As a Dominic Toretto origin story, F9: The Fast Saga suggests a potentially interesting direction that the Fast and Furious franchise could have gone with this ninth installment. The movie opens in 1989, where we see young Dom (Vinny Bennett, not yet inflated into Vin Diesel) and his brother Jacob (Finn Cole) as members of their father’s pit crew. With its grainy film stock, gritty car racing, and incredibly charismatic performance from Bennett, I wished we could have stayed there. Alas, that’s not what the people pay for. And so F9 only offers this as tortured backstory to the plot proper, which delivers all the ingredients that have paid the bills for 20 years now: Dom mots from Diesel (“No matter how fast you are, no one outruns their past.”); lots of car talk; and faces familiar (including Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty), old (Sung Kang returns as Han), and new (John Cena as the grownup Jacob, now a master mercenary who has been harboring a lifelong grudge against Dom). Making Cena humorless is a big mistake (see Trainwreck for his comic potential), resulting in one of the dullest villains in the franchise. But all that could be forgiven if F9 delivered on the gonzo action set pieces for which these movies have become known. Alas, director Justin Lin (making his fifth Fast film) nicely balances chaos and clarity in one early chase scene through the jungle, but later lets the visual bombast take over. And the much-touted “cars in space” sequence” feels like an obligatory gag – a nod to the jokes people have been making about these movies – rather than a true acceleration into action insanity. At this point, I’d prefer the series pumped the brakes and gave us Bennett as the star of Dom: The Early Years.
