Review: In 'F9,' director Justin Lin continues the 'Fast and the Furious' franchise's mission of throwing everything at the screen.

It’s appropriate that the latest in the action-movie franchise that started with “The Fast & The Furious” is called “F9” — since that’s the key on the laptop that makes everything show up on your screen at once.

With director Justin Lin — who directed installments three through six — back at the helm, “F9” aims to tie up loose ends from the franchise’s past, while adding a few new ones, and providing a backstory to Dominic Toretto’s family that we didn’t know we wanted. Mostly, though, it follows the pattern of most of the series: A bunch of cars going fast and doing things that defy comprehension, belief and several laws of physics.

The movie doesn’t start where the eighth film, “The Fate of the Furious,” left off — not at first. Instead, Lin and his co-writer, Daniel Casey, kick off in 1989, with Jack Toretto (J.D. Pardo, from “Mayans M.C.”) competing in a stock car race, with his two sons, Dom (Vinnie Bennett) and Jakob (Finn Cole), leading his pit crew. Jack gets killed in a fiery crash on the track, a moment that has serious repercussions for the Toretto family decades later.

Cut to decades later, with Dom (Vin Diesel) living a quiet life off the grid with Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and his son, Little Brian (played by twins Isaac and Immanuel Holdane). That tranquility is broken when members of their old crew — driver Roman (Tyrese Gibson), tech genius Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) and hacker queen Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) — show up with an intercepted emergency signal from their old spymaster friend, Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell).

The details are unimportant, but it gets Dom and Letty back in the game — and soon our crew is in some Central American country (but really they filmed this part in Thailand) tracking down some high-tech doohickey from Mr. Nobody’s crashed plane. A chase scene commences, and a shadowy figure gets away with the doohickey.

That figure, Dom and Letty realize immediately, is Dom’s estranged brother, Jakob, played by John Cena. This revelation opens up more flashbacks, to show how Dom and Jakob grew apart after their father’s death — with Dom going to prison for the first time and later exiling Jakob from the family, both for reasons that won’t be spoiled here.

The next part of the story sends the crew members in different directions. Dom, Tej, Roman and Ramsey go to London to track Jakob, while Letty and Mia (Jordana Brewster), Dom’s sister, go to Tokyo on the scent of their friend Han (Sung Kang), who was killed in both the third and sixth films. The fact that these sequences are happening simultaneously, and both happening at night on opposite sides of the world, is something time-zone nitpickers will just have to accept.

It’s interesting that Lin, who got to kill off Han in both the third movie (“The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift”) and the sixth movie (“Fast & Furious 6”), is now given the chance to undo that cinematic death. If you’ve seen the trailers, you already know that Han is back from the dead — because this is a franchise that keeps a major character alive even after the actor who plays him dies. (Paul Walker may be gone, but Dom’s BFF Brian remains eternal.) 

Oh, Tej and Roman also come across Sean (Lucas Black), Twinkie (Shad Moss, the artist formerly known as Lil Bow Wow) and Earl (Jason Tobin) — three of the lead characters from “Tokyo Drift.” They’re in Germany playing with cars and rocket engines. Can’t imagine that this tidbit will become important later in the movie.

After a few minutes, and a gratuitous Helen Mirren walk-on, we learn that Jakob is enlisting the aid of the last movie’s supervillain, Cipher (Charlize Theron), and being bankrolled by Otto (Danish actor Thue Ersted Rasmussen), the Eurotrash son of some dictator. Among the things Otto’s Amex card is paying for is a very powerful electromagnet — which provides the rationale for some of the more outlandish stunts in the movie’s second half.

Lin sticks to the official reason for this franchise’s existence —the strength of family, whether it’s the still-tight bond between Dom and Jakob or the haphazard family of Dom’s crew, whom we have grown to love throughout the franchise. Between Dom’s dealings with Jakob, both in the present day and flashbacks, Lin leans in heavy to the melodrama. (He also manages to cast the younger Torettos with actors, Bennett and Cole, who look remarkably like computer-generated de-aged versions of Diesel and Cena.)

But Lin also plays true to the real reason this franchise has lasted for 20 years: Making cars go fast and everything around them go boom, whether it all makes sense or not. Lin throws everything up on the screen, gleefully overloading on action, stunts and special effects — in other words, the things that make us want to see movies in big theaters, rather than home on our TV screens.

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‘F9’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, and language. Running time: 145 minutes.