Is it me or is this starting to feel the same every time, the same way superhero movies do (but for a slightly different reason)?

Just like a phenomenon I identified in the Marvel canon at one point (that the heroes only have to exist to mitigate crises their existence itself put into motion) the Fast and the Furious franchise for at least the last three or four instalments seems to follow a very rigid pattern; the villains from all the previous movies are now friends of the gang, and a new villain emerges to give them a new fight, destined to be yet another new friend next time.

I don't know the whole series as intimately as some diehard fans probably do, but I know at one point Jason Statham's character was the big bad of the series, then Dwayne Johnson's character was, then John Cena's character was.

Now they're all part of the ensemble of ever-increasing moving parts executing an audacious plan to save the world involving lots of hotted up cars and outrageous set pieces so over the top even Michael Bay would say 'nah, that's a bit much'.

This time Jason Momoa puts on a snakeskin jacket and gurns his way through the role of the son of a drug kingpin the gang took down a few movies back, and now he wants revenge.

So everyone – and I mean everyone, right up to blonde dreadlocked, uber-funded fashion model hacker Cipher (Charlize Theron) – saddles up to do battle against him.

And if the main cast aren't enough, the script not only brings back Han (Sung Kang) back after his apparent death on the ridiculously long runway a few films back, but Johnson as Luke Hobbes in a midcredits scene, archive footage of the late Paul Walker and even Gal Gadot as once love interest Gisele – who I thought we saw get shot dead.

All of which means that the most impressive filmmaking skill on show here is how the whole thing makes any sort of sense while following the plotlines of so many disparate elements and characters.

It's one of those movies where I'm not going to go into any detail about the plot – I'd only be regurgitating the he-did-this and she-then-did-that cause and effect you can get from the film's Wikipedia page.

Suffice it to say there's an inciting incident where the villain draws some of the gang to a heist in Rome as a way of setting them all up to fall into his clutches, and they spend the rest of the film crisscrossing the world in teams or groups (slightly reminiscent of the cross-galactic Avengers: Endgame effort to reclaim the infinity stones) to try and get ahead of him.

Momoa is the only one having fun here, as gruff and gleeful a bad guy as he is a good guy playing Aquaman while everyone else takes the over-the-top set pieces and drama way too seriously.

Double crosses will be executed, surprising alliances will emerge, old and new friends will turn out to be anything other than what they seem, and it's all held together by a small army of CGI software engineers animating some of the most outrageous action scenes you'll ever see on a movie screen.

If that's all you want from a two hour and twenty minute movie, you'll come away smiling. If you're discerning, you'll just sit there wondering how long it takes Dominic Toretto and his friends to go to space to fight aliens.