F9 makes many of the same retroactive franchise mistakes that felled Star Wars, James Bond and even the Scream series.
series. It introduces a new baddie who turns out to be a blood relative to our main hero and one who is retroactively the author of at least some of his pain. Not only does it bring a character back from the dead entirely to please a small but vocal fan base, it wastes screentime twisting itself in pretzels explaining that resurrection at the expense of its present-tense narrative.
The Justin Lin-directed flick, which opened in China to $136 million but is falling fast despite comparatively lousy word-of-mouth, gets off to a decent start with a flashback, set in 1989, to the day Dom’s father perished on the racetrack. This scene was merely discussed inbut is now outright shown while introducing Dom’s previously unknown younger brother Jacob . Cut to today, with Dom and Letty living off the grid raising Dom’s now pre-school-aged son.
The first big action scene, and honestly the last big set-piece for maybe the first half of the movie, is enjoyable enough. However, the skewed “lawless anti-heroes invade a foreign country and slaughter foreign soldiers with no consideration of the moral or practical consequences” sensibility will remind you of. The vehicular mayhem works better. Even if you’ve seen most of the pay-offs in the marketing, it works pretty well in context. The mission is essentially a botch .
Mia finally gets some screen time with and an action scene alongside her sister-in-law. Helen Mirren gets to flex her-era action muscles. All of this culminates in the reveal that Han Lue has fully recovered from his slight case of death. The how’s-and-why’s of that resurrection are ridiculously complicated and retroactively idiotic with flashbacks that will give you flashbacks to the flashbacks in.
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