Getting old ‘Fast’

Put speedy cars, muscled men, and vehicular destruction on repeat and you get ‘F9’

Universal Studios has gone and created a nearly perfect, self-perpetuating summer-movie popcorn dispenser: Every “Fast” film at this point more or less precisely apes the previous one, with cars, chases, brawling brutes, a well-overplayed homage to family, and a comic disregard for the laws of physics.

By now, after two decades, the producers have arranged enough side characters, villains, and back-from-the-dead heroes, all they need do for each new installment is slightly rearrange the cast (somewhat depending on who can work with series’ star Vin Diesel and who can’t), determine which car brands will pony up the most for their product placement, and come up with a fistful of CGI stunts involving vehicles doing ludicrous things over bridges, tunnels, crevasses and, often, cityscapes. Each film ends with enough of a teaser for the next installment that you can be assured in three years’ hence, we shall be treated to yet another entry.

The original 2001 film, concerned with street racing and heavy with the intricate details of car-guy obsessions (sample dialogue: “Thank you for providing us with the direct-port nitrous injection, four-core intercoolers, an’ ball-bearing turbos, and titanium valve springs”) was about cars first and foremost. At this point, the vehicles are pretty much empty props — stand-ins to get hooked, swung, blasted, and thrown across landscapes like so much flotsam. If the first “Fast” film was “Rocky” (a huge stretch, but bear with me), the rest of the films have been more or less “Rocky IV” in their growing cartoonish ridiculousness. Instead of focusing on cars, the series has become more and more like “Cars,” minus the southern accents.

The plot of every one of these movies has also become mind-numbingly

pointless: Give us vehicles, and a crazy mission that involves driving them, and then talk about family, and then more vehicles getting destroyed, and a final, even crazier mission that ends with still more vehicles being trashed, and close with everyone talking about family again. This latest installment is absolutely no different, other than it introduces yet another giant, muscle-bound villain — this one played by John Cena, as Jakob, the wayward brother to both Dom (Diesel) and their sister, Mia (Jordana Brewster) — and one who has a bitter past with Dom, who’s been busy living with Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), and his young son somewhere out in the country.

So, yes, soon enough, the gang for this particular installment, including regulars Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Chris Bridges), Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), and a few old friends (no spoilers), are all banded up together in pursuit of something or other that will control the world via something involving satellites and something or other else, cooked up by Jakob and his financial backer, Otto (Thue Ersted Rasmussen), a snobby Eurotrash villain in a shiny suit, who has kidnapped old foe Cipher (Charlize Theron) to help vanquish Dom and his crew.

Let’s not dwell upon it. What matters — pretty much the only thing that matters, in these films, anymore — are the stunt conceptions (alas, very little of which appear to be practical, and therefore even more cartoonish), and, here as usual, the writing team, including multiple-“Fast” helmsman Justin Lin and Daniel Casey, have come up with a few more wrinkles, adding to the growing junkyard pile of automobile pieces and carcasses from previous installments. You will watch one car go over a wooden footbridge, and another more or less grab a rope and swing across a giant gorge; you will witness cars fitted with enormously powerful electro-magnets somehow manage to unseat a huge caravan of thug-laden tanks and jeeps; and, if you stick around long enough, you’ll see a Pontiac Fiero, retrofitted with rocket boosters, make the jump past our atmosphere and up into space.

In those moments, at least, you get a sense of the winkwink nature of the enterprise — along with a somewhat weird meta-soliloquy from Roman about how the gang keeps going on these insane adventures and somehow keeps surviving them over and over again (and, for many who don’t survive in the moment, are quickly enough resurrected again before too long) — a sense that the producers are in on the joke that these films simply can’t be taken too seriously (although, it would seem as if they should maybe let the ever-dour Diesel in on the joke). Fair enough. The films don’t ask for scrutiny, and God knows they wouldn’t bear up to it, so we can all agree that they’re little more than silly bemusement.

I appreciate that these films have been churning out so continuously that the producers are now calling it a “saga”, but to my mind that’s a serious misnomer: We’ve long gone past the point where there’s any beginning, middle, or end to this story. It’s always just cars, muscles, and vehicular mayhem, on endless repeat.