Fast & Furious 9 Review: 5 Ups & 5 Downs

Downs...

5. The Lazy, Underwhelming Script

Though director Justin Lin usually gets the lion's share of the credit for revitalising the Fast and Furious franchise, F9 makes it clear just how valuable screenwriter Chris Morgan has been to the series.

Morgan, who wrote every single film from Tokyo Drift through to Hobbs & Shaw, didn't pen F9 due to his commitments to the Jason Statham-Dwayne Johnson team-up spin-off.

Instead, it was written by both Lin himself - who has just a few scattered screenwriting credits to his name - and up-and-coming scribe Daniel Casey (Kin).

Try though the pair might to ape Morgan's style, the end result is sorely lacking, and a testament to just how underappreciated Morgan's stupid-smart contributions to the series actually are.

Here the family melodrama has never felt more clunky, leaning back lazily on the most basic and unimaginative solutions to every conflict rather than actually coming up with something inspired.

It isn't an understatement to say that the script feels like a fan-fiction that somehow slid its way across a producer's desk and got rubber-stamped.

If there's an underlying efficiency and strong understanding of character and plot structure in the previous scripts, in F9 that's largely thrown out the window.