Having become so over-the-top, ridiculous, and beyond the point of parody that it effectively evolved into a superhero franchise, Fast & Furious was always going to succumb to the law of diminishing returns for a second time. Unfortunately, that happened with last year’s ninth installment, which marked the weakest critical and commercial returns for a decade.
Of course, being delayed by two years and then released in the midst of a pandemic contributed to the return of Dominic Toretto and the family’s $726 million box office haul marking the lowest since Fast Five 10 years previously, and that’s still a figure most big budget action epics would kill to achieve.
However, a 59 percent Rotten Tomatoes score saw The Fast Saga land the worst reviews since Fast & Furious back in 2009, a slide everyone is hoping will be arrested by this year’s landmark tenth chapter. Ironically, considering there was nowhere else to go but down, returning director Justin Lin instead opted to look up and finally send the gang into outer space, giving fans something they’d been demanding to see for years.
It’s loud, dumb, and stupid fun at its best or worst depending on how you feel about Fast & Furious as a whole, but having been added to the Netflix library in many markets on New Year’s Day, F9 has almost instantly had a rocket strapped to its back to shoot up the rankings at warp speed.
Per FlixPatrol, the insanely excessive ode to laughing in the face of physics, gravity, and logic has become one of Netflix’s top-viewed features already, because subscribers know full well that you can never turn your back on family.
