"Fast and Furious 9" has received polarizing reviews. How do you evaluate this series of movies?

In F9's first truly spectacular action scene, our heroes realize they need to drive through a literal minefield at 80 mph or more? Any speed slower, When a mine explodes, they are caught in the explosion. So the zipper zipped over them, at an alarming rate, leaving wonderful destruction in its wake. In a nutshell, this is the movie's method of storytelling: If you can move fast enough, and with some luck, you'll outrun the chaos before it catches up to you.

For another movie, this might be a flaw. For the F9, this is a selling point. As the series has become increasingly baroque over the years, with enough fake death to rival any daytime soap and action, and make your typical Marvel climaxes seem grounded, some of its more recent entries seem to be in a smog run. But F9, directed by Justin Lin, reaches levels of breakout transcendent absurdity, first going from cheesy breakout knockout to a nine-figure action extravaganza. When one character again reassures another that as long as we obey the laws of physics, we'll be fine?, while violating every law of physics, there's nothing to do but stand by and watch. F9? is here to overwhelm you with light and sound until your head is knocked off by nothing but the clang of metal against cars. Even by the standards of a fast-and-furious movie, F9 crams a dizzying amount of stuff into its 149-minute running time and rips it apart at such a breakneck pace that dizziness becomes part of the joy. While the overarching plot is easy to follow (it's yet another globe-trotting MacGuffin chase that threatens to destroy the world), the details pile up like a wrecked car on the side of the road. You can make yourself try to keep up, or you can simply let yourself believe that the script (Lin and Daniel Kesey) will eventually let you, like Dom (Vin Diesel) swerving into his car at the last second. , grabbing his friend's hood before it splattered all over the highway. Of course, this is something that happens multiple times in this movie.

Either way, they're just the film's return to the franchise's basic themes of increasingly frantic action and increasingly early declarations about the importance of family. On the former, it offers some. The car flies through canyons, rises into the sky, and hurtles through entire city blocks with the power of magnets. (The Meinitz are a big thing in this movie, and they're probably the best thing to happen to the series since Cars.) A lot of it isn't very believable; if common sense doesn't tell you that none of it can be true, then Flying vehicles in pixel weightlessness should really give it away to you.

But it often looks super cool, thanks to Lin's eye for propulsive action, and that's all that matters, and the movie knows it, which is all the more important. F9 keeps going, glossing over its silliest tendencies with a joke about Roman (Tyrese Gibson), as the team looks back at their previous adventures and becomes increasingly convinced that, over the years, there's more to it than luck. Something powerful kept him safe. Is this self-awareness teetering on the edge of utter chaos? Because, you know, he's right? That's probably the only way to deal with the fact that none of this makes sense.