Inciting Event: Deckard Shaw—vengeful brother of the last movie’s bad guy—blows up Dom, Mia, and Brian’s house. The conflict has been going on prior to this—Deckard beat up FBI agent Hobbs and killed team member Han in Tokyo—but this is the moment where it undeniably slams into Dom’s life.
First Plot Point: “Ghost” agent Mr. Nobody recruits Dom for the mission of rescuing the hacker Ramsey—creator of an omniscient surveillance system called “God’s Eye—from the warlord Jakande. He promises to let Dom use the God’s Eye to find Deckard if he does so. The plot in this movie is relatively complicated, but this is where it ties the personal conflict (Deckard) in with the outer conflict (the God’s Eye). Dom assembles his team for the mission.
First Pinch Point: Dom and his team rescue Ramsey from Jakande, but Deckard shows up and complicates things. Interestingly enough, Deckard really isn’t the main antagonist: Jakande is the one who consistently gets in the way of Dom’s goals. Deckard shows up at all the major plot points, but mostly just to put on the “pinch.”
Midpoint: Ramsey tells the team she left the God’s Eye with a friend in India. Once they get there, they realize they’ll have to break into a millionaire’s penthouse to get to it. The penthouse heist is the “big scene,” but it’s the earlier scene where Ramsey decides to side with them that provides the necessary “revelation” (such as it is) at the Midpoint.
Second Pinch Point: Mr. Nobody takes Dom and Brian along to capture Deckard, but it all goes south when Jakande shows up. Mr. Nobody is shot, and Dom and Brian take the team and flee back to L.A.
Third Plot Point: The “low moment” here actually takes place just before the Third Plot Point, and it’s a relatively subtle one: Brian’s “goodbye” call to Mia carries the weight. Then the plot turns when the team embarks on the mission to play keep away with Ramsey while she hacks into the God’s Eye.
Climax: It’s actually pretty hard to even find a climactic turning point amidst the full-on flurry that takes up the entirety of the Third Act here, but I’m going to call it as Hobb’s breaking out of the hospital and coming to the rescue. That’s what finally tips the scales and allows Dom and company to take out Jakanda and Deckard.
Climactic Moment: As in the previous film, the true Climactic Moment here is Dom’s “return from the dead,” rather than the death of the bad guys, since the story’s tension doesn’t slack off until then.
Resolution: The team says goodbye to Brian.
