Fast & Furious

Justin Lin’s entry is where the series changes direction. Its real job is not storytelling but getting the four original leads back in one frame, and with Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster back, the narrative behaves as though it is building those relationships from scratch. Missing the third film costs nothing, since the timeline was patched by a short called Los Bandoleros and the Tokyo chapter pushed later. The visual logic is declared openly: the team behind the opening tanker heist said they drew on tornado pictures, a James Bond adventure and crash footage found online, so the sequence reads as a collision simulation rather than a stunt. For the tunnel border crossing no real location existed, so the cars were shot live and the tunnel built digitally, because the cars were the stars. That is why the ground under these hundred and seven minutes sometimes reads like a game engine. The domestic opening weekend cleared seventy million dollars, more than the third film took in its whole domestic run, and the worldwide total reached three hundred and sixty million. Worth it if you can ignore the split between real cars and a synthetic world. Skip it if four actors returning makes you expect character development rather than the reunion standing in for plot.