Universal

About halfway through Fate of the Furious, the eighth flick in the ever-changing gearhead ninja series that started with The Fast and the Furious, I realized that my world had changed. This franchise had leapfrogged over James Bond in my long list of badass, high-tech, silly action flicks that I love to watch. After audiences take in the glorious insanity of this movie, I don’t think I’ll be the only one who feels this way.

If you think of all eight movies in the Furious franchise as having a plot arc, the action has been consistently bending toward “secret agent techno-ninja” for quite some time. Even in the first movie, there’s an uneasy truce between law enforcement and Dom’s (Vin Diesel) band of sideshow outlaws. Furious has a Bond-like balance between beautifully choreographed hand-to-hand combat sequences and tricked-out gadget porn. For a long time, however, the difference between a Bond movie and a Furious one was whose side we were on. Bond is a man of the Crown, fighting global threats. Dom and his team, meanwhile, are sometimes just fighting to have faster vehicles than the Asian gangsters up the block.