There are three different people credited with the story of this movie, which is sort of amazing, because it seems like one single not-that-bright fifth grader could have done a better job. But presumably what really happened is not that those three guys teamed up to write a great story, but that they each wrote a different story, and then they got mashed up together and they tried to paper over the seams.

So yeah, even by the standards of a franchise that’s not known for great plots, this one was pretty dire. The macguffin is so generic it might as well have been called a macguffin, and people just go from place to place because they wanted to have a scene in that place, encountering bad guys at each location because otherwise they wouldn’t have anything to do there. There’s no real narrative logic at all.

Which isn’t even the worst sin of the screenplay — that would be the retconned existence of a brother for Vin Diesel and his sister. You know, Vin Diesel’s character who spends all his time talking about family? Who has a sister who he loves dearly and is a whole big deal in the franchise (and appears here even though she’s married to Paul Walker’s character, making it awkward that he doesn’t appear for obvious reasons related to him being dead in real life)? Yeah, they had a brother this whole time, and they just happened to never ever mention it even once in passing in the previous eight movies, go figure. Oh, and also, that character who you thought died in a previous installment? He’s totally alive, with “somehow, Palpatine survived” levels of explanation as to how.

Other than being structured around a pile of nonsense, with its emotional core being characters whose existence seems absurd on its face, and being disjointed in a way that prevents even a semblance of coherency, though, the writing also has the problem that it keeps foreshadowing a thing that a) doesn’t happen, and b) doesn’t happen in ways that just lampshade the writers giving the characters plot armor.

Though tbf, that plot armor comes in handy during the many action scenes, which are the saving grace of the movie. Well, some of which are, anyway.

The thing is, the “normal” action scenes, where people are having car chases or low-key fights, don’t work at all — there are too many coincidental things happening (e.g., jumping blindly out of windows and cars just happen to be right below), there are magical magnets that seem to work as the plot demands in defiance of physical reality, and there’s just overall a lack of physical reality to things that should feel physical. Like, two normal human T-shirt-wearing guys fist-fighting should not knock down a concrete pillar with their bodies in a way that doesn’t hurt them.

But then there are the other action scenes, the ones that are wildly over-the-top, and now we’re talking. When you’re going to have a gigantic armored vehicle flip over and toboggan down a hill to take out a building, and then leap into the air and take out an airplane, while Vin Diesel is completely unhurt through the whole thing, that’s where this movie shines. When you’re going to strap rockets onto a car and shoot it into outer space, again, we’re in a great place.

So yeah, my takeaway here is that either they need to get better at making movies, or they need to focus more on the most implausible, absurd, ridiculous action scenes, because when you’re that bad at making anything feel real or earned, you need to go all-in on it.