It's a sequel. It's a prequel. It's an&ellips; inbetwequel? Yes, that's right, Fast & Furious is neither The Fast and the Furious 4 nor The Fast and the Furious: Beginnings. As its tagline says, it's a new model with the original parts—the first of the three sequels that actually reunites all of the original film's major characters. Sure, Vin Diesel and Paul Walker might look a good eight years older. Yes, it may have had to squeeze itself in between the movies that have already been made to pick up where its characters and their relationships left off (we'll call it 2.5). But hey, if fast cars, scantily-clad women, and cheesy lines were able to rake in millions three times before, I'd probably make another movie too.

Basically, Fast & Furious picks up where 2 Fast 2 Furious left off. Muscle-bound mechanic/street racer Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) is still busy pulling off grand heists with fast cars and hiding from the law that would rather him be behind bars. After falling into disgrace for letting Toretto go and earning back his badge by helping U.S. Customs, LAPD cop Brian O'Connor (Paul Walker) is once again back on the trail of the crime bosses, drug lords, and miscellaneous bad guys of greater Los Angeles County. When Toretto's girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is killed by someone likely tied to O'Connor's investigation of drug kingpin Braga, criminal and cop are reunited. And with O'Connor and Toretto racing both against each other and as a team, the race for justice and vengeance is off.

With O'Connor engaged in undercover assignments in all of the movies he is in, central to many of the Fast and Furious films are the concepts of trust, betrayal, and the thin line that often lies between the good guys and the bad guys. As O'Connor's boss warns him when he once again begins to slip into the crevice that lies between the two, "You know the difference between a cop and a criminal? One bad judgment call." As Mia (Jordana Brewster), Toretto's sister and O'Connor's ex-girlfriend, says to O'Connor, "Maybe you're not the good guy pretending to be the bad guy; maybe you're the bad guy pretending to be the good guy." And as O'Connor himself says when Mia asks him why he let Toretto go before, "I think it was because, at that moment, I respected him more than I respected myself."

Along with the blurring of the line between the good guys and the bad guys also comes the blurring of the line between good and bad, justice and revenge, and the law of the land and a greater code which sometimes negates that very law. As O'Connor demonstrates almost every time he leaves the police station, to even try to keep up with the bad guys, he simply cannot follow the rules of the road. While his job as a cop is to punish bad and promote good, he repeatedly lies to accomplish that task. And when his own department's laws would have let a drug lord go free and imprisoned the man who helped capture him, let's just say O'Connor's reflex is not exactly to just accept the orders given him and call it a day.

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