143 min | PG-13 | June 25, 2021 | Universal Pictures
Dom Toretto’s long-lost brother surfaces with a plan to weaponize a global hack, and the crew has to stop him while reckoning with the family they buried. A car gets launched into space. The franchise has stopped pretending physics applies.
Dominic Toretto has retired to a farmhouse to raise his son in peace. That peace lasts about ten minutes. A new threat surfaces, and at its center stands Jakob Toretto, the brother Dom has spent decades pretending does not exist. F9 is a film about family loyalty stretched past the breaking point and then welded back together. The plot mechanics about a satellite weapon and a stolen device exist only to give the brothers a reason to drive cars at each other.
Vin Diesel plays Dom with the same granite stillness he has brought to nine of these films. He growls about family and stares into the middle distance while the world detonates around him. John Cena plays Jakob as a wounded mirror image, all clenched jaw and buried grievance. The two men share a grief over their dead father that the film treats with total sincerity. Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris, as Roman and Tej, supply the comic relief and openly question whether they are invincible. That joke is the closest the movie comes to acknowledging its own absurdity.
Justin Lin returns to direct and co-writes with Daniel Casey. Lin understands the geography of an action sequence in a way that elevates the chaos above noise. He stages a chase across a collapsing jungle road where a vehicle swings on a cable between cliffs, and the spatial logic stays legible even as the stunt defies belief. The flashback scenes to the brothers as teenagers are shot in warmer, softer light to separate the past from the chrome present. Lin commits to every ludicrous beat, including the magnet-armed cars and the rocket-powered trip to orbit, and refuses to wink at the camera.
F9 wants to be two films at once. One is a solemn family melodrama about brothers and fathers and the cost of grudges. The other is a cartoon where cars survive falls that would liquefy a human body. The solemn half drags whenever the engines stop running. The cartoon half delivers exactly what a decade of escalation has promised, which is spectacle untethered from any law of nature.