Tier 1
1. Furious 6I'll explain my issues with Fast Five when I get to that movie, but I'm pretty sure that's the consensus favorite and I have a theory about why. I do have a slight issue in this movie with the villain, Owen Shaw, who is a little too all-knowing with literally limitless potential, but that's mostly the only issue. It features the return of Letty, played by Michelle Rodriguez. Her seeming betrayal added a weight and feeling to the movies that most of the others simply don't have. She's one of the best action actresses in the business in my opinion, because she's not reliant on the writing to be compelling. Her absence in Fast Five is a large reason why it's not here.
Also, in a weird way, I think the fact that there are actual deaths in this movie help the movie have stakes. Which I guess we don't know will happen during most of the movie, but the return of Letty threatens the stakes of the franchise - if she can literally die and come back, there are no stakes. They get away with it because honestly Michelle Rodriguez is what F&F needed and because the death in the fourth movie wasn't explicitly shown, which yeah is bullshit but it's just enough to ignore that there was no reason to think she didn't die in that movie.
2. Furious 7
The reason that Furious 6 is first over this movie is that Furious 7 takes a curiously long time to get to the point. I actually like Deckard Shaw better as a villain than his brother, because well Jason Statham, but also he's also somehow easier to buy? Like I know these movies bend reality and aren't realistic, but somehow a lone ranger who can do anything is easier for me to buy than a guy who will literally plan for every contingency possible with his hands deep in every government agency. It's funny what one is willing to accept and not accept in these movies. But it's still 2nd and not 1st. That's because the movie doesn't really get started until the 37 minute mark - I checked.
Also, because James Wan is not quite as good at action sequences as Justin Lin. He's clearly not bad at them - I still have him higher than every other Lin movie. The reason this movie is as high as it is really is because of how the movie handled Paul Walker. I'm not giving the movie extra credit, but the thread was already set for Walker to leave the franchise (though I'm sure he would have returned) before he died. And I confess that "See You Again" as seen in this context is more affecting than I expected - I still think it's a terrible song, but it did its job here.
3. Fast Five
I really wanted to have a hot take here, and I'll explain why I didn't in the next selection, but needless to say, this was the official start of the new age Fast and the Furious, the one less concerned about car races (though they still have those) and more concerned with making amazing action spectacles. And this movie has them aplenty. My theory, by the way, since I teased it above, that people think this is the best is because it genuinely came out of nowhere and surprised people. The expectations properly set, they did not have their minds blown as much as this movie did in the following installments even though they are better.
Why is this third? Elena. Apologies to Elsa Pataky, who I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and just say that she struggles with having any sort of screen presence when not speaking her native language. Because holy shit is she just a black hole of nothing in this, and she's a super integral part of the movie! But there's just nothing there. She's super bland, uncharismatic, laughably nothing character. Which isn't completely her fault. Not like the script did her any favors. If you give an actress as little to do on the page as Pataky is given, you need a better actress than this to make her a character. Her turn at the end is again laughable, because she doesn't imbue her character with any sense that this will happen. It just needs to happen to make the plot work.
4. Fast and the Furious
About that hot take I wanted to do? I actually think in some ways, this is a better movie than Fast Five. It's clearly the movie that cares most about the characters and does the work to make you care about them. I'd damn near say you need to watch this movie if you want to care about the characters at all in the later movies, because besides saying family a bunch, they rely heavily on preexisting knowledge of relationships. It also has probably the best structure and I appreciate the relatively low stakes of the whole affair given how absurdly high stakes the later movies are.
But then there's that damn soundtrack. I asked myself: can a soundtrack really sink a movie enough to make me place a movie below a movie I think is otherwise better if you ignore the music? The answer is yes. This is maybe the worst soundtrack of any movie I've ever seen. And they play music a lot. And Fast and the Furious does not exactly have good soundtracks normally. And if this is your cup of tea, more power to you, but this soundtrack is painfully 2001. Limp Bizkit, Ja Rule, Fat Joe. God I never knew I could hate a soundtrack so much. Everything else about the movie is fine, but if someone wants to remix this movie with a better soundtrack, please dear god let me watch that.
Tier 2
5. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
I think the first four movies on my list, believe or not, are very similar in quality. I chose not to put star ratings on this particular ranking, because I didn't need to. I needed to with my Avengers list to help separate. Not here. But if I did, I assure you there would be a stark drop from 4th place to 5th place. I don't really think any of the rest on this list are good movies. That's not to say there aren't things to recommend and you can't enjoy yourself watching them, but I wouldn't call them good movies.
Tokyo Drift is hurt mostly by some cringey and bad acting. I don't think the direction is bad, I don't necessarily think the writing is bad, and I don't think the story is bad. But the acting is bad mostly. Bow Wow isn't bad, but his character makes no fucking sense at all and it's distracting. Nathalie Kelly is very bad in this movie though with zero charisma. This series is not that great on casting, huh? Han is of course great and the highlight of this movie and why this movie is above the others which have no Han. But ultimately, too much screentime is required of Bow Wow and Kelly, which sinks the movie and Lucas Black is a pretty bland actor that doesn't really add anything either. Get better acting, this movie is good.
6. The Fate of the Furious
I'm very glad that Elena is only sort of integral part of one movie and then was just obligatorily put in sequels because that's just what the Fast and Furious franchise does at this point, but she otherwise might as well not have been in them. That's sort of the case here too even though she's technically important, in the sense that she surprises Dom with a baby and then gets held hostage by the big bad. I get what this movie was trying to do with this. But it is so clearly manufactured tension, it's hard to care. If there were hints she was pregnant or had a baby in a previous movie, it might have even worked. But no. This was clearly "we need the team to think Dom is bad" and that's the best they had.
I realize we're talking about a summer blockbuster here, but this would have been a better way to approach their goals in my opinion anyway. Have Charlize Theron have a point. She's generic action movie bad here with no seemingly human goals. Have her present what seems like a valid point. Have Dom buy into that. Reveal to the audience and Dom's team, but not Dom, something she does or is willing to do that crosses a line big time. Dom learns this information late in the movie, switches sides. Hold his never before seen baby hostage is just lazy writing.
7. Hobbs & Shaw
Never before has Fast and the Furious been more gloriously goofy than this movie. It's as stupid as the movies below this, but it takes itself less seriously and has better action set pieces. Vanessa Kirby is a delight and a welcome addition, but the further twist that only Hobbs' brother can do this is just silly. The sister twist was enough. Go ahead and save Hobbs connection to his family for the sequel. It is insanely 137 minutes long, and someone needs to tell the producers of the Fast and the Furious movies to aim for under a 2 hour run time. While a lot of the later F&F movies are too long, no other movie in the franchise feels as long as this one does. And it very well may be the longest, but that's not really my point, because it's probably only the longest by a few minutes.
This has a lot of fun parts and for a decent portion of the movie, I thought I might rank it highly, but the brother subplot just was a complete dud for me, and that's about the point where I kind of checked out of the movie. This whole movie is action and banter. It really does not help that Ryan Reynolds and Rob Delaney are there to make the movie feel even more bantery than it already does. If F&F wants to keep getting good critical love, it's gonna need to make the villains better at this point and not just cast awesome actors like Idris Elba to play cartoon villains.
I think the first four movies on my list, believe or not, are very similar in quality. I chose not to put star ratings on this particular ranking, because I didn't need to. I needed to with my Avengers list to help separate. Not here. But if I did, I assure you there would be a stark drop from 4th place to 5th place. I don't really think any of the rest on this list are good movies. That's not to say there aren't things to recommend and you can't enjoy yourself watching them, but I wouldn't call them good movies.
Tokyo Drift is hurt mostly by some cringey and bad acting. I don't think the direction is bad, I don't necessarily think the writing is bad, and I don't think the story is bad. But the acting is bad mostly. Bow Wow isn't bad, but his character makes no fucking sense at all and it's distracting. Nathalie Kelly is very bad in this movie though with zero charisma. This series is not that great on casting, huh? Han is of course great and the highlight of this movie and why this movie is above the others which have no Han. But ultimately, too much screentime is required of Bow Wow and Kelly, which sinks the movie and Lucas Black is a pretty bland actor that doesn't really add anything either. Get better acting, this movie is good.
6. The Fate of the Furious
I'm very glad that Elena is only sort of integral part of one movie and then was just obligatorily put in sequels because that's just what the Fast and Furious franchise does at this point, but she otherwise might as well not have been in them. That's sort of the case here too even though she's technically important, in the sense that she surprises Dom with a baby and then gets held hostage by the big bad. I get what this movie was trying to do with this. But it is so clearly manufactured tension, it's hard to care. If there were hints she was pregnant or had a baby in a previous movie, it might have even worked. But no. This was clearly "we need the team to think Dom is bad" and that's the best they had.
I realize we're talking about a summer blockbuster here, but this would have been a better way to approach their goals in my opinion anyway. Have Charlize Theron have a point. She's generic action movie bad here with no seemingly human goals. Have her present what seems like a valid point. Have Dom buy into that. Reveal to the audience and Dom's team, but not Dom, something she does or is willing to do that crosses a line big time. Dom learns this information late in the movie, switches sides. Hold his never before seen baby hostage is just lazy writing.
7. Hobbs & Shaw
Never before has Fast and the Furious been more gloriously goofy than this movie. It's as stupid as the movies below this, but it takes itself less seriously and has better action set pieces. Vanessa Kirby is a delight and a welcome addition, but the further twist that only Hobbs' brother can do this is just silly. The sister twist was enough. Go ahead and save Hobbs connection to his family for the sequel. It is insanely 137 minutes long, and someone needs to tell the producers of the Fast and the Furious movies to aim for under a 2 hour run time. While a lot of the later F&F movies are too long, no other movie in the franchise feels as long as this one does. And it very well may be the longest, but that's not really my point, because it's probably only the longest by a few minutes.
This has a lot of fun parts and for a decent portion of the movie, I thought I might rank it highly, but the brother subplot just was a complete dud for me, and that's about the point where I kind of checked out of the movie. This whole movie is action and banter. It really does not help that Ryan Reynolds and Rob Delaney are there to make the movie feel even more bantery than it already does. If F&F wants to keep getting good critical love, it's gonna need to make the villains better at this point and not just cast awesome actors like Idris Elba to play cartoon villains.
Tier 3
8. Fast & FuriousThis movie has two main problems. Michelle Rodriguez must have been busy during the filming of this movie. Avatar came out the same year, so I assume that she filmed when she could. Which meant that she's barely in this movie and gets killed off. Fast & Furious was relying A LOT on the memory of audiences to care about a character from a movie made eight years ago, because she's in five minutes of this movie and then dies and that's basically the emotional crux of the movie. It doesn't work. It certainly doesn't help that this was retconned as her not actually dying later in the film series. I knew she came back, so maybe that's influencing my opinion, but I don't think it's an especially effective hook.
The second thing is that, while this movie does up the action scenes I think, the ending of this movie is downright goofy. A bunch of cars chasing each other going into caves and it looks fake as shit. Like distractingly bad CGI. It might as well be a cartoon. I watched Fast and the Furious because I want to see them actually pull off stunts, not watch CGI chases. Or at least fool me. It's also a very stupid movie, plot-wise, so this movie barely has anything going for it.
9. 2 Fast 2 Furious
Besides producing a great Ludacris song, this movie has pretty much nothing going for it. It's amazing they ever brought Tyrese Gibson back, because dude can't really act. The later movies, smartly, use him purely for comic relief. Here he's expected to be a bigger part of the movie, and man is his acting bad. It's basically a rehash of the first movie, but without actually making you care about any of the characters and being much more ridiculous, and without being over the top enough to be entertaining.
Unlike the first movie, the soundtrack to this movie is actually good. I wish the soundtracks were switched desperately. Turns out I like listening to Ludacris a lot more than listening to Ja Rule. Didn't need the Fast and Furious movies to tell me that. It goes without saying, but the Eva Mendes Paul Walker romance doesn't really land either.
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