"Fast and Furious 9": family traumas

fast and furious 95 points

Fast & Furious 9; United States, 2020

Direction: Justin Lin.

Screenplay: Daniel Casey and Gary Scott Thompson.

Duration: 145 minutes.

Cast: Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris and John Cena.

Theatrical release “It's not about being the strongest, it's about being the biggest,” dad Toretto tells his son Dominic shortly before crashing into a concrete wall during a Nascar-style race, in an introductory sequence that takes place in 1989 and operates as a presentation of the family traumas that Vin Diesel's character will have to resolve during the more than two long hours of Fast and Furious 9. It is not unreasonable to think of that phrase as a declaration of principles of a saga that throughout the years last 20 years it has exponentially increased its volume to become a planetary box office success. But bigger is not necessarily better. What started with a couple of films focused on a group of thieves experienced in the art of driving as an excuse for the constant parades of tuned cars and scantily clad women twerking on camera, became a fat, festive, wild and rabidly kinetic universe. Centered around the most unlikely physical challenges and chases Hollywood has imagined in a long time. But now Fast and Furious wants to go the other way. The problem is that it doesn't seem to know where.

Taiwanese Justin Lin had sat in the director's chair four times before doing so now. He was responsible, among others, for the fifth and sixth, which marked the break towards a more excessive stage. Nobody like him should know that the matter works to the extent that his action scenes do. However, Lin tries a new twist by which he adds spies, betrayals and villains who want, like those of Avengers, to conquer the planet. And there is no, as there was before, self-awareness of the dramatic absurdity that these stereotypes mean in a foreign universe. Nor does the shift in narrative focus help the relationships, motivations, and desires of those characters who have never said more than 20 consecutive words without a car flying or exploding. To make matters worse, several installments ago the saga took the habit of bringing into the ring those who had been given up for dead before. Who could care about someone's fate, if not even the writers care?

During the beginning, Dominic's brother (Diesel) enters the scene, Jakob (the giant John Cena, coming out of the wrestling rings), who after the death of dad Toretto went over to the side of the bad guys and is now part of an international conspiracy to hack satellites , headed by the wealthy son of a European leader. As in all the previous films, Dominic is quiet in a field, enjoying retirement and teaching mechanics to his son, until his companions arrive to ask him to please join them in safeguarding the free world.

He obviously accepts, thus igniting a plot more indebted to James Bond and Mission: Impossible, with hi-tech devices the order of the day, than what Fast and Furious had been until now. The trips around the world – from Japan to Mexico, with a stopover in London – are excuses for cameos by old acquaintances of the saga (Helen Mirren, with palatial elegance even when she drinks in the street) and various ridiculously funny situations, such as the trip to space... in a car with a rocket engine on the roof. The self-confidence of that sequence is not the same as that of the rest of a film that resorts to well-known formulas (cars that “cut off” people, impossible rescues) and applied through digital effects that make more noise than fully accelerated engines.