Fast and Furious 9

My husband and I have begun our quest to watch all of the Fast and Furious movies in reverse order. After watching Fast 10 in theaters (and having many questions) we watched the 9th movie in hopes to gain some context. Now for those of you who have seen all of the Fast and Furious movies I can feel you laughing at me. And you would be correct to do so. So much happens in these movies and yet nothing happens in these movies so no context was gained. No questions were answered but so, so many arose.

Now it has been a while since I have watched any of these movies willingly and honestly I stopped with 5 because that's really when they stopped being good. I saw 6 in theaters and firmly remember hating it. That said as I journey back through, I’m glad I stopped when I did.

Apparently every character I remember from the last films I saw “died”, namely Han and Giselle who were a surprise in the 9th and 10th movies I guess. But as I was super far behind the curve I was in fact excited to see Gal Godot in the theaters but not surprised. And now I am just confused. We seem to be operating on comic book rules, no one stays dead and if you don’t see a body assume alive. Also very comic book-esque, someone that died will come back at a very narratively convenient time. Now we saw lots of people “die” in the 10th movie but now that we know that there will probably be at least 2 more movies I wouldn’t count anyone out yet.

I suppose my real problem with the 9th movie versus the 10th is that at least the action in the 10th movie got away with their lack of logic through the rule of cool. Did I laugh my ass off when Dom took down 2 helicopters? Absolutely, because it was ridiculous, but it wasn’t driving a car into OUTER FUCKING SPACE levels of ridiculous. Between that and the crews timelapse electromagnetics I don’t know what caused more what the fuck moments. Someone would turn on the magnets in their car, it wouldn’t affect their car but it would somehow cause everything affected by a magnet to hit the car behind them…somehow. I am convinced that Fast and Furious takes place on a parallel earth where physics doesn’t exist.

I will say that so far our favorite part of these movies is Roman’s character, he seems to be the only one that is self aware which also tells me that to an extent the writers know exactly what they are doing. And I guess I appreciate their inclusion of Roman to keep the movie at least somewhat grounded. Not that anything excuses a car in space but I will get over it eventually.

Like I said this movie raised more questions than answers, some of those questions include;

Who is little B's mom?

When did Dom have time to fuck somebody else?

When the Fuck did Giselle “die”?

When did Han “die”?

Why did it take 9 movies to get to Jacob existing and any backstory for Dom?

When did we abandon the laws of physics?

Perhaps I will get some answers in Fast 8 and 7…probably not but one could hope. I am also trying to pinpoint the exact moment these movies went from fun action adventures, to absolutely batshit crazy. We will be doing the next one this weekend so stay tuned I guess…