Starring: Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, John Cena, Jordana Brewster, Nathalie Emmanuel, Sung Kang, Michael Rooker, Helen Mirren, Kurt Russell, and Charlize Theron.

Directed by Justin Lin

Universal, out now

Dom Toretto thinks he’s out of the game now, bringing up his son Brian in the middle of nowhere. But when he responds to a call to arms, he encounters someone he thought never to see again – his estranged brother, Jacob…

The “f” word – family – is never far from the lips of characters in the Fast & Furious films, and it’s key to this latest, belated, addition to the saga, four years since we last saw Toretto and co. face off against Charlize Theron in Fast 8. We meet Jacob as a youngster back in 1989 at the race in which he and Dom’s father is killed (and the camera lingers on that footage for what feels like an uncomfortably long time), and as this movie progresses, we get repeated flashbacks that explain the falling out – which allows for one of the street races that’s this franchise’s raison d’etre, albeit one in the early 1990s – as well as some confrontations between Vin Diesel’s Dom and John Cena’s Jacob in the present day.

There’s the usual McGuffins at play – the team have to find both parts of Project Ares and the mysterious key to it (which will have classic Doctor Who fans grinning wryly when revealed) – which inevitably involves as much automotive destruction as possible, and use of electromagnets to a ridiculous extent. Although using the word ridiculous in this context is perhaps a little like saying water is wet…

Justin Lin keeps the action sequences as tight as ever (British audiences may be a little distracted by the weird licence plates on the movie’s vehicles in the London and Edinburgh set scenes) and you will sit there shaking your head at both the concepts and the execution. There’s a valiant attempt to lampshade the issue of the cast’s apparent invulnerability which in any other movie would be a foreshadowing of devastation to come, but here is just the cue for jokes at various people’s expense.

And we get some returnees to the franchise, notably Sung Kang’s Han, who quite definitely was killed by Jason Statham’s Shaw (although as Alasdair noted presciently in his review of Fast 8, we never saw the body). There’s some handwavium involved at this stage, but I suspect that there’s far more to come – don’t race out of your seats at the end, and stay for a key extra scene.

It’s the first film since 2 Fast 2 Furious not to have script input from Chris Morgan, and this has given it a slightly different feel to the others – occasionally the blend of family and action isn’t as smooth as before – but all credit to the production team for finding actors (Vinnie Bennett and Finn Cole) who can convincingly play younger versions of the Toretto brothers rather than digital de-aging. It’s also good to see Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster as a pretty lethal combination – although Nathalie Emmanuel feels once again a little underused (and there’s a gag involving her that needed properly setting up and following through, neither of which is done).

Verdict: Huge fun, and well worth seeing on an IMAX screen (and you get the Jurassic World lengthy preview which is almost worth the cost of admission alone!), but not quite at the heights of the franchise. 8/10

Paul Simpson