Review by Logan Kenny
I went to see F9 in the cinema because I didn’t care if I lived or died. It sounds worrying and disconcerting when I articulate it directly. It wasn’t an active desire to be dead, but a general sense of apathy towards existence. It was difficult for me to see things to live for at an extremely difficult time in my life. It seemed hopeless to imagine the possibilities of a long-term future or to reckon with things outside of my bedroom. There were a few months where it seemed like there was no chance of any consolation or happiness in my existence. As I waited alone in my room, staring at my phone for text messages that would never come, rotting away in the early hours of the morning, I fixated on returning to the cinema. I’d been away for so long that it felt alien to imagine myself back inside of a multiplex, to experience the total submergence into darkness that comes from a film beginning. I hadn’t gone since the day before I went into lockdown in early 2020. I refused to go back when theatres first re-opened out of paranoia and anger, and I was nervous for myself and nervous about what the initial reports suggested. I imagined that I wouldn’t go back until I had gotten the vaccine. But by the time F9 came out, I was struggling to find anything to cling onto. I was experiencing a colossal sensation of grief and needed something to take my mind away from it. When I got up to go to the movies that day, preparing my mask and carrying a mini bottle of hand sanitizer in my pocket, I didn’t care about what happened after the film ended. All I cared about was the need to be lost for two and a half hours in my favourite franchise.
My relationship to the Fast and Furious series is one of extreme attachment. I watched 5 of the first 6 for the first time in a single sitting as I prepared for Furious 7. It took a little while for me to completely acclimate to the series, but I surprised myself by how much I cared about the characters – how dynamic and human their relationships felt. The action was impressive, the cars were cool and the actors were ethereal in their beauty, but it was that connection to the idea of family that really connected the series together for me. By the time I reached the end of Fast & Furious 6, I was desperate to experience Furious 7 on the biggest screen possible. I went to see it in IMAX with my mum, who had never seen a Fast and Furious film before, eager for the excitement and emotion that was awaiting us. Even with the knowledge of Paul Walker’s passing and the new connection I’d formed with the series, I wasn’t prepared for how much Furious 7 would mesmerise and devastate me. The goodbye to Paul Walker, incorporating previous footage throughout the series in order to pay tribute and celebrate the impact he’s had on everyone involved is one of the best edited sequences I’ve ever seen in a film. The decision to keep Walker’s character Brian O’Conner alive within the universe, always leaving the possibility that the surviving protagonists will meet him again, just away from the camera, is a profoundly beautiful decision in every respect. You can feel just how much Walker mattered to everyone involved in the franchise, how painful his loss is and how necessary it was to honour him in the most remarkable way possible. The ending of Furious 7 is when my admiration and enjoyment of the series transformed into something more profound: a way for me to filter and cope with my own experiences with grief, and a way for me to feel connected to the ideas of family in a way I didn’t even know I needed.
Over the course of a few years, my love for the ending of Furious 7 and my respect for the rest of the series transformed into an undying love. Whenever I was feeling down, I could think about the characters I’d developed an emotional attachment towards, I could rewatch an entry and be guaranteed an electrifying, hilarious and deeply affecting experience. The core themes of finding family of your own, relationships that didn’t need to be connected by blood to matter more than anything, meant a lot to me as a queer autistic kid figuring shit out. The films went from being enjoyable to something more, a representation of what I needed most from big budget cinema. I rewatched the earlier entries and found cosmic significance that I’d never seen before: the elegance found in driving, the quiet connections forged by indescribable pain, the unconditional love that the family shows to the people that matter the most. These films aren’t singular in my emotional development but they helped provide me with the context of what friendship and family can look like, even as they made me smile with extravagant vehicular stunts. I connected a lot to the arcs of Letty and Han. I found solace and understanding in Vin Diesel’s portrayal of Dominic Toretto, a character who reminds me of myself more than most characters in fiction. The characters of these films helped me remember how to breathe, which I’ll be grateful for the rest of my life.
To me, Furious 7 was the ending of the series in spirit. Everything that has come after is just a bonus – practically DLC tied onto the end of the experience, just some more time with characters that we’ve loved for 15 years. There didn’t need to be any more entries, if they were going to say goodbye to the series, it made sense to do it alongside the final tribute to Paul Walker. But they continued. There was a little something missing from The Fate of the Furious with the benefit of hindsight. That extra spark of familial connection which is built into the series’s DNA wasn’t there in the same capacity. There was a wonderful ending scene that continued the omnipresent force of Brian, but unsurprisingly, it felt like the series’s creators weren’t sure what to do without Walker. Where does the story go after the death of one of the two main actors? How do you replace someone like that? How do you move on? There’s teething problems throughout Fate of the Furious as a consequence. There’s an embrace of the worldwide agent network introduced in 7 to mixed results, an attempted Walker substitute in the bland Scott Eastwood, disgusting disrespect towards Elena Neves to create a shocking moment, and, controversially, the decision to make the villainous Deckard Shaw become part of the family in spite of his murder of Han. It was an entry that jumped between numerous plots, Diesel’s clashes with a miscast Charlize Theron, the saga of unlikely allies as Shaw and Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs escape from a prison together, and the rest of the family being treated as little more than generic agents. Furthermore, F. Gary Gray clearly has little emotional connection or understanding of these character’s dynamics, leading to a largely depersonalised series of stunts and dialogue sequences. It has its moments, a fun opening race, a great leading performance from Vin Diesel, the aforementioned ending sequence, but it doesn’t function within its franchise. That constant presence of emotion, the grace notes of bonding and intimate connection, just weren’t on display here. That problem was exacerbated in the spin-off Hobbs and Shaw which, aside from an excellent third act set in Samoa, didn’t feel anything like a Fast & Furious film whatsoever. All the heart and sincerity of the series had been replaced with nauseating quips and badly cut action sequences. While I enjoyed both films as fun but flawed blockbuster entertainment, there was no extra connection, no heart, imagination or love in the ways that count the most. They existed to keep the franchise going, to keep the profits intact, to give Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel some breathing room from each other.
I knew F9 was going to be different. From the second that Justin Lin, the director of four previous entries in the series, was announced to return, it seemed like it was inevitable for the series to return to its emotionally charged core. By the time that Han appeared in the trailer, returning for the first time since his supposed death in Fast & Furious 6, it instantly became the most anticipated movie of 2020 for me. I could feel it in my heart that it was going to be special, that it was going to be the epitome of what Fast & Furious could be without Paul Walker. If there was anyone who could do it, it was Justin Lin. Then the world shut down. Then the movie got delayed. Then I started to realise that I’d never see my partner at the time ever again. The person I was when I saw that trailer, filled with excitement and euphoria towards the future, wasn’t the same person who was preparing that mask and bottle of hand sanitiser 18 months later. The excitement to see the movie turned into a momentary source of oxygen, it became the first thing I’d left my house for since March 2020 aside from the first dose of the vaccine. I knew that no matter what, I needed to see it. I needed to experience these characters again, who have tied themselves to my lives in ways I couldn’t have imagined in the six years since my first encounter. It almost didn’t matter to me if all the precautions didn’t work, if all the bad luck in the universe was concentrated towards my flesh. I just had to see it.
The theatre is my safe space and it has been since I was a kid. The hardest part of the pandemic, beyond the endless waiting for news about my partner, was not being able to lose myself in the theatre whenever a bad moment hit. It was always my coping mechanism, my source for otherworldly inspiration. When I was old enough to start properly analysing movies, I would go to the theatre multiple times a week. For 7 years, there wasn’t a weekend that I didn’t see a film in a cinema. It didn’t matter if I was in Glasgow or Orlando or on a Scottish island, I’d find a way to see something projected, to experience the darkened bliss of an auditorium. The shift in getting used to a world without it was difficult. Films became a different experience, defined by the glimmering light of my laptop and the lack of ability to truly cut off from the world. It became harder to focus on films, easier to get distracted and be filled with anxieties. Instead of cinema being the thing I depended on to get through a day, it became a liability in some of the hardest times, a restriction, a job. I used to watch films at home to relax, to experience major works I’d unlikely get to see projected and ones that I just couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed for. In the last year, my love for cinema remained intact but there was the occasional sensation of discontent, where profound images didn’t feel the same displayed on a Chromebook screen. Sitting down for F9, a little bit of nervousness flowed through my bloodstream. I was hit with the worry that I’d forgotten how to properly watch films, how to allow all of my attention to focus on this singular text, this immersive big screen experience. I was worried it wouldn’t feel the same anymore, that a part of my brain had shifted fundamentally because of the other experiences I’d been through. But when the lights went out and the music started, I knew I was home. I knew that for a couple hours, I wouldn’t have to think about the sickness of my partner, the crushing anxieties over the future or my increased sense of nihilism. I could just feel alive in that theatre. It almost didn’t matter if F9 was great or even good. I was just so grateful to be back.
I am incredibly grateful that F9 wasn’t just great but utterly wonderful. From the first few minutes, I knew that I was exactly where I needed to be and that sensation only amplified throughout the rest of the film. It balances the increased focus on humour from the previous entries with the emotional core of the franchise perfectly, managing to be genuinely funny without undermining the complex and difficult emotions on display. Lin’s imagination and clear love for the series is on full display here, with each set-piece being embedded with such infectiously chaotic glee. Instead of the action sequences feeling like empty attempts at escalation, there is such personality and vibrance in each one. At its best, Lin’s approach to action feels like a child playing with their toys, stacking up feats of destruction with feverish enthusiasm and deep sincerity. The beauty of Lin’s return to the series comes across majorly in his approach to the environment. As the series has moved away from specific cities and transformed into a globetrotting adventure, it would be easy to lose the idiosyncrasies and textures of each location that the protagonists visit. One of the best aspects of the first five entries is how each city (Los Angeles, Miami, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro) feels so essential to the entire production; their architecture and auras help define the narrative progression and emotion. Lin’s entries have always cared about the locations as much as the vehicles, with Fast & Furious 6 making the most of every stop on its journey. While cities had little texture or ambience in The Fate of the Furious and Hobbs and Shaw, F9 manages to broaden the scale of the family’s destination without losing that specific feeling. The way Lin frames the desolate racetrack of Dom’s youth, showing how much glamour and life has been stripped from it over the years is fantastic work, conveying within seconds how painful it is for Dom to revisit his past like this. In the bigger adventures, Edinburgh is filmed with such vibrancy, capturing the unique pleasures of the city through the journey across rooftops. London’s nightlife is captured beautifully and effectively, the return to Tokyo focuses on the smaller streets and quieter areas of the metropolitan city, and the final action sequence captures Georgia’s capital Tbilisi in exhilarating form. Each major set-piece feels like it needed to take place in whatever location it was filmed in, never once feeling anonymous or devoid of life.
There is no irony present in F9 like in Hobbs and Shaw. The comedy is built around traits of characters that we’ve spent multiple films with, instead of tired quips and embarrassing punchlines. Instead of performers like Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris being relegated to mere comic relief, they are given the spotlight to be characteristically entertaining and important in action sequences. The dynamics between all of the characters are stronger, with Lin recognising that they are the most important feature of any Fast and Furious entry. There is significant attention throughout the runtime towards casual interactions between members of the family, letting these characters catch up with each other, joke around and express honest emotional sentiments. In addition to this, Lin is drawn towards incorporating the past entries into the narrative, with the returns of Han, Mia Toretto and the main lads from Tokyo Drift all being central to F9’s emotional resonance. In a film so largely about the ghosts of the past, Lin understands that it’s crucial to find beauty and optimism from what’s come before, even if that’s just reuniting with old friends.
Those aforementioned ghosts are what define the narrative of F9. It is a film overwhelmed by what’s happened in the past, whether that’s through the direct interference of the latest villainous character, or the overwhelming desire for Dom to leave his past behind and forge a new future. Arguably F9’s greatest strength as a narrative feature is the incorporation of elements of Dom’s life that we haven’t seen before, how it defines his current approach to family and his desire to abandon his current lifestyle of action and violence. It opens with the sequence described in his central monologue in The Fast and the Furious, the death of his father on the race track. We see young Dom in vivid detail, witness the intense acceleration of the circuit, the beauty of seeing these machines at their maximum potential. There is inherent danger to it, as we see with his father’s fatal crush, but there is something so magnetic about the ways the tires grind against the gravel, how the structure of the vehicle implodes upon its final collision. Within minutes, you understand why Dom is so conflicted with his relationship to cars, and why he can never stop himself from racing them. As the film progresses, we see his comfortable domestic life with Letty and his son Brian. They live in isolation, maintaining their home and a single car in their garage. It is a peaceful existence for two characters who have had their lives defined by trauma, grief and physical pain. However, peace cannot stay intact forever, at least not yet. Both Dom and Letty are drawn back into the family’s organisation due to the return of Jakob Toretto, the brother of Dom and Mia, who is acting as a mercenary for an erratic billionaire desperate to wreak havoc upon the world. The basic mechanics of the plot aren’t incredibly relevant – the connective tissue is a little weak and underdeveloped – but it’s for a good purpose. Lin understands that the fractured dynamic between Dom and Jakob is the most important thing. The plot beats are built around fleshing out that dynamic, which is perfect for a series that cares far more about character, emotion and action than mechanical excellence. This is most evident in the sequence introducing Han’s return, as it spends a few minutes explaining a completely absurd justification for his survival that barely makes sense, but the logic doesn’t really matter. Both the family and the audience are just happy he’s back.
The best scenes throughout F9 are built around Dom. In particular, his dynamics with Jakob and Letty are the beating heart that brings the series back to earth. The relationship with Jakob puts Dom in a completely alien environment, forced to reckon with the ways that he failed a member of his own family. Modern Jakob is overwhelmingly distanced from emotional entanglement upon his introduction. John Cena delivers an excellent supporting performance, using his naturally composed figure and broad frame to great effect. His initial stoicism transitions into something more desperate as the film progresses, with Cena expressing resentful petulance brilliantly. It’s a difficult balance between the professional nature of an international mercenary and a fragile younger brother and Cena nails it. His remarkable physique and naturally intimidating presence ensures that the melodrama of his dynamic with Dom never undermines his threat in fight sequences. He always feels dangerous, those moments where the facade slips and his desperation comes out amplifies that sense of intimidation. The frequent usages of flashbacks surrounding the breakdown of Dom and Jakob’s relationship work to the film’s benefit, especially as the two narrative strands coalesce in one of the series’ best ever sequences. In the middle of the film, Dom falls into a deep pool of water, seemingly on the verge of drowning. As he floats down into the dark abyss, he suddenly appears in his own memories, the flashbacks we’ve been witnessing throughout the runtime. Dom walks through his childhood home, sees his brother as who he was before the darkness overwhelmed him, and allows himself to remember all the nuances of his past. The brilliant production design and attention to detail makes Dom’s childhood home feel like a fading dream, a place that immediately radiates with melancholy from the first glance. It is one of the most tender moments in the franchise, as Dom reconciles with his own memories before he allows himself to fade away, accepting whatever his fate shall be.
Dom and Letty’s relationship is arguably the most satisfying aspect of the film for fans of the series. Since Letty’s return in Fast & Furious 6, the loving relationship between the two has been riddled with complications. Amnesia, the weight of grieving, Dom’s former partnership with Elena, all of these things have ensured that their road to happiness has been harder than most. Yet, they are completely comfortable with each other here. They have committed their futures to each other, living a domestic life for the most part. Even when Letty needs to experience the adrenaline of their previous existence, they still love each other deeply and have each other to rely upon whenever needed. In a relationship that’s been so largely defined by uncontrollable conflict and pain, it’s relieving and beautiful to see them develop and flourish as an on-screen couple. Michelle Rodriguez is particularly fantastic here, giving what’s maybe her best performance as an actor to date. The chemistry she has with Diesel is remarkable, she’s always impressive in action sequences but most importantly, she conveys fragility and pain in such a deeply personal manner. Her quiet moments with Dom, whether they’re in their house or during moments of overwhelming anguish are mesmerising. The pain in her eyes when she thinks she’s lost him forever mixed with the tearful relief when she hears him breathe again are two of the best acting moments of the new decade.
The ensemble is the most complete it can be without the presence of Paul Walker. Sung Kang and Jordana Brewster who are both excellent as always. Kang slips back into the elusive, cool melancholy of Han like he’d never left, and Brewster gets far more to do in action sequences than she ever has before. Nathalie Emmanuel properly gets to shine here in a way that she didn’t completely in the previous two entries. The decision to no longer make her the object of both Roman and Tej’s affection is the right one, with all three having lovely chemistry as close friends. She gets to show off her comedic chops and truly feels like a member of the family by the final moments. The inclusion of the Tokyo Drift boys leads to some truly hysterical sequences, but also a genuinely beautiful moment where Lucas Black’s Sean Boswell gets to see his friend/mentor Han for the first time in years. They reconcile and embrace each other like no time has passed, remaining family even after everything.
With Walker, F9 continues the trend established in Fate of the Furious, ensuring that his presence remains intact in the closing moments. It’s key to illustrate that Brian still exists in this universe. The medium of cinema means that they can keep him alive here, letting the audience imagine the reunion and the meal between the family when he arrives. It’s impossible (and should remain that way) to see Paul Walker’s image on our screens again, but with the closing moments of F9, it feels like a part of him still exists in this series. He remains part of the hearts of everyone who works on the films, everyone who remembers and loves him even after he’s been gone for almost eight years. While the series didn’t need to continue after Furious 7, the way that Walker’s legacy is continued makes it worth it on its own. It makes the grief over his loss easier to stomach whenever Brian is mentioned with adoration.
When F9 ended, I felt happier than I did in a long time. I had a gigantic smile on my face and the return to the cinema felt like a truly special experience, one that I couldn’t have been more thankful for. It didn’t fix all my problems, it’s just a film, a wonderful one that means a lot to me, but it’s just a film. It gave me a reason to keep going for a while, to look forward to something at a time where I didn’t care about anything. It seems almost strange to look back upon those feelings of ennui and despair now. Life got a little easier over time. Grief lives within me, but I’m coping with it. I’m moving on, I’ve fallen in love again, I’ve let myself look forward to the future. When I was preparing to go see Old, I got struck with a feeling of nervousness that I didn’t get from F9, that fear that something would go wrong, that I’d get sick or something bad would happen. I cared if I lived or died again. I cared what happened to me. F9 reminded me how good it can be to be alive, even if it’s just for a couple hours in the multiplex. Now I remember every day, I can feel it in my heart when I wake up. I remember what it feels like to want to live.