F9: The Fast Saga - Review!

th9 is about to hit theaters and if you don't like me calling f9 well then you should have thought of that fast and the furious before you passed up on the chance to call the last movie the fate of the furious big mistake huge hello everybody and welcome to my review of f9 i will call it that for the rest of this review however i refuse to call it f9 the fast saga that is a no-go for me director justin lin returns for his first fast and furious film since directing the trilogy four five and six that brought this franchise out of its funk he also directed fast and furious tokyo drift which some people consider the best movie in the franchise so he's been at the helm for a lot of the better films in this series dominic tiretto and the fast family are back and this family keeps getting bigger and more complicated because this time they are fighting dom's long estranged brother jacob who's played by john cena this is a fast and furious movie so you know exactly what to expect you have the fast family all of the regulars you expect to be in this movie ludacris tyrese michelle rodriguez and then the great thing about this franchise also is that you have so many other faces from other movies that have already been announced there are some that you may not know are in this movie there are some that you know because they've been in the trailers people like charlize theron helen mirren they have a great stable of actors and i have to admit it is fun to see these folks pop up in these movies because they are having a good time that is obviously what most of the actors involved with this franchise are doing when you look at this franchise film by film i think that every fast and the furious sequel seems to exist solely to make the previous film seem less ridiculous and more plausible because they keep one upping the ridiculous factor of these films and that is not necessarily a bad thing or it's not a bad thing in and of itself i've been very open about the fact that by and large the films in this franchise are not for me and that's not new it's not something that i'm saying like oh i love the old fast and the furious ones better i never really cared for the franchise from the very beginning there's a few that i liked i liked fast five i liked furious seven and i've liked parts of just about every fast and the furious films i don't think that they're all terrible films but i think more than ever this is a big problem with the last movie there's this is a big problem with this one as well is that there seem to be two opposing forces that are pulling at these movies as each sequel gets more and more untethered from reality and this is the most untethered from reality fast and furious film of them all producer star vin diesel seems to be more and more determined to ground the movies in toretto family drama these movies yearn to be free these movies yearn to be completely insane and there is stuff in this movie that is objectively insane bananas there's no way in any reality that any of this could happen but that's the beauty of it and i think that that's what these movies are yearning to be let these movies be crazy let these movies be like one step short of mad max fury road strap rockets to cars bring a bunch of characters back from the dead suck up a whole city block with magnets i don't really care but every time f9 threatens to truly take flight to to transcend the barriers of possibility cinematically in scales vin diesel all mopes and growls and he grabs the film with both hands and just pulls it back down out of the atmosphere because he so much wants this series to not be about the crazy things that that's going on with everybody else he wants it to be about the drama the toretto family drama and let's be honest how many people are going to fast and furious movies for the plot this is a franchise that got genuine emotion that got genuine pathos in the seventh film because there was a real-life tragedy that happened with paul walker and i think that that movie handled that beautifully i really really do i love how they handled that character i love how they handled the transition i think they did the best they could do given the impossible situation that they were in but it seems to me like vin diesel wants to ring that same kind of pathos now out of the character of dom and he keeps layering tragedy and difficulty and complication to his own character's backstory because he has the cloud of the as a producer to help direct where this franchise is going to go and i think it's hurting the films because there were so many times that i was ready to just let go with this movie just like be like you know what let's do this let's just let's go nuts but every time we got to that point it was in 20 minutes of high drama not the fun kind of mellow drama not the kind of drama that's just like oh well this is the kind of drama that takes place in these movies but you're not supposed to take that seriously then diesel takes these movies deadly seriously and these are movies that cannot survive if they're being taken as seriously as vin diesel takes them it's just such a bummer when you're having a blast and things are flying around and then for 15 minutes you have to sit with vin diesel with his one angry face talking about his brother it's just it not only makes the movies over long and overly complicated it also makes them way too messy and you know people look at movies different ways and food analogies didn't generally tend to work some people look at a movie like f9 and they look at it like a big greasy cheeseburger there's some good stuff on there there's some bad stuff on there but you know what they're just gonna wolf it down they're gonna eat the whole burger they're gonna take the good with the bat and they're gonna enjoy just the overall burger experience and i'm not saying that's wrong that's a perfectly valid way to take this movie i did not have the burger experience with this movie and i don't really have a burger experience with a whole lot of movies when i look at movies if we're going to keep with the food analogy i'm going to kind of side with the great carl weathers and something that he was known for doing on arrested development i'm going to talk about a stew i want to get a good stew going with the movie and when you're making a stew you have ingredients every movie has ingredients but you need to prep the ingredients you need to cut the meat you need to peel the potatoes you need to chop the garlic you you can't just throw a bunch of ingredients into a pot that's not a stew you actually have to finally mix them and integrate them all together that's not what's happening here with f9 you have all the crazy action stuff that's crazier than ever you have all of the comedic stuff and and all the stuff with the the side characters from the previous movies new characters old characters and then you've got the the the down and dirty ven diesel dominic toretto drama but there's no preparation done to any of these ingredients so when i take the pot off of f9 and i look down into that pot i don't see a stew i see food water that's what i see when i look at f9 i see a bunch of unprepared ingredients just kind of mushed together and floating in a boiling pot of water and it's not a very appetizing stew not to me the person next to me if they want to eat the burger that's great eat the burger i'm looking at a pretty bad stew you probably already know if you're gonna like this movie or not because it is no more or less especially than the last three fast and furious films have been they just keep escalating if you thought that they were untethered from reality before they are twice as untethered from reality this time but there's a certain delight in it there's a certain kind of childhood flashback thing of just like i'm gonna do whatever i want i'm gonna let my imagination go wild and that was actually the stuff that i minded the least because that is escapist entertainment and there's a great place especially right now for escapist entertainment but you can't escape from the other stuff in this movie and i did not buy into anything having to do with vin diesel or toretto or the toretto brothers or the family drama or any of that because it just doesn't seem to fit these are starting to seem like great action movies with a side of a vin diesel vanity project and i know that vin diesel thinks that he is the fast and furious franchise's great hero but right now i think he might be their greatest enemy because they can't seem to get him out of the way i think these movies could be the most ridiculous action franchise of all time and in many ways they are and it seems like they may be doing one more big perhaps culmination to everything else and i would just say if vin diesel wants to do the grounded dominic toretto story let him go do it let him do a hobbs and shaw let him go make his own side project if he still wants to be involved in the fast and furious films then he can be but leave that stuff over here and let these movies be as insane as they want to be because that's really what stood in my way i was on board with all the crazy stuff even though i rolled my eyes it was a lot of times that i was rolling my eyes and smiling at the same time and if that had been the whole movie then i probably would have said like you know what this movie is stupid it is so dumb but you're probably gonna enjoy it and i enjoyed it to an extent however it's such a muddled mess with all of the other stuff that's in there that it really tamped down what enjoyment i did have for this film so if you love the toretto family drama if you are invested in the storyline in the plot there is a lot of that in this movie then you'll probably like that part if you like the action the action is insane less believable than ever more insane than ever you're either going to go with it or you're not going to go with it i think you're going to get a big spectrum of reactions to this moment i think you're going to have a lot of people that are saying this was the best fast and furious ever it's probably the people that like both the toretto family drama and the action you're probably gonna have some people saying this was the worst fast and the furious film ever because it does go so far off the deep end on both of those same things the action and the drama and then there's gonna be a lot of people in the middle that's no different than any other movie but it really is going to separate out who the fast and furious fans are and what they value so those are my thoughts on f9 it hits theaters here in the united states on friday it's open in some markets worldwide it's opening in others this weekend and then it'll roll out around the world later this summer let me know what you think down in the comments below once you've seen it was this the best fast movie to take everything up to the heights that you wanted it to be did you feel like me that it was a little tamped down by the drama i'd love to hear what you think also don't forget if you want to see more of what i'm up to you can check me out on patreon at patreon.com dan merle lots of great stuff still to come this month we have movie commentaries we have our movie club our monthly patron ama a lot of great stuff on the horizon we'd love to have you come join me there and mostly thank you for joining me here i'll be back very soon on friday i will have my live show tomorrow my podcast all my movies will be up uh we will be covering the rock one of my favorite action movies from just a few years ago about 25 years ago it predates even the fast and furious franchise they did make action movies before fast and furious believe it or not so we'd love to have you join me for that thank you so much for watching stay safe and i'll see you next time [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Dan Murrell

Views: 90,748

Keywords: dan murrell, dan murrell movies, f9 review, fast furious 9 review, f9 fast saga review, dan murrell f9 review, f9, f9 fast saga, fast furious 9, dan murrell fast furious 9, dan murrell f9, dan murrell screen junkies, dan murell, dan murrel

Id: icOZEMjLAJ8

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021