Courtesy of Universal Pictures

Because “4 Fast 4 Furious” doesn’t sound too flattering, and doesn’t remotely make sense, someone high up at Columbia Pictures decided to mercifully take the words “the” out of the title, cutting the amount of energy used to say the title in half for all of us.

So now we have “Fast & Furious,” the fourth installment in the almost decade-old franchise, featuring a reunion between Vin Diesel (Dominic Toretto) and Paul Walker (Brian O’Connor) as its main selling point.

The funny thing about “Fast & Furious” is that it is somehow, for lack of a better word, less stupid than its predecessors. Like the screwup son in a family that one day grows up out of nowhere, the franchise’s latest installment most closely resembles a real movie out of the first three. In case you were wondering, the term “real movie” is referring to a film that actually has a conflict. A “real movie” is one that isn’t trying to score the pink slip for some guy who looks like Linkin Park’s No.1 fan in a tacky orange racer or spinning your bright pink ’95 Nissan in circles down a parking structure in Japan.

Even though the cars in the movie (keeping up with the tradition of colors so bright they’re actually offensive as are the obnoxious spoilers) are as easy to look at as a leper colony, the film noticeably gives them a more infrequent role in the film, shifting the attention away from the cars to the actors themselves.

So, in case you haven’t seen it yet, Michelle Rodriguez’s character, Letty, is murdered at the beginning, forcing Toretta and O’Connor to team up and take down a Mexican drug lord in order to get to her murderer, ending with a judge hitting Toretto with “25 to life” without parole.

Don’t worry … everyone in the crowd was booing the judge after he delivered the verdict. Spoiler alert! Wait, too late now, sorry.

Thankfully, instead of focusing on cars spinning in circles or how much stupid crap you can put in a car “Pimp my Ride” style (like “2 Fast 2 Furious” and “Tokyo Drift” did), “Fast & Furious” attempted to expand on some of the awkward issues that were subtly presented in the original film. For instance, there’s a lot more emphasis on the dichotomous relationship that Toretto and O’Connor share throughout the movie.

Because O’Connor is no longer undercover (because it was blown at the end of the first one), he still plays the role as a friend of the family, even though he’s initially unsure whether the attachment is valid or just a by-product of a case he worked on five years ago. He’s also haunted by a recurring question of why he let Toretto go at the end of the first installment, adding even more to the moral predicament he faces for the majority of the movie.

In the end, however, it seems that he comes to terms with his true role amongst his “friends,” giving us a refreshing break from the obnoxious cars in the meantime.