'Fast & Furious 9' Is, at Long Last, Driving Cars Into Space

You must by now be familiar with the fourth law of thermodynamics: every Fast & Furious film will be exponentially more berserk than the last. It started out as Vin Diesel's Dom smuggling DVD players around. Now, in the ninth film in the series – F9 – it looks very much as if two men are going to fly a car into space.

Yes, there's a lot of other stuff going on here – a Dark Knight-style truck flipping end-over-end, a plane that can catch a car with a big magnet, another big magnet that makes police vans crash, Charlize Theron, Helen Mirren – but it feels like the last two decades of Fast films have been building to that moment when Roman and/or Tej hit the big red button marked BLAST OFF and go to the moon. It's the logical endpoint, the most infinitely dense point of Fast & Furious-ness. From the beginning, it was all really about this.

The subtle narrative turns of the Fast & Furious saga make War and Peace read like Rosie and Jim, so don't feel bad if you can't remember who's dead and who isn't anymore. This time around it's all about John Cena's Jacob, Vin Diesel's hitherto unmentioned long-lost brother.

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This franchise has always been about family – or at the very least about Vin Diesel saying the word 'family' again and again until he kicks back with a beer at the end – and it sounds like, finally, his family is going to betray him. "You always say never turn your back on family," says Jacob, "but you turned your back on me."

There's also the reappearance of Han Seoul-Oh – yes indeed – who died at the end of Tokyo Drift but came back in Fast 7. Pretty much everyone's back apart from Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham, who'll presumably turn up in the next one as it'll be the grand finale. Really, there's nowhere else to go from here except to challenge God himself to a drag race. And do you know what? I cannot wait to hit the big red button marked BLAST OFF.