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When Jumping the Shark Jumps the Shark: F9

Our Editor says you can keep his dignity but he wants his money back

Words by Will Halbert

So they go to space in this one. This isn’t so much a spoiler as it is a dramatic inevitability. At this point in the series’ trajectory, driving a car through space is less a product of big-budget ante-upping and more a consequence of complete narrative exhaustion – the inevitable destination of a franchise that quite literally has nowhere else to go.

But that’s entirely on us, isn’t it? For the last two decades, we’ve watched on with a sort of tormented glee as the Fast & Furious franchise freed itself from the pesky shackles of logic and reason and continuity and physics. We’ve rallied, in bouts of fist-pumping fervour, behind baby-oil sleek physiques increasingly at odds with both their own skeletal systems and our wider understanding of human locomotion. And all the while we’ve demanded more. More fast. More furious. Until all we’re left with is a kind of accelerating stupidity. A pedal-to-the-metal preposterousness that sees the traditional cinematic underpinnings of dialogue, plot, and nuance shake and scream like a stock car’s chassis under the destructive aggression of its own unchecked speed.

All of which leaves very little room for things like irony and self-awareness – devices trusted to deliver a bad film from the murky depths of utterly unwatchable to the cult-like heights of endearingly schlocky. No sir. F9’s excess is delivered in complete and total earnestness, leaving any notion of postmodern lampoonery in the dust of its own shambolic inertia.

No matter. I bought the ticket. I took the ride. And as F9 races past $500 million at the worldwide box office, I can rest easy knowing I played my part in saving the future of cinema. But as Dom Toretto hits his memetic apogee and his increasingly bizarre crossovers begin to read like plausible sequel options, know this: we brought this four-wheeled horseshit on ourselves.