The Fate of the Furious

Essential as plot, and the weakest of the modern run. The premise is the strongest idea the series has had since Fast Five, which is to turn Dom against the crew and make the rest of the film about people trying to work out why, and it is squandered by revealing the reason early and then repeating it.

Charlize Theron's Cipher is a cyberterrorist who operates from a plane and talks about the family in air quotes, and she exists mainly to stand behind a screen explaining what she has just done. The series has never worked out how to write an antagonist who is not physically in the room.

Two sequences justify it. Hundreds of remotely driven cars pouring out of a multi-storey car park onto a Manhattan street is a genuinely striking image, and the finale on a frozen bay with a submarine surfacing through the ice is the most ridiculous thing the franchise had attempted at that point. F. Gary Gray stages both clearly.

The important structural development is Deckard Shaw's conversion from the previous film's villain to a member of the crew, achieved through an aeroplane sequence with a baby that is the funniest thing in the film and which several of the cast objected to on the grounds that he had killed somebody they loved. That objection goes unresolved and the series proceeds anyway.