Review: In ‘F9,’ finding a new gear for ridiculousness

With all due respect to Vin Diesel’s Toretto clan, I must disagree. The “Fast and Furious” movies are really about reaching new nitro-injected realms of absurdity. If you can stomach the macho melodrama, these movies are ridiculous big-screen ballets, with cars shooting out of skyscrapers and airplanes, that at their best are the right kind of stupid. More than family or cars, they’re about the movies’ whiz-bang capacity for ludicrous grandiosity — for stepping on the gas and leaving logic in the rearview.

It wasn’t always like this. The “Fast and Furious” movies, which have moved so speedily that their original articles flew out the window somewhere along the way (the first entry was 2001’s “The Fast and the Furious”), began more humbly on the road-racing streets of Southern California. But, particularly by the time of Justin Lin’s “Fast Five,” the series grew ever more expansive, reaching around the globe and, finally, by “F9,” into space. As if always searching for another gear of outrageousness, the franchise has hunted new, implausible roads for gravity-defying mayhem and unexplainable traction. Cars here, cars there. Cars everywhere.

So when I sat down for “F9,” which opens Friday in theaters, I was looking forward to some of that good, old stupid fun. “F9,” gets there eventually, courtesy of a comic, cosmic foray by Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) in a rocket-fueled Pontiac Fiero. But for a healthy amount of the movie’s 145-minute running time, it feels more like a franchise running low on gas. There’s a bit of a hangover to “F9,” and not just because it sat on the shelf for the past year while waiting until the pandemic was more blockbuster-ready. “F9,” in which Lin returns as director after a seven-year break from the franchise, follows the most dramatic chapter in the “Fast and Furious” run, when real-life tragedy added an echo of pathos in the death of Paul Walker and off-screen squabbles led to a spinoff for Dwayne Johnson, with Jason Statham, in “Hobbs and Shaw.”