Movie

DIRECTOR Justin Lin STARRING Vin Diesel, Michelle

RATED PG-13

The movies are back, baby! Soda, popcorn, trailers, ringing cellphones . . . oh, crap, did someone just sneeze? Big, dumb explosions! Candy wrappers crinkling! Was that another sneeze? Did they cover their mouth? Okay, just watch the movie. Hopefully they’re vaccinated too, it’s fi ne. It’s fi ne. The movies are back, baby!

After more than a year-long delay, the ninth installment in what has become the quintessential summer blockbuster, F9: The Fast Saga, is fi nally here. From the fi rst fi lm’s humble beginnings as a street-racing rip-off of Point Break, the Fast and Furious franchise has since transformed into a testosterone soap opera synonymous with absolutely bonkers action sequences and Vin Diesel’s everpresent, rumbling utterances of the word “family.”

Justin Lin returns to direct, sticking to the formula he started in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and honed to popcorn perfection by Fast & Furious 6. The fi lm opens with a prolonged fl ashback to retcon, uh . . . establish that Dom Toretto (Diesel) has had a brother this whole time. Cut to present day and the team is pulled out of retirement to investigate a plane crash in Central America, which of course leads to a shootout at ancient ruins, a car chase through a jungle mine fi eld and a couple of gravity mocking stunts involving a rope bridge and, what else, cars.

Before you know it, these L.A. street racersturned-international heroes are racing off to Tokyo, London, Edinburgh and Tbilisi to fi nd the Aries, a doomsday MacGuffi n, uh . . . device, that looks like a 100-sided die with Matrix code in it. The hows and whys of the plot are rushed through like a kid fi nishing their homework to play video games, but the backstory between Dom and his brother Jakob (John Cena) and the ludicrous action set-pieces are the main focus—and the real reason F9: The Fast Saga is the longest fi lm in the franchise at 145 minutes.

On top of that, Lin overstuffs the fi lm with cameos of characters both old and new in what might work as fan-service to die-hards but only distracts the casual watcher. (Wait, is Helen Mirren coming back? Is Shea Whigham wearing a nose? Was that Cardi B?) Likewise, F9 suffers a charisma vacuum with the notable absence of a certain wrestler-turned-superstar (sorry, buff Ernest, uh . . . John Cena). And there might not be a more humorless character in the history of cinema than Dominic Toretto. Thankfully, Tyrese Gibson picks up some of the slack as the audience surrogate, constantly questioning how any of them could’ve survived any of this before being told, like us, to shut up and don’t think about it.

Despite the absurdity of nearly everything about this fi lm and this series, there’s something pure about the Fast franchise. The movies are violent but never mean-spirited, and beneath all the outlandish spectacle, there’s a valuable theme of family, as heavy handed as it can be sometimes, that focuses on the found families we make in life for ourselves. Also, there’s a Pontiac Fiero in space. The movies are back, baby! — JAY SPIGHT