Knee-jerk review: "F9"

1. At this point, it's all fairly ridiculous, isn't it?
2. Two of the characters actually go into orbit, people.  It's totally crazy.
3. No matter the role, Michelle Rodriguez is just always so surly looking, like someone just killed her dog.
4. There's this weird structure where the action grinds to a halt for these gag scenes with Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris trading comic insults.  It sometimes seems like they're in a whole other movie.
5. Vin Diesel gets a crazy sequence where he goes into superhero berserker mode and fights off, like, a whole squadron of soldiers with his bare hands.
6. Bonus points: the movie has a lot of fun with some giant electromagnets during a lengthy set-piece car chase.  This is why we see these movies.
7. John Cena is pretty terrible here, making us wonder if he's better served in parts with a lighter, more comic sensibility.  He can be pretty funny.
8. We do appreciate the effort to expand the story tapestry and go back to Dom's youth to explore the death of his father, which adds a nice Shakespearean vibe to the whole thing.  That said, it's completely ballsy to ask audiences to believe that two auto racer brothers became estranged, followed totally different life paths, yet ended up both becoming James Bond-style super spies.  What?!  (And no, it doesn't work to hand-wave all of this insanity away by suggesting Kurt Russell's Mr. Nobody character engineered the whole thing.)
9. If you only watched the more recent Fast movies, packed full of machine guns and electronic gadgets and world travel and melodramatic villains looking to rule the world, you'd assume this was a franchise about secret agents.  Let us remind you: these characters started out as Los Angeles blue collar street racers.  Did we mention these movies are nuts?
10. To us, the best one is 2011's Fast Five which starts with a prison break and ends with two cars dragging giant stolen banks vaults down a city street.  It's the Goldfinger of Fast movies, just the right mix of realism and wacko.
11. Paul Walker's absence throws everything off kilter (although in the world of the story he's still alive, just off-screen).  He and Diesel's bromance was the heart of the franchise.
12. As over the top as all of this is, we cannot deny the movie's soul.  Over and over, throughout the entire franchise, the characters (most of whom are not related) talk about the importance of family, risking their lives for each other, ending their adventures with communal dinners and cold beer toasts.  Lots of Hollywood movies involve some sort of makeshift family, but few wear that notion on their sleeve like these movies do.

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