Fast & Furious 9: 20 WTF Moments

After being delayed for more than a year, Fast and Furious 9 is finally here - or F9, as the cool kids are calling it - and what a wild ride it is, both for better and for worse.

Though scoring the series' most lukewarm reviews in years, most will agree that F9 doesn't leave audiences wanting for insanity, both in terms of its hilariously cartoonish action sequences and mind-numbingly silly storytelling.

It is a film defined by excess in every fiber of its being, where the word "restraint" has no place and no ridiculous idea is a bad one. As such, fans won't find themselves running short of WTF moments throughout F9's beefy two-and-a-half-hour runtime.

Imagine showing this film to someone 20 years ago and telling them this is the direction the series would go - dense, melodramatic character mythologies, death-defying stunts that literally nobody could survive in real life, and most absurdly of all, an actual trip to outer space.

F9 may end up marking the law of diminishing returns for the series' superheroic thrills, but if that's true, this is a suitably unhinged way to do it...

One of F9's biggest surprises is its abundance of flashbacks to Dom (Vin Diesel) and Jakob Toretto's (John Cena) younger days, where they're played by Vinnie Bennett and Finn Cole respectively.

The film opens in 1989 with the death of their father Jack, after rival racer Kenny Linder clips Jack's bumper, causing his car to crash and explode.

A later flashback shows Dom going to jail for nearly beating Linder to death, and while doing time he also meets Leo and Santos.

When he gets out, Dom challenges Jakob to a race, on the condition that Jakob - who Dom believes killed their dad by tampering with his car - leave if he loses, which he does.

Ultimately these flashbacks are only intermittently successful in fleshing out the Toretto mythology, and more to the point they consume a huge combined chunk of a movie that, at 145 minutes, is clearly far too long.