It might not have been until F9: The Fast Saga that the Toretto crew finally launched into outer space but the long-running Fast & Furious franchise left Earth’s rotations a long time ago. When Fast Five reconfigured what was possible for the crew of once-car-jackers and small-time criminals by making them larger-than-life master-criminals to whom the laws of physics bent the knee in surrender, all bets were finally off. Helmer Justin Lin had reached a pinnacle of the utterly ridiculous, high-octane bombast that fueled the car-based action films and laid the template for all that would follow. Fast would never be the same.

The hugely popular box office cash cow was born anew, this time with both commercial and critical appeal. As time went on though, any semblance of being grounded to reality stretched into infinite incredulity. The Fast and the Furious had always been silly but with each passing chapter, the bar for preposterous stunts and absurd plotting reached ever higher. In Furious 6, the Toretto crew’s skills and infamy had grown so precipitous that they were recruited by the US government to do their dirty work. On an infinitely lengthy runway, they chased down and grounded a moving Antonov An-124. By Furious 7, the Rock flexed out of an arm cast. In Fate of the Furious, one might recall some absurdity about cars driving on Arctic ice plates in pursuit of a submarine but the details grew fuzzier and fuzzier.

The plot increasingly didn’t matter. Fast become strictly about whizzbang, NOS-fueled spectacle and some mumbled sentiment about family. With the passing of Paul Walker, the heart of the franchise grew harder. With the exit of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson from the past two main-chapter entires, it grew flabbier. Returning to the director’s chair for the first time since Furious 6, Justin Lin tries to cover all that up with dizzyingly ridiculous set pieces and hilarious stunts but no amount of band-aids can tape up such a gaping wound.

The cars now swing like Tarzan. Their hoods are but the gentlest pillows to catch our heroes whenever they might be falling from some building, cliff, or moving, rolling, and/or exploding vehicle. Brian O’Connor once famously offered, “Cars don’t fly Dom.” If only he could see his babies now.

While Fate of the Furious showed signs of the series’ stupidity overweighing its undeniable fun, the one-two punch of Hobbs & Shaw and F9 reveals a franchise running on fumes. Unlike Dom’s beloved Charger, whatever’s under the hood has started to rust and sour. Its charm wearing away from too many turns around the same track. Working from a script from Lin and first-time FF collaborator Daniel Casey, F9 operates like a junkyard of scrapped ideas loosely patched together to resemble a plot.

There’s more faces and relationships to track than ever before with Dom (Vin Diesel), Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges), Mia (Jordana Brewster), Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), and the once-dead-now-not-dead Han (Sung Kang) all returning as principal characters, charged with spitting out exposition-heavy dialogue and lazy quips sure to illicit more groans than the actual laughs Lin and Casey aim for. Seasoned performers Helen Mirren, Kurt Russell, and Charlize Theron return to the fray in diminished capacity, each too good for the material they’re working with while Michael Rooker and John Cena enter the equation, the latter as Dom’s much-too-serious kid brother Jakob who, since an incident that left their father dead when they were teens, has turned to a life of crime. But like the bad kind of crime, not to be confused with the good crime that the other Toretto crew does.

The performances are somehow even hammier and eye-rolling than they’ve been. For whatever he brings to the table (muscles, it’s muscles), Cena is not a livening addition and the WWE performer’s lacking presence only makes the Rock-size hole loom larger. For his part, Diesel’s line delivery has become 100% crooked muttering, leaving you questioning the performer’s proximity to having a stroke at times. Easily the best and most ridiculous sequence in a movie that champions jumping the shark as many times as possible finds Dom finally going Full Hulk Mode, fighting off a few dozen mercenaries with the fury of that gamma-radiated brute. The pure uncut stupidity of it all left me cackling, head in hand, both exhausted and entranced by the sheer level of inanity taking place on screen scene after scene after scene. As the series turns to straight meta commentary, Roman openly questions the crews similarity to superheroes. Are we invincible? He wonders between snacks. The fact that Han mysteriously has returned to life with the wave of a hand points to yet.

By the time, Tej and Roman pilot a rocket-powered Pontiac into outer space, it’s somehow not even the most absurd thing we’ve seen over the past two-and-a-half-hours. At some point, being so far above the ground becomes a toxifying demerit. When there are no stakes, when the spectacle is not tethered to anything remotely human, we naturally disassociate. Diesel can slur all the platitudes about family he wants but empty professions do not meaningful characters make. It was always just a matter of time until the Torretos reached space. Maybe it’s time we leave them out there.

CONCLUSION: Justin Lin returns to the Fast & Furious franchise to re-test the barriers of what cars and Torettos are capable of in the most bonkers entry to the car-action series yet. The performances are universally poor, the set pieces too often unintentionally-hilarious, and the sense of unabashed fun the franchise requires is notably lacking. It might not be the worst these movies have ever been but ‘F9’ seems to be testing the wrong boundaries.