Sunday Best: Fast And Furious Films Ranked

Over this past week, my wife and I did a marathon of the Fast and Furious movies.  She had not seen any of them and I had only seen some of them.  This series has been around for almost twenty years and is the 10th highest grossing franchise of all time, but I had never really gotten into it.  So with Hobbs and Shaw out in theaters, we decided to catch up.

My conclusion is that these are all B-movies with increasing budgets.  What makes them work so well is that they know what they are, they know their audience, they never try to be more than they are, and build the franchise on characters that people like.

So here are all the Fast and Furious movies ranked.

9. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

This one is almost universally regarded as the worst of the series.  This is also the one that almost killed the entire franchise.  It is the lowest grossing film of all the Fast and Furious movies.  To give you an idea of how low it is, Furious 7, which is the highest grossing in the franchise, did not make twice as much as Tokyo Drift, not three times, not five times, but... 10 times as much!

Obviously, box office alone is not proof of quality.  But with the exception of Han, all the characters lacked any interesting personality and the racing story felt played out.  Nothing is terribly interesting or exciting in this film.  The drifting is kind of cool at first, but then it looses its flavor very quickly.  It was the failure of this movie that led them to try a reboot with all of the main characters in Fast and Furious.

8.  2 Fast 2 Furious

There is nothing very terrible about this film, it is just that it isn't very good.  It feels like a re-heated version of the first film with nothing terribly new or innovative.  The movie did slightly better than the first, but Paul Walker couldn't quite maintain the franchise on his own.

7.  Hobbs and Shaw

I will have my full review up later, but this movie is so over the top that it plays almost like a live-action cartoon.  There is no pretense on holding to any kind of reality here, but that is okay because the movie is incredibly fun.

6.  The Fate of the Furious

The first in the series without Paul Walker and you can feel his absence.  The series becomes more untethered from reality, but it keeps it grounded by our attachments to the characters in the franchise.  I'm mostly okay with Hobbs hand guiding a torpedo on the ice simply because I enjoy watching these characters interact.  I also found the ending oddly emotional.


5.  The Fast and the Furious

This was the one that started it all.  I don't think anyone thought it would spawn a multi-billion dollar franchise.  People have a lot of nostlagia for it, but when re-watching it, you can feel that is one step away from being a low-budget made-for-cable film.  What keeps it from going there are the excellent race scenes and the chemistry between Diesel and Walker so that the last scene between them feels earned and not cheesy.

4.  Fast and Furious

This feels like the most direct sequel to the original and that is why it works.  The movie is all about how the characters have developed and how the dynamic of their relationships have changed and evolved as it puts them into more and more ridiculous situations.  But this is a straight-forward tight revenge plot that delivers on what it promises.

3. Fast & Furious 6

This movie is pure action carnage.  This is the second time around with the what I like to call the "Prime Crew" of characters and their chemistry works fantastically.  Everyone knows their place in the film and how best to implement it.  The airplane fight at the end should have felt over-long and boring, but I was completely invested.  The movie also has, for me, the saddest death in the series.

2.  Furious 7

This is the highest grossing film of the series.  It took the film to new levels of ridiculous.  And yet I couldn't help but find those set pieces exciting, whether it was cars falling from planes, cars jumping from skyscrapers, or that ridiculous bus rescue scene.  On top of that, the final minutes of the movie are so incredibly emotional with giving such a touching tribute to the late Paul Walker.

1.  Fast Five

The whole reason the why the series has maintained all of these years is because of this movie.  It assembled the "Prime Crew" of all of the great characters from the four previous films and assembled them all together Avengers-style.  It also transformed this films completely into full-on heist films.  It cracked the formula for the film's success: exciting action, over-the-top spectacle, focus on family loyalty, and characters that you grow to love.

Thoughts?