting bot Charlize Theron is here too alien, like she based her performance on Michael Fassbender’s in Prometheus, in which they co-starred. Either way, she looks and acts weird. Helen Mirren seems to have based her accent on Dick Van Dyke’s in Mary Poppins, and her performance is the only true embarrassment in her career I am aware of.
The only naturalistically acted scene features Kurt Russell, looking like he is in a completely different film. The actor who emerges with the most credit is Ludacris, who has a comedy pairing with the god-like Tyrese Gibson; but they struggle with the unfunny dialogue and ridiculous scenario. It’s …garbage.
FATAL VISIONS 