Fast & Furious

Essential on plot grounds and not much else. This is the film that reassembles the original four leads after two instalments of drift, and the event it is built around, the apparent death of Letty, is the thing the next two films are about. Nothing later makes sense without it.

Justin Lin had directed Tokyo Drift and was brought back to repair the main line, and the repair is visible as machinery rather than as a story. Characters are moved back into position, a grudge is established, and a mid-credits scene points at the next film. It is the most functional entry in the series.

It is also the ugliest. The photography is dark and desaturated in the manner of its moment, the humour is almost entirely absent, and Dom spends the film in a mode of grim vengeance that suits neither the actor nor the franchise. The best sequence, a tunnel run across the Mexican border, is genuinely good and the rest is grey.

One structural oddity: the opening heist on a fuel tanker in the Dominican Republic is better than anything else in the film and belongs to a different, more charming picture. Watch it as connective tissue between the street films and Fast Five, which is where the series actually becomes itself.