Universal PicturesWe didn’t know how good we had it in 2011. A full year before Marvel would debut its first crossover with The Avengers, and bring the film industry as we knew it in line with its cinematic universe, Universal created a shared world of its own. The studio was also building a superhero team, in a way, one that’d go on to be the center of increasingly bloated vanity projects. But 15 years ago, the Fast & Furious saga was still about cars going vroom and little else, and its fifth entry would change that for better and worse.The crossover we get in Fast Five is relatively modest in hindsight, corralling the heroes of four disparate Fast & Furious movies for their biggest score yet. Back then, the Fast saga was what we’ve now come to know as “unc slop,” a relic of the noughties that was mostly just cool to father figures and gearheads. The franchise always did well at the box office, but there was a sense it was running out of road. Fast Five effectively unlocked another lane: it was a turning point that paved the way for the bigger, grander (and arguably stupider) saga we have now. Before it was a backdoor villain origin story, Fast Five was just a good, old-fashioned crime thriller. The film picks up after the long-awaited reunion between Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner and Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto, who — after kickstarting an impossible partnership in The Fast and the Furious — found themselves separated for nearly 10 years. A whole lot of illegal street racing sees Dom facing a long prison sentence, and the formerly squeaky-clean cop Brian on the lam in Miami. The adventures we got in the interim ran the gamut from splashy-but-random (Tokyo Drift) to stylish-but-mid (justice for 2 Fast 2 Furious!), culminating with the narratively crucial but otherwise inert Fast & Furious. Though a lot happens in the latter — from the demise of Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty Ortiz to Dom’s gutsy prison escape — it’s a largely skippable entry in the grand design of the saga. Fast Five saw fit to make all that meandering matter: if nothing else, it’s responsible for the line-up that springs most readily to mind whenever Dom growls out the word “family.” It also graduates the Toretto clan from their modest origins as street racers into the vigilante big leagues. Fast Five is the first stepping stone into the world of heists and espionage that now informs the saga over all else. At the time, that development was pretty awesome, mostly because director Justin Lin knew to balance those higher ambitions with the grounded vibes of earlier entries. Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), the film’s Big Bad, has more in common with the small-time villains of Fast & Furious or Tokyo Drift than he does with, say, a megalomaniac like Cipher (Charlize Theron). But his criminal empire, based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is still more formidable than anything Brian and Dom had faced up to that point. 15 years ago, Dom Toretto’s familia formed in earnest. | Universal PicturesThe specifics of Dom and Brian’s conflict with Reyes really aren’t all that important, but it mostly involves the murder of a few DEA agents, corruption in Rio, and a vault that contains $100 million in cash. That’s more than enough for Brian to start a new life with Dom’s sister, Mia (Jordana Brewster), who’s also pregnant with his child. But they can’t steal Reyes’ fortune alone, especially with a team of ruthless federal agents — led by the dogged Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson, in the role that’d cement his star power in earnest) — on their tail. That’s where the familia comes in. Brian calls in his friends from 2 Fast, the motor-mouthed Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and tech-savvy Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges), while Dom taps Tokyo Drift’s Han (Sung Kang) and Fast & Furious alums Gisele (Gal Gadot), Leo (Tego Calderón), and Santos (Don Omar). This — give or take a few later inclusions, fatalities, and resurrections — would become the franchise’s core team, and for good reason. Few line-ups work better or feel more natural than the Toretto clan as seen in Fast Five. Sure, Letty is sorely missed, and the films later struck gold with Jason Statham’s endearingly insane Deckard Shaw. But otherwise, Fast Five finds a flawless balance between comedic relief, wanton aura farming, and everyman pathos. Fast Five is the inflection point for the Fast saga, grounding the gonzo stunts of later films with the simple thrills of street racing. | Universal Pictures“Balance” is honestly what sets Fast Five apart from every Fast film. Brian and Dom’s stunts would only get crazier in a bid to top whatever came before, but the sequence that serves as this film’s climax calls on practical effects to craft something equal parts plausible and totally bonkers. There’s a reason why the “Bank Vault Chase,” in which Brian and Dom hitch that aforementioned vault to the back of a Dodge Charger and drag it through the streets of Rio, tops any list of the saga’s greatest stunts. It feels like something real people would do — crazy people, but real people all the same — the perfect distillation of Lin’s Mission: Impossible-inspired ambitions and our heroes’ street-level instincts.Fast Five is not only the best in hindsight; it was also pretty great in 2011. But after trips to space and attacks from “zombie cars,” you start to appreciate its unfussiness. Fast Five gave us the Toretto squad before they realized they might also be superheroes... that or, as Roman suggests in the abysmal F9, touched by some supernatural force. That all didn’t come from a vacuum, of course: a lot of the franchise’s wildest exploits wouldn’t have been possible without Fast Five. That makes the film a fascinating inflection point in the mythos of this saga. It brushed greatness plenty of times afterwards, but never so succinctly as the team’s adventures in Rio.Fast Five is available to rent on Prime Video and other digital platforms.