Recently I watched the Fast and Furious series in chronological order (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 3, credits for 6, 7). While I love the Fast and Furious movies I frequently just return to my favourites (the ones at the bottom of this list). And when I do, sometimes the characters will reference something or someone I’m a little fuzzy about, so I thought watching them this way would help clarify the series’s history. And it did. It also made it painfully clear that some of the movies were a lot of fun and some where not. While I don’t typically like to write ranking lists, I’m going to brave it this one time. Here goes:
7. 2 Fast 2 Furious
Recently a friend admitted to me he hadn’t seen the earlier Fast and Furious movies. I told him, “you don’t really need to see the second one,” and I feel that’s accurate.
2 Fast 2 Furious features Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) pulled in by the government to infiltrate a drug organization by posing as an expert wheelman. Brian demands that he get some help from a former childhood friend, Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson). They’re also working with an already-under cover agent, Monica Fuentes (Eva Mendes)
The problem with the movie is that it’s trying too hard to be fun. Believe it or not, there’s a subtle art to the tone of a Fast and Furious movie: You can have over-the-top fun, but not in a cartoony way. You might think of Fast and Furious movies as brainless blockbuster entertainment, but they respect themselves.
I’m wondering if director John Singleton thought the series was a joke. There’s an awful lot of animated blur added to the car races when the drivers use their NOS and there are far too many cartoon-style close-ups on a driver’s eyes widening when something unexpected is about to happen. Even the colour palette for the film is so wild and bold, like clown colours.
There are some decent stunts and races (and plenty of them), some laughs, and a somewhat coherent story, but somehow the movies never escapes the impression that it is a joke.
6. Fast & Furious
Fast & Furious is the fourth installment in the series and is a return to a more Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel)-centric story. Dom and his crew are still performing complex, high speed vehicle heists (this time for fuel tankers), but disbands the crew because he feels they’re getting too high on wanted lists. Meanwhile, Brian is working as an FBI agent trying to track down druglord Arturo Braga and has Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) infiltrate their organization. When Letty is found murdered, Dom wants revenge and he and O’Connor kinda-sorta work together, posing as expert wheelman, while really just trying to locate and capture Braga and find out who killed Letty.
The plot is not all that disimilar from 2 Fast 2 Furious, the main difference is the tone. Fast & Furious is about the revenge of a lost one and that’s not very fun. It’s grim.
5. Furious 7
This is highest earning Fast and Furious movie, which likely means it is one of the most popular movies, so giving it this position on the list (especially considering the classy send-off for Paul Walker) will not be popular.
Hear me out.
Furious 7 is about Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) seeking revenge on Dom and his crew for hospitalizing his younger brother, Owen Shaw, in Fast & Furious 6. “Kinda.” It’s also about the Turetto crew helping out a covert ops group led by Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) acquire a tracking tool called “God’s Eye” which can find anybody anywhere. And it’s also about saying goodbye to the late Paul Walker.
The best thing about Vin Diesel movies is their focus. They’re not going to win any Oscars for Best Picture, but they have decent storytelling fundamentals while staying entertaining. The more complicated you make the story, the harder it is to follow and the more difficult it is care about all the little bits. So when you have our heroes chasing this God’s Eye so they can help find Deckard Shaw with it, and Shaw chases them everywhere they go, interspersed with meaningful, but out of place moments where Paul Walker’s fatherhood and life are discussed, it’s hard to stay focussed on what the characters are doing and why they’re doing it.
It’s just too big, too convoluted.
4. Fast & Furious 6
Fast & Furious 6 has a beautiful self-awareness to what the Fast and Furious movies have become. It admits, “Yea, our stunts are getting a little crazy, but you know what? We’re going to make them a little crazier and we’re going to have fun doing it.”
The movie takes the same crew from Fast Five (but replaces the bickering Spanish brothers with Gina Carano) who are hired by Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to take down a rival crew. Then it filters that mission with the series-long dedication to family by also being about saving Letty from the rival crew (and herself) because, while she survived, she seems to have lost her memory.
It’s a great two-pronged approach to a Fast and Furious story because no matter what crazy stunt they try there’s a reason and emotion for it. “How did we end up driving a car through the front of a jumbo jet? Well, we were trying to stop Shaw and protect family.”
3. Fast Five
A strong argument could be made that Fast Five is the best of the series. It’s well-paced, entirely focussed on having fun, introduced perhaps the best character to come to the Fast and Furious series (Hobbs), established a successful crew / heist focus, and finally figures out how to use each character effectively.
While on the run from law enforcement, Brian, Mia, and Dom involve themselves in a car heist that gets the attention of DSS Agent Hobbs who brings a specialist team to apprehend them. Instead of running, Dom decides to rob the biggest gangster in all of Rio and calls in former favourites from the series to help him do it.
It’s one of those rare cases where you take a group of actors, put them all together, and the chemistry just works. Roman and Tej, Hobbs and Turetto, Han and Giselle. This is where the Fast and Furious group became a true family. Salute mi familia.
2. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
I’ll admit that I’m unreasonably biased toward this film. I’m a huge fan of the anime Initial D, which is about street racing and drifting on Japanese mountains. So when this movie came out I was predisposed to liking it.
Tokyo Drift is about as stand alone as it gets. None of the previous cast (save a cameo by Vin Diesel) returns. It’s a story about Sean (Lucas Black) who gets sent to Japan because he keeps getting in trouble street racing. First thing he does when he arrives in Japan is get into a race with someone named “Drift King” who has ties to the Yakuza. Sean is taken in by Han (who people liked so much that producers altered the timeline of the rest of the movies) who helps teach him how to drift and encourages his races and conflict with the Drift King.
This movie taught me a lesson about how to appreciate movies. Technically this is a spoiler, but the movie isn’t that deep so it probably won’t bother you. At the end of the film, Han is dead thanks to D.K., and his entire crew is thinking of disbanding. Sean thinks of a solution and finally decides to take responsibility for the destruction he keeps creating. He will go to the Yakuza bosses and ask to race D.K.; loser leaves town for good.
This makes no sense. From the Yakuza’s perspective, everything is fine. Sure D.K. made quite a public mess by killing Han, but Han was stealing from them so that’s probably OK. The Yakuza bosses don’t really know or care who Sean is. Why agree to Sean’s request?
Because that’s the conclusion to the movie we want to see and it shouldn’t matter how they get there. So why get mad at it?
Thank you for the lesson, Tokyo Drift.
1. The Fast and the Furious
This is as close to a traditional story structure as we get in the series. It’s where everything begins. Brian O’Connor is an undercover agent trying to figure out which crew of racers is responsible for $6 million worth of truck heists. While infilatrating the street racing world with the Turetto crew, Brian’s loyalty to law enforcement wavers the more he spends time with the family and the more he develops feelings for Mia.
Structure-wise, this is the best movie. Heists aren’t just entertaining, they’re involving. The film’s climax features Dom, Brian and crew trying to save one of their own who’s tied to a truck. But there are legitimate stakes and a tension to the scene. All the other chase sequences in the series may be flashier, more entertaining, or even more dangerous, but this one feels the scariest — and we don’t even like the guy they’re trying to save!
There’s also a character-building scene with Dom where he tells Brian about his Father and the car that killed him.
That’s my dad. He was coming up in the pro-stock circuit. Last race of the season, he was coming into the final turn when a driver named Kenny Linder tapped his bumper and put him into the wall at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. I watched my father burn to death. I can still remember him screaming. The people who were there said my father died long before the tanks blew. They said it was me that was screaming.
We also get to see Brian struggle between duty and a genuine desire to be accepted by Dom. He’s in love with their world, but can’t be honest with himself about it.
You don’t get this kind of heart or character anywhere else in the series. And while it might not be as fun as Fast Five, it feels the most geniune, the most legitimate — the most alive.