F9

Essential, and the entry where the series starts openly commenting on itself. Roman spends the film asking out loud why none of them has ever been seriously hurt, which is the audience's joke handed to a character, and the film's answer is to put two of them in a rocket car in orbit.

The plot introduces a brother Dom has never mentioned across eight films, played by John Cena, and explains him with extensive flashbacks to a racetrack accident. Retrofitting a sibling into an established history is a soap-opera move and the film performs it without apology. Whether that is charming or exhausting is the main thing people disagree about.

The genuinely welcome development is the return of Han, which the series had been pressured into for years by an online campaign about his treatment. The explanation offered is thin and the character is back, and Sung Kang slots in as though he had never left.

Justin Lin returned to direct and the set pieces are his best since Fast Five: a sequence with an enormous electromagnet dragging vehicles through a city, and a convoy crossing a rope bridge that is collapsing in sections. At a hundred and forty-three minutes it is bloated, and the flashbacks are where the time goes.