Film Review - Fast and Furious 9 (2021)

 Fast and Furious 9 is the ninth instalment in this franchise and once more Vin Diesel returns as Dom Toretto, car mechanic turned street racer now family man and quasi super spy and he and his makeshift spy family are out to stop what is known as Project Aries a powerful weapon that will control every satellite on Earth but Dom will also have to fight his long lost brother (John Cena) to get it back.

 

Fast and Furious 9 was not a movie I had high hopes for before seeing it mainly because the trailer I saw for it had cars heading for outer space and I began to fear that this franchise was starting to get too silly for its own good and Hobbs and Shaw in 2019 had been an over the top film plus the Fate of the Furious in 2017 was not a great entry in this series.

 

Happily this series does not jump the shark with this movie but nor does it reach the heights of Fast 5, 6 and 7 all of which I liked quite a bit, firstly the film has a number of fun action chase scenes that director Justin Lin who returns for this movie does a good job with, I particularly liked the opening chase scene in the Jungle and a late night one in London outrunning the police.

 

And also the cast now have a nice rhythm and flow to their moments together and there are a number of quiet moments with them together as a main group and with some of the splinter groups within that broader ensemble cast.

 

But there are times where regrettably this movie does get very silly especially in the third act and during those moments I just sat there going “What the fuck” and groaning not that much longer afterwards as I just didn’t get that on board with those moments now don’t get me wrong, this movie does not get that silly but it comes up to that wall very closely and hopefully Lin will not crash this franchise into that wall with the next film.

 

Another big issue with this film is John Cena, now I have liked him in other movies Bumblebee being one of them but here I thought he was terrible as in every scene he has with Vin Diesel he mugs and talks in a deep voice as if he’s either trying to compete with Vin or copy him and neither really worked for me and every time he came on screen I just lost interest especially with Charlize Theron coming back and is a much better villain than Cena is.

 

And so that was Fast and Furious 9 and it’s a mixed bag overall, I didn’t hate it but there are those moments where I groaned and it’s a fun ride for sure its better than the Fate of the Furious for sure but this series needs to pull back from the silliness like the Bond films did from time to time before they become a joke, 2 and a half out of 5.

Film Review - Cruella (2021)

 Cruella stars Emma Stone as Cruella Deville who this time is set in 1970’s Punk era London and heads to work for a ruthless fashion designer (Emma Thompson) while also living with her 2 housemates (Paul Walter Hauser and Joel Fry) and Cruella is determined to upstage her boss for you see the only thing she’s looking for is an outfit that looks good.

 

Cruella surprisingly was good fun and firstly this is down to the overall look of the film, there is a very nice recreation of 1960s and 70s Punk era London which looks great from the townhouses to the fashion studio to the cars and costumes it all looks great on a nice cinema screen.

 

Also the cast are very good here, Emma Stone sounds like she’s imitating Eva Green (who would’ve been fantastic in this role by the way) but she is very good here, I also really enjoyed seeing Paul Walter Hauser again after his criminally overlooked performance in Richard Jewell early last year and Jodi Fry and Mark Strong are good here as well.

 

But the film has a couple of big problems:

 

- Firstly the film is far too long, it runs for 2 hours 15 minutes but it felt more like 2 and a half hours and as a result the film tends to drag a lot for most of the films runtime and it takes a fair while to find it’s groove but thankfully once it does it held my interest.

 

- Secondly there are way too many needle drop soundtrack songs on the sound mix, I get that the film is set in 1970’s London but there are only so many times where having a song from that era on the sound mix but here it is done way too often and too many times for it to really have a proper impact on the viewer.

 

- And lastly Emma Thompson is not that good here in this movie and I felt she was a little miscast, the entire time I kept thinking “I wish Olivia Coleman had played this role instead” as I felt she would’ve brought that same black comedy energy that she brought to her Oscar winning role in the Favourite in 2019 and Thompson plays the part way too seriously like she’s copying Meryl Streep in the Devil Wears Prada and it didn’t sit well with me not to mention the way her character plays out in the story just made a miscast feel that much more worse for me.

 

And so that was Cruella and despite some missteps this is still a fun ride worth taking, 3 out of 5.

Film Review - Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021)

 Those Who Wish Me Dead stars Angelina Jolie as a fire jumper, someone who jumps via parachute into deadly bushfires but she is haunted by one that didn’t go the way she thought it would and is now in a firetower looking for fires in the nearby forest, meanwhile 2 deadly assassins (Aiden Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) are after a young boy who runs into the forest after his father exposes some shady dealings so now the chase is on.

 

And this is quite possibly the worst movie I’ve seen so far this year, this is not a good movie at all I felt and there are a couple of reasons:

 

- Firstly the thrills aren’t really there, I didn’t really care about Angelina and the little boy because it feels like their storylines for the most part don’t really mesh together very well, they feel like 2 separate strands of stories that have been mashed together in multiple script drafts and it feels like a very painful transition.

 

- Secondly I didn’t really care about the assassins as villains, Gillen aka Littlefinger from Game of Thrones and Hoult are good actors but here they seem to just randomly open fire on anyone and everyone that even dares to say hello to them as a friendly driver driving along the forest and at one point they blow up a house in the middle of a Florida street and I’m pretty sure someone would have noticed a house blow up real good as it was in broad daylight, 10,000 Thundering Typhoons they are silly for no real reason.

 

- And lastly to come back to an earlier point, the firefighting and the assassin storylines could’ve been interesting on their own as separate films in their own right but here they don’t click together and try as the screenwriters might they couldn’t do it and as a result of this there is a waste of a great cast not just Littlefinger and Hoult but also Jolie and Jon Bernthal who I always enjoy seeing pop up in movies but here is given little to do and as for Jolie it’s great to see her again playing a tomboy heroine with a boozy edge and she’s got the presence still but the script lets her down and it’s a real shame, hopefully the Eternals will be a better film for her later this year.

 

And so that was Those Who Wish Me Dead and Those Should Seek Out Backdraft instead as that film was about fire and firefighters while also having a mystery in it as well and its much better than this pile of poo, 1 out of 5.