So this is the eighth movie in the franchise, as its punny title would indicate, and the first one without Paul Walker. As someone who would have said that his character was kind of a blank face, I find myself in the weird position of thinking that his loss really hurts the franchise.

Because the thing is, up until now, the franchise has had two centers, Paul and Vin. And with Paul gone, now it sets up Vin as like The Man around whom everything revolves, which interacts weirdly with the ensemble cast and “when you’re here, you’re family” themes that underlie it. Like, if nothing else, everyone else seems to look up to Vin’s character as a patriarch, and he needs a peer to kinda puncture his ego a bit. It’s particularly awkward here, where for convoluted yet mysterious reasons, Vin ends up doing his own thing separately from the rest of the team: It robs the team of any focal points, so it’s just a bunch of people randomly doing their little things without a central figure.

But also this is such a weird movie structurally, because it takes the international superspy background from the previous movie and foregrounds it so that our crew is now deeply involved in international super-agent espionage stuff in an even bigger and more implausible way than before. This means rethinking the characters so they make sense in this context, which is how you get a character who used to be a notable mechanic who ran his own garage, but is now a super-hacker tech god. Did he like go to coding bootcamp between movies?

By most metrics, this movie is even more over the top than the last one… but it doesn’t feel like it. I think some of this is the result of the direction — the big setpieces are objectively big and over the top, they just don’t feel as hyperkinetic and intense as the ones in the previous handful of movies. It is, to its detriment, both less fast and less furious than its predecessors.

Still, it’s not a bad movie, it’s just maybe a kind of replacement level action movie; and if you’re eight movies into this franchise, obviously you’re not gonna stop watching them just because one of them is merely okay.