In the 8^th installment of what is surely the most implausibly preposterous and most wildly successful Hollywood franchise ever produced, the “Fast And The Furious” team (minus Paul Walker, R.I.P.) are back. For anyone who has missed the fun, I suggest you stream the first seven F&F films immediately, and watch our rebel twenty-something street ‘rodders transform themselves, via 14 hours of suspended disbelief, into a crackerjack, multiracial, high-tech, fast-talking and faster driving elite fighting team doing the good work of saving the world. Only in the US of Empire, baby.

Directed with frenetic intensity by F. Gary Grey, “The Fate of The Furious” begins in Havana, Cuba (of all places) with a drone shot (of course!) over the old fort and down onto Havana’s famed malecon. In a matter of 12 minutes, Dom (Vin Diesel) and his gal Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) solve sixty years of fraught Cold War US/Cuban relations with 1) a Coke can, 2) a pop top, and 3) a high speed car race through the streets of decaying downtown Havana, ending at the Hotel Nationale with a pyrotechnics display that would put any other movie blockbuster to shame. US/Cuban “normalization,” Hollywood style.

Complications quickly ensue. A dreadlocked Charlize Theron (creatively known by the moniker “Cipher”) appears in Havana out of nowhere and quickly and mysteriously entices our good Dom into joining her evil terrorist plot to steal Russian nuclear codes and launch soviet submarine missiles at an unsuspecting world. Picking up where FF7 left off, we learn of a powerful “God’s Eye” device that allows for enhanced surveillance of global populations (gosh – that could NEVER happen). This machine, combined with Cipher’s cryptographic and computer skills and Dom’s big muscles and street smarts, create immediate challenges for our FF8 team. Why did Dom go rogue? And who will save the world from Cipher? High tech gear is mystically commandeered, our FF8 posse is magically assembled – Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson doing his best bad-ass Daddy acting, the ever-lovable Jason Statham as the tough-as-nails martial arts master, plus the usual suspects, (Roman, Tej, Ramsey etc) and we are off and running, er, driving.

The most impressive element of FF8 is how the film’s plot and themes so deftly disguise real-world imperial phenomena as action-adventure entertainment. If one were conspiratorially-minded, one might even think that the US Deep State uses Hollywood films like FF8 to propagandize on behalf of the US Empire. (gosh – that could NEVER happen). So, when Cipher commandeers the cameras of urban ATMS and programs the computers of self-driving cars in a crowded city neighborhood to carry out her nefarious plans, we are simply witnessing Hollywood fantasy at work. When the Russians in FF8 are demonized as both evil AND incompetent, we moviegoers are simply experiencing a strange sort of celluloid coincidence that in no way mirrors US Deep State actors, centrist Democrats, and the US corporate commercial “news” media’s current obsession with blaming Putin and the Russians for everything from HRC’s 2016 presidential election loss to the Syrian “civil war” (right, Rachel Maddow?) And when our FF8 team goes to the Arctic and carries out its own mini global-warming campaign – deploying a powerful electromagnetic ground-shaking energy weapon – in the name of stopping the bad guys, we movie-going audiences cheer, applaud, and unthinkingly throw popcorn. Such weapons don’t really exist in real life, right? Right?

After all, film fantasy NEVER mirrors real life in the world of Hollywood, right? Right.

So, kick off this summer’s blockbuster movie season in high-speed style with “The Fate Of The Furious.” 170 plus minutes of good, clean, US imperial fun. No strings and no propaganda attached.