The start of Universal's biggest franchise to date.

Rating: 7/10 (25 July 2015)

A slick, adrenaline-fuelled action flick featuring a hot cast, a cool soundtrack, and countless custom cars, The Fast and the Furious is designed primarily to appeal to the young petrol-head crowd—those who would spend a fortune on a sound system for their ride and then blast crap music out of the windows while sat in a McDonald's car park (at least here in the UK). Anyone heavily into car culture will probably wet themselves in excitement over the modified machines on display.
But even if the idea of highly-polished Japanese street cars with more expensive accessories than a Kardashian doesn't get your pistons pumping, there's always the human eye-candy: for the ladies, there's blonde-haired, blue-eyed Paul Walker and bald bit of rough Vin Diesel, while the guys get numerous tasty young women to ogle, including Jordana Brewster as Vin Diesel's younger sister and Michelle Rodriguez as feisty girl-racer Letty. We also get lots of impressive stunts to keep the pulse pounding, with a great chase scene featuring one character dangling from a truck cab while being shot at by the driver, and a white-knuckle jump across railway tracks in front of an oncoming train that results in a spectacular crash.