Every Fast & Furious Movie Ranked Worst To Best

Listen: Fast & Furious 9 knows exactly what it is, and doesn't once claim to be anything other than a leave-your-brain-at-the-door action extravaganza.

That aside, though, there are some issues worth pointing out, the biggest of which is easily the completely erasure of threatening stakes or any kind of digestible emotional core.

As the series has powered on, the stunts have increased tenfold and much of the emotional investment has been left behind as a sacrifice, and F9 - with its space-travelling, magnet-battling insanity - is the latest pinnacle of that trend.

The characters here, particularly Dom, are seemingly invincible, John Cena's villain is both maddeningly predictable and created only to elicit some cheap emotion from cinema-goers, and interesting side characters like Cipher (Charlize Theron) and Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) are oddly side-lined as walking pieces of needless exposition.

Admittedly, the stunts are gloriously entertaining and as a popcorn flick it's great if over-long fun, but the stakes have never been lower and the story has rarely been so frustratingly predictable as they are here.

And the less said about the return of Han (Sung Kang), the better...