Fast Five

Essential, and the best film in the series. It is also the clean entry point for anybody who does not want four street-racing films first: it recruits most of the previous cast in a single sequence, explains what each of them does, and proceeds as though the franchise started here.

The genre change is the whole move. Justin Lin stopped making racing films and made a heist picture, which gave the series the thing it had always lacked: a reason for a group of specialists to be in a room together planning something. The crew assembly, the comic friction between Roman and Tej, and the sequence where they steal cars from a train are all heist conventions the series had never used.

Dwayne Johnson's arrival as Hobbs is the other half of it. An opponent who is physically larger than Dom and openly not interested in his speeches gave the films a comic register they had been missing, and the fight between them in a warehouse is staged as two trucks colliding.

The last twenty minutes are the franchise's signature: two cars dragging a bank vault on chains through the streets of Rio, destroying everything in their path, filmed with enough practical work that the weight reads as real. The physics are nonsense and the sequence is legible from start to finish, which is the balance every later film has been trying to find.