It’s the one classical old-school race in the entire movie, and it’s a true rouser, with Havana making for the most decorous of Old World mazes, and Dom, in the home stretch, driving the car in reverse, its engine engulfed in flame. It’s an uneven race, with Dom stuck driving the slow-poke jalopy, which he strips down to its engine and outfits with a nitrous-oxide canister that will make the car either go intensely fast or blow up (or both). The movie opens in Havana, where Dominic and Letty are on their honeymoon, an interlude that’s interrupted when Dom agrees to race a Cuban hipster-bully who tried to make off with his cousin’s jalopy. The fact that it’s the first film in the series to have been made after the death of Paul Walker (and the first not to feature him since “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” in 2006) only gives fans that much more of a reason to rally around it. “The Fate of the Furious” is nothing more than pulp done smart, but scene for scene it’s elegant rather than bombastic, and it packs a heady escapist wallop. Gary Gray (“Straight Outta Compton”), who has shown a propensity for action going back to “Set It Off” (1996) and “The Italian Job” (2003), now proves to be a high-flying ballistic wizard at it.

Is the movie top-heavy, only semi-logical, and 20 minutes too long? Of course! But the director, F. You’d think that merging all those elements would make “The Fate of the Furious” a bit of an overcooked stew.

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