Craziness in 'F9' is out of this world

They did it. They really did it.

They actually flew a car in space!

By now, we should expect no less. We've seen the Fast and Furious franchise turn into the James Bond of crazy car heists. They get crazier and more unrealistic with each entry. And for several movies now, the makers of these films haven't even tried to hide it. While watching F9: The Fast Saga, they even crossed that line of self-awareness so much so that they were making fun of themselves. Throughout the movie, Roman (Tyrese Gibson), the scaredy-cat tough guy of the group, had the most meta epiphany of all-time when he started questioning whether it's only because of luck that he's never even gotten so much as a scratch during the insane shenanigans the group has encountered while saving the world over and over, or whether it's because he's invincible. Flying cars out of airplanes, driving tanks across lakes of ice, dragging a giant safe on the road - there's seriously nothing this group can't do.

And I mean that. This time, they seriously flew a car in space! A car that was considered air sealed because its windows were rolled up. A car that turned into a solid block of ice, but somehow the fuel lines were fine. A car that kind of reminded me of Back to the Future's Delorian. Completely absurd!

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

What makes all of this passable is the underlying story and connection to the characters we've seen now for almost two decades. Everything always ties back to Dominic Torreto (Vin Diesel), whether the story revolves around Dom's girlfriend Letty, Dom's sister, or Dom's mother of his child. The writers went through the painful rehabilitation the series' lore after the audience's uneven reception of 2 Fast, 2 Furious and Tokyo Drift. The fourth movie, simply titled Fast and Furious (not to be confused with the original movie's title The Fast and the Furious), served as a nice reboot, and every entry since then has added to what came before it.

Now in some ways, how they continued building on the story is F9's biggest problem, which I'll get to later. But for a few scenes in middle act, when the team finds its way back to London, the movie feels like a reunion as they cross paths with a few characters making extended cameos, but these appearances make total sense given the context established in previous films. For example, Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russel) is retconned into past storylines in clever ways. Another one of the returning characters is the "villain" from a previous movie, and she initially works with the new villain of F9.

So who is the new villain of F9? Why, it's none other than Jakob Torreto (John Cena), Dom's long-lost brother, of course. Cue the record scratch.

I'm not usually a fan of bringing in a phantom sibling who's never been talked about before. Anyone watch all three seasons of Sherlock on Netflix? That's another example of how dumb that Season 3 twist is. It felt like such a gimmick in F9, especially when you consider how important family is to Dom (Look up F9 family memes on the internet. They're absolutely hilarious). Oh sure, the writers tried to contrive some sensical explanation for why Jakob has been gone this whole time. Heck, it even connects to references made in the original movie. Back then, Dom told the story of how he was once imprisoned for beating up a guy with a wrench after his dad passed away. But at no point did we hear a mention of his brother.

Fast forward to F9, and not only do we get to witness that story Dom told back then, but we also see that his brother was involved with the car accident that killed their father. Later on, a young Dom apparently told Jakob to leave and never return (they raced for it, of course). I'm sorry, but I just can't buy into the fact that Dom never tried to keep up with his brother or never heard what he was up to, which is especially ridiculous considering all the random people Dom seemed to know during his worldwide escapades in F9. For crying out loud, even Cardi B. makes a guest cameo as a military girl who helps Dom bust out of military custody (no, I did not make that up). Seriously, where does Dom find the time for that? At the beginning of the movie, Dom, Letty, and Dom's son, whom I would guess is now 7 or 8 years old, are hiding out in the country trying to live the peaceful life, out of the limelight. That doesn't last long as Tej (Ludracris), Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), and Roman roll up to his barn out back and try to convince him to get back into the game, which Dom, of course, does (it was literally the Avengers showing up to Stark's house in Endgame all over again).

And off they went traveling the world from one beautiful locale to another. They hatch a car-chase scheme to catch some bad guys, which involves driving over landmines and near edges of cliffs, but the bad guy literally flies off the cliff and is magnetically caught in the air by an aircraft speeding by at just the right moment. During the chase scene in London, Dom and his crew utilize magnetic tricks of their own by pulling things from the side of the road onto the actual road. And of course, there was the aforementioned space car. All in all was an incredibly thrilling ride (no pun intended).

There was one other big moment I was waiting for the whole movie. About halfway through, the team discovers what the audience learned at the end of Fate of the 8: Han is alive! Sung Kang reprised his role as the guy who was thought to be dead at the end of Tokyo Drift, but a post-credit twist revealed he survived (no one dies in the movies anymore). Ever since then, I've been dying to find out how. It was mostly a letdown of an explanation, but it worked. The problem was we didn't see Jason Statham's character, Deckard Shaw, make a return.

Until the post-credit scene, that is.

The camera pans on Deckard as he's boxing in a low-lit, dank, non-descript secret hideout. Someone knocks at the door, and in walks the last person I'd expect to see: Han! This could mean a number of things, of course, but the initial implication is Han wants to work with Deckard (a known bad buy), even though we just saw him working with Dom and the team for good. What was weird, though, was the look of surprise on Deckard's face; after all, he thinks he just killed Han (Tokyo Drift was the third movie released, but as I mentioned, the writers reworked the story to place it much later in the series chronologically). We've been led to believe that Deckard had something to do with Han's "death" in Tokyo Drift, so it'll be interesting to see if Han wants revenge on him, or if he's simply using him to track down Deckard's brother, who also could've been the culprit behind Han's accident. Lots of possibilities! Director Justin Lin will be back for the final two installments of the Fast saga, which will shoot back-to-back, so I'm expecting every storyline to get a resolution at some point.

Notes:

-When Dom and Letty join the rest of the team to begin the mission, I assumed that Dom's sister Mia was left to babysit his son Brian. But later on, Mia rejoins the team, too, so who was watching his son then?

-Am I the only one who picked up on a Jakob and Esau parallel? Younger brother Jakob tricked older brother Dom in a plot involving their father. In the movie, though, it seems like the father, Jack, either cared more about Dom to protect him by not getting him involved, or felt it would be easier to manipulate the younger son to assist with this whole scheme (neither of which is how Isaac operated in the Bible).

-At one point, two of the "bad guys" were having a serious discussion about which character the other would be in Star Wars, which was amazing until one described the other as Yoda in a NEGATIVE sense. Tej later made a funny Harry Potter joke when they were in London.

-No sign of Hobbs (The Rock) at all. Perhaps The Rock's feud with Diesel ended uglier than initially believed, huh? Hopefully he comes back one more time.