The Fate of the Furious

F. Gary Gray’s eighth entry in the series withholds the reason for Dom’s betrayal until past the midpoint. For the first half of its 136 minutes crew and audience alike react to an event neither can assess, so the tension comes from missing information rather than from anything at stake. Deckard Shaw, established earlier in the series as Han’s killer, is converted into a comic hero across a prison riot and an aeroplane sequence, and the film never addresses the switch. Anyone arriving from the seventh film will feel the jump. Cipher, played by Charlize Theron, works almost entirely from screens inside a plane. For once the antagonist is not someone Dom can race or fight; the climax is a hacking problem solved with cars. Theron and Kristofer Hivju joined as villains in April 2016; shooting began that March in Iceland at Lake Mývatn, and the crew secured permission to film in Havana. The budget is given as 250 to 270 million dollars. The opening weekend took 539.9 million worldwide, the biggest global opening then achieved, a record Avengers: Infinity War took a year later. The total closed at 1.236 billion. Go in if a finale that abandons physics entirely is acceptable. Avoid it if you want the motive early enough to read scenes by.