Okay, here we are, this is the franchise I was promised. It’s five years after the first movie, and the original cast is getting back together. They’re all older and more mature, full of resentments and grudges based on their shared history, but also a lot of underlying respect and love. It’s by now the commonplace analysis that this is a series about a found family, and this is the first place you really feel it.

Along with that, they really up the level of driving action here. In the previous movies, the cars were fast, but this is the first time they actually felt furious, with lots of big explosions, and preposterous “dodging a tanker truck flipping end over end” type stunts. I assume that everything in these movies has always been CG, but if there were any practical effects in previous movies, it’s all CG now.

The main downside to this movie, really, is that essentially the whole plot is driven by an egregious fridging. I mean, yeah, I get it, screenwriters, you’re all very lazy and don’t actually care about the plot and “hey, what if his girlfriend were dead? I bet he’d be real mad about it” is the easiest and laziest plot hook in the world, but it would have been worth spending an extra five minutes trying to think of an alternative.

At the end of this movie, my wife and I were like, “wow, that one was actually good!” and then had to kind of pause, calibrate, and be like, “well, I mean, in comparison.” I sort of think of this as the Jason X of this franchise so far — the one where, after a string of blandly shitty movies, at least it’s rising to the level of interesting, enjoyable trash.