Ranking the Fast and Furious franchise
Ranking the Fast and Furious franchise
FasTEN your seatbelts, cuz here we go.
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America’s most improbable franchise just hit its 10th entry (of a now-promised 12. Bless bless). It’s become a really annoying “joke” to point out that the movies that used to be about street racers stealing DVDs have mutated into movies where Ludacris and Tyrese drive into space, as though that’s a bad thing. Unlike, say, the Transformers movies, the Fast & Furious franchise has (mostly) prospered for (mostly) good reason. So I’m going to take you through my beloved franchise, and rate and rank each entry to date. I’m rating each of my criteria on a scale of 1-5 cars (🏎). And, as ever, if you disagree with me, you’re wrong.
Criteria
The Fast. Even as the set pieces get more preposterous, the muscle of this franchise is the powerful, thrilling stunt driving. These filmmakers clearly love and respect practical stunts in a most infectious way. The best of these movies have at least one jaw-dropping moment that includes real cars smashing into or being driven out of real things (or both).
The Furious. We need compelling stakes and a charismatic, or at least reasonably threatening, villain behind them. If the stakes are too big—fate of the world type stuff—or the villain is too dry, it gets harder to care.
The Family. Whether you care to admit it or not, F&F is the originator and perfector of millennial action movies’ obsession with found families. If the gearhead shit is the muscle, the bonds between these characters are the heart of the franchise. Without legitimate group chemistry, the movies flounder.
The Foolishness. There’s a certain (read: massive) amount of suspension of disbelief required for these movies. If you can’t get there, then you just don’t know. But sometimes the balance between fun and foolishness tips too far, and your eye rolls become more exasperated than loving.
SPOILERS FOR ALL TEN MOVIES. Ride or die, remember?
The Fast and the Furious (2001), the rap-metal Point Break remake
The Fast: 🏎🏎🏎. For this movie, the stunts are impressionistic and fizzy in the beginning, grounded and heart-pounding in the final scenes. (That shift will switch in later movies.) Everything you see before the final truck hijacking scene and the final quarter-mile race is fun; by contrast, the final stunts pack a serious punch. The stakes go from reputational risk to grievous bodily harm, and it works.
The Furious: 🏎🏎🏎. The fake villain is Johnny Tran, the improbably handsome gang leader who may or may not also be hijacking trucks to steal DVDs. (He is not.) But the real villain turns out to be law enforcement, which becomes a runner throughout these movies.
The Family: 🏎🏎🏎🏎. The movie turns on Dominic Toretto being a magnetic force that draws everyone in in spite of themselves, and Vin Diesel makes that pull very credible. Charisma and chemistry both require vulnerability, and at this stage in his career, Vin has that in spades. His chemistry with Paul Walker’s Brian is electric and heartwarming, while Brian’s romance with Dom’s sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) feels like a bittersweet replacement for the romance that should exist between him and Dom. Plus, the scene where Dom makes hapless Wish.com Giovanni Ribisi-ass Jesse say grace before dinner is the beginning of the Toretto Family Values that flow through these movies.The Foolishness: 🏎🏎🏎🏎. Everything is pretty grounded for this first outing, as far as these movies go. The most ridiculous thing in retrospect is the fact that the plot so heavily features DVDs. Different time, the Sixties.
Average: 🏎🏎🏎1/2
2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), the toxic PowerPuff Girls episode
The Fast: 🏎🏎🏎. 2F2F made an interesting choice to add more plot to the racing scenes, which ultimately gets in the way of the driving itself. Everything is bright and propulsive, but ultimately empty. Kind of like the whole movie.
The Furious: 🏎🏎. Other than a very upsetting torture scene with a rat and a trash can, the stakes don’t feel too high on this one. The main villain is Cole Hauser’s Carter Verone, but he barely makes an impression. As is typical for these movies, the true antagonist is the law enforcement officer who berates and manipulates our heroes to suit his own political needs.
The Family: 🏎🏎. We’ve lost just about everybody from the first movie except for Brian, and subbed in Tyrese’s Roman as the bald hottie to glower at Paul Walker, and Ludacris’s Tej as the guy who has a garage. Tyrese and Vin Diesel have completely different energies, though; and to the movie’s credit, they kick the glowering pretty quickly in exchange for some lighthearted banter that largely revolves around different pronunciations of the word ‘bro’. Roman and Tej will both come back to much greater effect later. This is also the movie that establishes Brian as that girl who has half a dozen people who call him their best friend. Watch this space.
The Foolishness: 🏎🏎🏎. Just about every person I know sent me this prompt tweet from KevOnStage.
I think most people either skipped or forgot everything about 2, because this is the true beginning of the series’s maximalist nonsense. However, the climax is still just one car ramping onto one yacht from a bridge. That felt wild in 2003. Little did we know.
Average: 🏎🏎1/2The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), aka Fast Times at Rydell High
The Fast: 🏎🏎🏎. People talk shit about how far the franchise has strayed from its street racing roots, and still laugh Tokyo Drift off despite its entire plot being about street racing. The drifting itself is also pretty fucking cool.
The Furious: 🏎🏎. Something about most of these characters being in high school, even though half of them look old enough to afford their own streaming platform subscriptions, really takes the sting out of any stakes here. The nominal villain doesn’t really register either, until he starts threatening everyone’s fave character.
The Family: 🏎🏎🏎. It’s a fascinating move to decide your white boy doesn’t need any kind of charisma to be the star, and then to also have Sung Kang’s Han be a supporting character when he’s actually the coolest person who’s ever been in any of these movies. Like, imagine being so cool and so instantly beloved by fans that the filmmakers bend time and space around your character TWICE to keep you alive, even though we all watched you physically blow up. Anyway, all three 🏎s here are for Han.
It’s literally bullying to put these two in the same scene. The Foolishness: 🏎🏎🏎. Why would the Yakuza get involved with high school students and their street racing exploits? Hard to say. But the high school students drive the Yakuza out of Tokyo with street racing, and that’s simply how it’s done.
Average: 🏎🏎3/4Fast & Furious (2009), the non-starter
The Fast: 🏎🏎. Blah. The most notable thing about the driving in this one is that they have GPS on their car’s touchscreens now. The opening truck hijacking is energetic, though it doesn’t live up to the scenes from the original that it’s clearly referencing. And I guess the crashes are quite bruising. But there’s no real oomph to most of the stunts, and oomph is at least half of why we’re here.The Furious: 🏎. The bad guys do kill off a main character, and back when that used to at least kind of mean something in this franchise. But damn if they aren’t fucking nobodies anyway. (It really pains me to say this about the man who would bring us Mother’s Milk, too.)
The Family: 🏎🏎. Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty gets killed off-screen 15 minutes into the movie. What a waste of one of the franchise’s brightest lights. And, speaking of waste: this was the first movie that director Justin Lin and writer Chris Morgan said was set before Tokyo Drift, because everyone loved Han’s character so much. But Han is only in the two first scenes of the movie, and leaves saying “I hear they’re doing some crazy shit in Tokyo” to set up his eventual landing there. Why bring him back just for two scenes?? This is honestly when the #JusticeForHan campaign should have started. (More on that later.)I’m here for the enemies-to-lovers arc between Dom and Brian, since Dom alleges that he’s angry with Brian for breaking Mia’s heart but we all know that it’s Dom’s own heartbreak he’s nursing. But it’s just so melodramatic without being really touching.
The Foolishness: 🏎🏎. This one gets a low ranking, not because it’s too foolish, but because it’s not foolish enough. The one thing these movies should never be is boring, but here we are. The balance is all off.
Average: 🏎3/4Fast Five (2011), the turning point
The Fast: 🏎🏎🏎🏎🏎. This is when the filmmakers made a radical choice to make these movies fucking awesome. The stunts will get bigger from here, but they won’t get any more viscerally muscular than Brian and Dom dragging a giant safe behind their cars through the streets of Rio and smashing cop cars to smithereens. (The gag is, they actually did drag a giant safe behind their cars. That’s why it looks so good. I fucking love these people.)The Furious: 🏎🏎🏎🏎🏎. Again, technically the bad guy here is Joaquim de Almeida’s Hernan Reyes, and his ending here is the inciting incident for Fast X. But, again, the primary antagonist is law enforcement, here embodied by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s Luke Hobbs. This is back when The Rock was still doing character work—known as “acting” in some circles—and willing to play an asshole who we aren’t supposed to root for. Hobbs is full of rage, prone to extrajudicial violence, and always sweating profusely around (but never through!) his absurdly tight Under Armour tees. He absolutely lights up the screen, especially when he’s up against Vin Diesel. This is a series peak right here.
The Family: 🏎🏎🏎🏎🏎. The group chemistry is absolutely oozing out of this movie. It’s in the speech that Dom gives to the gang about how money will come and go, but the only thing that matters are the people in this room. It’s in the tension that briefly simmers between Brian’s two best friends, Dom and Roman, as they size each other up and silently figure out who the real best friend is. (Hint: it’s the star of the franchise. Roman then gets his own best friend in Tej.) It’s in Dom telling his prodigal friend Vince that “there’s always room for family.” And most of all, it’s in the moment when Mia tells the two men in her life—Dom and Brian—that she’s pregnant, and Dom hugs them both and says tearfully, “our family just got a little bigger.”
This is what watching these guys together feels like. The rebound relationship between Dom and new addition Elena is also worth noting, because it’s strange and sad, and because it stays strange and sad until its true conclusion in F8.
The Foolishness: 🏎🏎🏎🏎🏎. This is a classic heist movie, and heist movies require the perfect balance of razzle to the dazzle in order to really fly. Not for nothing, but this movie balances it all perfectly and earns the necessary suspension of disbelief. We get several scenes of the gang test driving—and failing—to beat a security camera. Once they finally nail that stunt, they’ve got you. You believe that, you’ll be willing to believe the unbelievable shit that happens next.
Average: 🏎🏎🏎🏎🏎Fast & Furious 6 (2013), the victory lap
The Fast: 🏎🏎🏎🏎🏎. Since they spent Fast Five patiently earning our trust, in 6 the gang starts to really cut loose. We have some really magnificent race scenes through the streets of London, and the fight scenes get amped up with the addition of noted shameless monster Gina Carano and noted martial artist Joe Taslim. This is also the movie with the iconic tank scene, which includes, well, this:The Furious: 🏎🏎🏎1/2. Owen Shaw is a classic/cliche villain archetype - the invert of the hero. He has no swagger and no sense of loyalty. He doesn’t even care about the aesthetics of a car - his cars look like skeletal go-carts that prioritize brutal efficiency over personality. He’s all restraint and precision, where Dom is all heart. It’s cliche, but it works here. And the reveal that ostentatious bag-fumbler Gina Carano has been his mole the whole time is juicy.
The Family: 🏎🏎🏎🏎. Letty is back, baybee! This is the first time in the series that a character gets resurrected, which is different from what they did with Han (at least, the first time). And as exceptional as Fast Five is at what it’s doing, I really miss Michelle Rodriguez in it, and I’m thrilled to have her back. It makes up for the somewhat laborious dialogue about family in this movie, including things like “you don’t turn your back on family, Brian. Even when they do.” And the movie ends with two gut punches - not only do we finally lose Han, which we’ve known was coming but never knew when; but we first lose his love Giselle (Gal Gadot) as she sacrifices herself to save him. Those losses hit hard, because they do feel like part of the family.
The Foolishness: 🏎🏎🏎🏎. This is where the motto becomes, “We can make it make sense later. Let’s make it awesome now.” While The Rock is explaining the plot that they’re about to embark on, Tyrese goes around the room asking everyone around for change for a vending machine that The Rock then shoots out for him. That’s how unimportant the specifics of the fetch quest are to this (and any) movie. We’re here for fun, dammit! We’re here for Letty’s really specific amnesia, for runways that go for miles and miles, and for Jason Statham getting out of the car that just killed Han and leaving the immortal message “Dominic Toretto. You don’t know me. But you’re about to.” Reader, I applauded. There’s no reason for Han’s death all the way back in Tokyo Drift to stitch in as seamlessly as it does here, but it really does.
Average: 🏎🏎🏎🏎1/4Furious 7 (2015), the improbable tearjerker
The Fast: 🏎🏎🏎🏎. This is the one where they drop several cars out of aircraft, and it fucking slaps. Roman’s car, spiraling away from the road while everyone else lands bumpily but solidly, is the only one that reacts like a car would if it had a giant parachute attached to it. The message? Reality is a drag. Have fun with us instead. This is also the one with the legendary Tony Jaa as one of the villain’s dragons, and we get two claustrophobic fight scenes between him and Brian that I wish lasted longer.The Furious: 🏎🏎🏎. Deckard Shaw is a much more compelling villain than his brother was, partly because Jason Statham is simply a more charismatic actor. But Djimon Hounsou’s villain is so unnecessary that I’m genuinely puzzled every time he shows up. One villain here would have been fine!
The Family: 🏎🏎🏎🏎🏎. The fundamental thing about this movie: this is the one where Paul Walker dies. And in a series where just about every member of the family who dies somehow comes back, it’s jarring to be faced with a real death that the actors are clearly processing on screen. It’s also remarkable that this movie should pull off an impossible magic trick—using our knowledge of Walker’s real death to make us fear for his character’s life, giving Brian some lovely closure in a way that Walker tragically couldn’t get, and collapsing the two into each other in Vin Diesel’s shockingly stirring eulogy at the end of the movie. Vin wrote the closing monologue to his friend, whom he calls his brother; and it hits because it’s him at his best—straightforward, simple, and unapologetically sincere. Please watch here.
And I cry every time Paul’s car drives off to heaven. The Foolishness: 🏎🏎🏎. This is their messiest plot yet, but you have to give them grace—losing one of their stars in the middle of shooting causes mess. Letty’s amnesia is an obstacle until it’s quite suddenly not. Kurt Russell kicks off his Russellaissance with his goofily deadpan character Mr. Nobody, and at one point radiantly lampshades the nonsense plot by picking up the MacGuffin and shrugging, “All that trouble for this little…ehh…thing.” It’s hard to be mad at any of this. Having said that, I really can’t excuse the preposterous line “The thing about street fights? The street always wins.” Especially since Dom says it right before he stomps on some crumbling concrete and brings an entire parking garage down around him in order to defeat Shaw.
Average: 🏎🏎🏎3/4The F8 of the Furious (2017), the ultimate betrayal
The Fast: 🏎🏎🏎🏎. We’re doubling and even tripling down on the fight scenes in this one, with a blistering prison fight that spills across two storeys as Hobbs and Shaw (🙄) blaze their way through prisoners and guards alike. There’s also an incredible Hard Boiled homage that finds Shaw fighting his way through a plane full of bad guys scene while protecting an adorable baby wearing noise-cancelling headphones. Besides that, we have the zombie cars scene, where Charlize Theron’s villain Cipher hacks into every (?) car in New York City and floods the streets with them. The filmmakers strapped a bunch of GoPros to cars and rolled them out of a building, giving the scene some necessary crunch to balance out the necessary CGI.The Furious: 🏎🏎🏎1/2. Charlize Theron is a movie star, meaning she doesn’t have to work that hard to capture your attention when she’s in her zone. So, she doesn’t work hard at all, and just coasts in her Machiavellian Ice Queen zone for the entire movie while her mysterious hairstyle does most of the heavy lifting. Nice work if you can get it! In any case, conscripting Dom into her services and against his family is what gives the conflict real stakes, not Cipher’s vague goals to arm a nuclear submarine to force “accountability” from the world’s superpowers.
I simply cannot understand the meaning of this. The Family: 🏎🏎1/2. The egos on this one are simply impossible to maneuver around, unfortunately. Vin’s ego and therefore Dom’s whole deal of being instantly worshipped whenever he goes achieve mythic proportions. The Rock isn’t playing Hobbs anymore - he’s playing The Rock™️, which drains a lot of fun out of his character. The gentle but passionate homoeroticism between Dom and Brian has been replaced by the belligerent but empty homoeroticism between Hobbs and Shaw. Further disrupting the group chemistry is charisma void Scott Eastwood, Clint Eastwood’s greatest disappointment besides that empty chair. And Dom and Elena’s strange, sad story comes to a rather mean-spirited end, with Elena revealing she had Dom’s baby at some point after the sixth movie, and then getting shot and killed in front of Dom and that baby a few scenes later.
But, most importantly, I’ll never get over the fact that they accepted the man who killed Han into their family, just because he also has a family whom he would do anything for. HE KILLED HAN, YOU TURNIPS. HE DOESN’T GET TO EAT CHICKEN WITH Y’ALL. #JusticeForHan
The Foolishness: 🏎🏎🏎. This is the point for me where spectacle trumps soul. The spectacle be spectacling, though! Is it ridiculous to watch the gang driving around on ice to stop a nuclear submarine? Absolutely it is. Am I rolling my eyes at everyone using their cars to protect Dom from an explosion? Of course I am. But I’m still having fun, because they seem like they’re having fun.
Average: 🏎🏎🏎1/4F9: The Furious Saga (2021), the soap opera devolution
The Fast: 🏎🏎. They no longer seem like they’re having fun. Womp. The action here feels tedious, and as a result the movie is somehow both slow and overstuffed.The Furious: 🏎🏎. I’m so sick of the trend that’s dominated MCU villainry - the ruthlessly uncharismatic villain who seems as opposed to fun as they are to the continued existence of the world. And even if I weren’t sick of that trend, I strenuously object to casting the charmingly rubber-faced John Cena in that role. I don’t even care that he’s playing Dom and Mia’s long-lost white brother. I care that he doesn’t even crack a smile the entire movie. Let me enjoy my Cena, you dummies.
The Family: 🏎🏎🏎. At the center of it, we are watching a Toretto we didn’t know about get back the family we had no idea he was part of. It wouldn’t be so hard to take if it seemed like any of the Torettos were enjoying each other’s company, but they’re all playing it so seriously that there’s nothing to latch onto.On the fun side of things, though: The Tej-Roman-Ramsey triangle blossomed into something unexpectedly lovely and deeply platonic. These three goofballs are still committed to their buffoonery, and it helps. Bringing back the leads from Tokyo Drift was a curious choice that I’m not convinced anyone asked for? They don’t necessarily hurt the movie, but they don’t add much either. We almost definitely could have gotten to space without them.
But most importantly, HAN LIVES. For the second time in this narrative, the filmmakers break the reality we know in order to give us more of who we want the most in this world—Han Seoul-Oh and his ever-present bag of chips. Did the explanation for his survival kind of trigger my inner Annie Wilkes? Lil bit. But I have my Han back, so I shan’t complain.
Much. The Foolishness: 🏎🏎.Them going to space was not even the least credible thing in the movie. After all, Tej does tell us that “As long as we obey the laws of physics, we’ll be fine.” And they did*, so they were. It’s Dom’s underwater mind palace excursion really takes the cake for me. On the positive side, Ramsey revealing that she can’t drive and immediately having to drive a truck with a magnetized whatsit in the cab is hilarious.
Average: 🏎🏎1/4Fast X (2023), the shocking comeback
The Fast: 🏎🏎🏎🏎. Opening with a copy-paste of one of the best scenes in the franchise’s history is a bold fucking move, and it started things off on the wrong foot with me. But by the time the team failed to disarm a giant bomb that smashed its way through half of the landmarks in Rome but left “no fatalities,” I was back on board. We’ve fully left the mild plausibility of Fast Five in our rear view, but the action still didn’t feel as weightless in this one as it did in F9. Plus, we get a knockdown drag-out fight between Charlize Theron and Michelle Rodriguez, who feel evenly matched in a way that, say, Rhonda Rousey and Michelle Rodriguez did not.
The Furious: 🏎🏎🏎🏎🏎. Jason Momoa’s Dante “Enchanté” Reyes is quite simply the most fun villain this franchise has ever seen. He gives us a performance that throws back to the golden age of camp villains, with unpredictable line readings, a genuine zest for life and revenge, and the fashion sense of a helpful gay pirate (complimentary). Dante Enchanté is a blast of NOS. Plus, his laser focus on making our beloved gang suffer keeps the stakes palpable, even when he’s wheeling giant bombs through Rome with gleeful abandon.
Me too, fella. Me too. The Family: 🏎🏎🏎🏎. Dom’s son Little Brian keeps getting cuter, no? And his chemistry with his various family members feels heartfelt. He even manages to solve the biggest problem of F9 by teasing out the lovable goofiness we want out of a John Cena performance. Honestly, everyone seems to be having a ton more fun in this movie than in the previous ones, even as several roles get bumped down to glorified cameos. And speaking of glorified cameos, I cannot believe Vin’s deranged Instagram post actually worked!
The Foolishness: 🏎🏎🏎. We haven’t seen plot twists like this since Gina Carano’s villainous reveal in 6! I also appreciated Nathalie Emmanuel’s Ramsey finally having her Oppenheimer moment and realizing that the God’s Eye algorithm she created back in Furious 7 would only ever be used as an invasive surveillance tactic. That had been bugging me for a while. And with a series that goes a little overboard with all the country-hopping, the ANTARCTICA location card drop is sincerely hilarious.
Average: 🏎🏎🏎🏎
So, in summation: 5 > 6 > 10 > 7 > 8 > 1 > 3 > 9 > 2 > 4