The Fast and the Furious series has undergone some profound changes since 2001 when the franchise launched with a film about LA car enthusiasts who fund their passion for illegal street races by boosting DVD players. (It was a different era.) The original film wasn’t exactly a low-key indie, but nothing about it suggested that it would eventually evolve into a globetrotting action franchise that pitted Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his ever-expanding crew against international terrorists and other nefarious foes.

The series has switched genres a couple of times, but at this point, it resembles nothing so much as the X-Men (not the superpowered mutants of the movies so much as the X-Men from the long-running comics, in which colorful characters with specialized skills unite around a common cause and save the world). Group members drift in and out, presumed-dead teammates sometimes turn out to have just had amnesia for a bit, and as they navigate a hostile world that doesn’t understand them, a charismatic bald leader keeps them together by emphasizing that they’ve become a makeshift family.

To continue the analogy, that would make Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw the franchise’s equivalent of Kitty Pryde and Wolverine, a spinoff project in which two teammates with a fun dynamic and unique chemistry set off on their own for a sidequest. Hobbs & Shaw reteams DSS Agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) with Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), a British black-ops-agent-turned-bad-guy-turned-good-guy (more or less) who’d previously been accepted into the F&F fold, even though he killed beloved team member Han. (He did, however, save Dom’s baby, which apparently makes things even. The series has a strange sense of morality.) Of course, that doesn’t mean Shaw and Hobbs like each other as the film opens. What kind of buddy movie would it be without contentious banter?

Co-writing with Drew Pearce, longtime series writer Chris Morgan provides contentious banter aplenty when Hobbs and Shaw reluctantly reunite to deal with a world-threatening programmable supervirus that’s gone missing in London — with Shaw’s MI6 agent sister Hattie Shaw (Vanessa Kirby) as the virus’s apparent thief. There’s more to the story, of course. Hattie has injected herself with the virus, sure, but only to keep it away from Etheon, an evil corporation with plans to save humanity by killing off large swaths of it. Etheon has vast resources and a killer app in the form of Brixton Lore (Idris Elba), a rogue MI6 operative whose broken body has been rebuilt and reprogrammed with superhuman capabilities. Can the protagonists save the world despite overwhelming odds? Maybe, but in the tradition of the recent F&F films, they’ll first have to travel to a bunch of exotic locations.

It doesn’t hurt to bring Fast & Furious knowledge to Hobbs & Shaw, but what’s come before doesn’t much matter. That’s partly because Hobbs and Shaw pick up where they left off, bickering and threatening each other, partly because the spinoff uses characters who aren’t dependent on their personal histories so much as their stars’ personas. Statham and Johnson are two of the most likable action stars working today, but neither mixes up what they do from movie to movie all that much. (The Johnson who shows up for the disaster film San Andreas isn’t that different from the one who shows up for the Kevin Hart comedy Central Intelligence.) There’s a reason for this: those personas work. And Hobbs & Shaw proves they work well together, stretching out the sparky dynamic of their previous appearances together to feature length.

Even though Statham and Johnson are both big, bald slabs of muscle, they make a fun study in contrasts, from an early split-screen sequence capturing their morning routines to a later fight scene in which Shaw has to take out a room full of bad guys using grace and finesse, and Hobbs has to take out a somehow-even-bigger foe through brute force. Hobbs speaks with wrestling-ring bravado. Shaw uses insults like daggers. Hobbs looms over Shaw. Shaw makes up in scrappiness what he lacks in size. They have some fundamental differences, and yet, in a not-so-shocking development, they make a pretty good team.

Kirby is fun, too, as are Helen Mirren (as a criminal matriarch), a handful of big-name actors making surprise cameos, and Elba who plays a formidable foe. But Hobbs & Shaw is very much about its eponymous duo saving the world through a series of action setpieces staged with panache by stunt coordinator-turned-director David Leitch (John Wick, Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2). Leitch continues a streak of films that treat action scenes almost like musical sequences, with swelling rhythms built around a handful of jaw-dropping images. The gunplay and hand-to-hand combat (and fights with other weaponry best left unspoiled, even though they appear in the trailer) have real impact, though some of the chase scenes lean too heavily on CGI for their effectiveness.

In fact, the gearhead-pleasing moments almost feel like obligatory nods to the mother series that Hobbs & Shaw otherwise seems happy to forget. The unresolved animosities between key cast members make it hard to see a full-on Fast & Furious reunion in the future, but Hobbs and Shaw seem like they’ll be okay on their own if that never happens. Their film leaves the door wide open for sequels and sets up a supporting cast for future installments, and the excessively entertaining, eager-to-please nature of this movie makes it easy to welcome that option. The X-Men have survived the departure of key personnel plenty of times. No doubt Dom and his family can do the same.