Fast & Furious 9, review: demented nonsense, but Vin Diesel is having a ball

• Dir: Justin Lin. Starring: Vin Diesel, John Cena, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges, Nathalie Emmanuel, Sung Kang, Jordana Brewster, Charlize Theron, Helen Mirren, Kurt Russell. 12A cert, 143 mins

Towards the end of Fast & Furious 9, two of the film’s ragtag heroes drive a rocket-powered sports car off the back of an aeroplane and up into space, with a view to ramming a weaponised satellite out of orbit.

“As long as we obey the laws of physics, we’ll be fine,” says Tej (Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges), the brains of the outfit, though wheelman Roman (Tyrese Gibson) doesn’t look reassured. Why would he be? A veteran of five of these things, he knows all too well that in this particular franchise, the principles of Newtonian mechanics carry as much weight as a formatting tip from the Microsoft paperclip. It looks like you’re jumping a $3 million supercar across the 150-foot gap between the Etihad Towers. Would you like to make sure its rate of change of momentum over time is directly proportional to the sum of the forces acting upon it? You wouldn’t? Shall I check again in a couple of minutes?

Yet even by the Furious-verse’s overblown standards, the action scenes in this ninth instalment (or 10th, if you include the tangential mayhem of 2019’s Hobbs & Shaw) hit new heights of exhaust-pipe-rattling outlandishness. In addition to Tej and Roman’s jaunt to the exosphere – in which ice crystals have been digitally added to their windscreen, presumably for realism’s sake – other notable scenes include a chase through the centre of Edinburgh, in which a lorry full of super-powered electromagnets sends local vehicles scattering like Matchbox toys.

Eagle-eyed viewers may notice the route takes in a number of the Scottish capital’s cinematic landmarks: the Calton Street Bridge from Trainspotting, the Grassmarket from the Bill Douglas trilogy and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the site of the deep-fried kebab shop in Avengers: Infinity War. Unlike the zigzagging traffic, the commitment to silliness in this sequence is completely unswerving. It plays like a Mission: Impossible film written by some eight-year-old boys on a Haribo spree, and by now, fans of the brand couldn’t possibly hope for anything else.

I mean that in both good and bad ways. The Fast & Furious films – which have grossed ￡4.5 billion to date – are one of the great success stories of Hollywood’s cinematic universe era. Everything about them is supremely exportable, from the switch-your-brain-off set-pieces to their organically assembled multi-ethnic cast. For modern audiences, they deliver much the same kind of package-deal escapism as James Bond did in his early heyday: a jumbo dose of action, glamour and globetrotting, with Bond’s celebration of eternal bachelorhood replaced by growly paeans to the importance of finding one’s tribe.

Yet as every new episode has striven to be more outrageous than the last, they’ve simultaneously ended up meaning less and less. The latest features the surprise return of Korean street racer Han (Sung Kang): if you’re not familiar with the backstory, this is surprising because we’ve already watched the character die on screen twice.

Next comes the announcement that Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) – a man whose every second utterance is about the importance of family – has a hitherto-unmentioned younger brother called Jakob (John Cena), who works for the playboy son of a billionaire dictator. Jakob is hunting for the parts of a contraption that will allow his employer to wage cyber-warfare on any country of his choosing, and naturally it falls to the Fast gang to stop him, since they were all recruited by a secret government agency two films ago, for reasons that may or may not have made sense at the time. (In Fast & Furious, “making sense” is relative.)

Rather than glossing over the absurdity, the script attempts to turn it into an ironic virtue. After a shoot-out, Roman marvels that his jacket is full of bullet holes but he’s emerged without a scratch. But the result is still a film you can only really enjoy between inverted commas. As for the cameo appearances by series veterans, most feel arbitrary even by cameo standards. Helen Mirren, returning as the London master criminal Queenie (geddit?) has a fun scene with Diesel in which she quietly plunders a Bond Street jeweller.

But Kurt Russell’s shadowy Mr Nobody is spoken about so extensively and seen on camera so rarely, you’re left with a nagging sense that the actor simply wasn’t available for the shoot – while Charlize Theron, returning as the master hacker Cipher, spends most of the film sitting in an aircraft hangar with a “Gareth from The Office” haircut.

At the heart of it all broods Diesel himself, a big, blunt chunk of weary meathead-in-winter charisma with a voice like a cigar-smoking brachiosaur, and a face that resembles the world’s largest and grumpiest big toe. Like director Justin Lin, who has been with the series on and off since part three, Diesel’s affection for the material is obvious, even after 20 years: not something that can be said for every franchise leading man by a long chalk. When the film gets up to speed it remains dependable fun, but the steering’s spongy, the acceleration sluggish. The journey continues, but the saga is running out of road.

In cinemas from Thursday