I have a small confession to make: until late August, I had never actually watched the original The Fast and the Furious from beginning to end.

Sure, I knew the mythology. I’ve caught twenty-minute chunks on cable on lazy Sunday afternoons, I know all the “family” memes, and I know that Dom Toretto lives his life a quarter-mile at a time. But somehow, across two and a half decades, I just never sat down in the dark and let the whole story play out.

So when our local theater announced a 25th-anniversary re-release, I figured it was finally time to fix that blind spot. I grabbed a ticket for a late-August evening showing, expecting maybe a dozen nostalgic millennials scattered across empty rows.

Instead, the place was completely sold out.