As of tonight, I have seen every Fast and Furious movie released at time of writing (actually like a month ago at time of completion). And oh boy, let me tell you, it was a ride. I have demons that I need to exorcise. I have seen the face of the devil and he grinned as he hit the nitro that every car inexplicably has.
Let me be explicitly clear about something: this includes The Fast and the Furious 1 through 10 as well as the spinoff Hobbes and Shaw. This does not include the short films they made as extra adaptations while they were trying to prove it could work as a franchise. I believe the content of those movies was covered pretty well in later entries and frankly, I don't care. This also does not include spinoff animated children's tv show The Fast and the Furious Spy Racers, starring Dom Toretto's cousin Tony Toretto, which was executive produced by Vin Diesel. I could not bring myself to commit to six seasons of whatever can of worms that is. This also does not include 1954 crime B movie The Fast and the Furious, which both starred and was co-directed by John Ireland. This is completely unrelated to the franchise, except that they licensed the name because it was better than anything they came up with. This was probably a wise decision given that Race Wars was a serious contender. This further does not include 1949 animated cartoon The Fast and the Furry-ous, the debut of icons Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Nor does it include Tom and Jerry: The Fast and the Furry (2005). Look, I got nothing.
I would take a moment to warn you about spoilers here, but there really aren't any. Well, that's slightly misleading. There are "twists" in these movies, in the sense that there are scenes and developments the movies want to be surprising. But that isn't the central draw of these movies. The entire purpose of these movies is "car go fast". These are stunt based action movies and they take no pains to make sure you cannot possibly forget that. The plots are threadbare at best, the characterization is nonsensical, and any attempt at serious drama is undercut by the insistence on undoing any deaths the moment the actor wants to get back into the series. That's what most of the spoilers are, by the way. The revelation that a character last seen in a giant fireball actually survived. Somehow.
Perhaps I should start with a broad overview. The Fast and the Furious movies are a long running franchise of car films for car people. While the early films were trying for serious drama, they eventually moved onto a sort of hyper dramatized almost superhero-level silly action heist style. It's distinctive for its occasionally impressive stunts and nonsense plots. It stars Vin Diesel as Dominic Toretto, a man whose personality traits are best described as "man", and "manly", and "drives cars". He's big into family in an abstract way where they want to pretend the movies are about something big and people are watching them for things other than big explosions, but as much as he claims family as a motivation, it is hard to believe due to how little chemistry he has with his family. Then there's Paul Walker playing Brian O'Conner, a cop who, despite initially investigating Dom Toretto, switches sides and becomes his heterosexual life partner. He is, for the most part, the most boring white man you have ever seen, topped only by the protagonist from Tokyo Drift, who we will talk about later. Notably, Paul Walker died in a car crash in 2013. The franchise, in a decision I actually respect a lot, chose to simply retire his character in Fast 7. He is frequently mentioned in films after that to establish that he's doing fine, living on a big house on a beach with his beautiful wife and child. Frankly, I wish more movies would do this instead of looking into ai duplicates of actors. The ai duplicates look bad! Stop doing them! If you really gotta, just hire a lookalike! I will suspend my disbelief for you even if it's a bad lookalike! Just stop doing ai actors! (update: I've heard a rumour they're bringing him back for the series finale and I want to scream)
The cast is wide ranging and features a lot of different actors you know from stuff. Some of them are boring beefy men (Vin Diesel playing a big muscle man, John "The Dwayne" Rockson playing a big muscle man). Some of them are cool women (Charlize Theron doing her best to be cool with what material she is given). Some of them are cool men (Jason Statham who is so clearly the only member of the male cast who has studied martial arts). Some of them are uncool women (Gal Godot playing basically Gal Godot).
The movies are not great. They are particularly and consistently awful towards women, both using them as sexy set dressing to establish how cool parties are and also just in how the major women characters are written. There is a distinctly uncomfortable masculinity to these movies. In a way, I think this is the main draw of, at least, the first three or four. They are movies meant to appeal to a boring white man. They are all power fantasies of a white man showing up to the street racing circuit and just winning big, earning all the money, and scoring the hot women. They are meant for boring white men who look at street racing and go "yeah, I would so win at that if I ever tried that, I'm so good at Mario Kart".
There is the usual level of worship towards the United States military and surveillance departments, with later movies featuring "The Agency", a seemingly unaccountable organization who can spy on anyone, kill anyone, abduct anyone, and so on. This is generally seen as a good thing to have around. A line I cannot stop thinking about from Fast X is when the hacker complains that the algorithm she wrote that hacks every security camera to locate anyone is being used against them. "But I made that to help people," she says because surveillance is a good thing to have when good people are in charge of it.
There is a lot you can say about these movies. As with any piece of media, the philosophy of the creators leaks into it and can be picked apart and dissecting. But more important than using them as a lens to look at car culture, masculinity, worship of violence, etc, we can look at the most intersting pattern in this movies. There is one reoccurring scene that binds the whole franchise together: the traditional car versus vehicle fight. There's one in every movie. At times, they are the best of scenes. At times, they are the worst of scenes. Here is every Fast and the Furious movie ranked, in order from worst to best, by what vehicle they make the cars fight.
Eleventh - Cars v Bus
Fast and Furious (the fourth movie in the series, it's just called "Fast and Furious", no really) is easily the worst offender in terms of what vehicle the cars go up against. It adds nothing particularly new or noteworthy to the franchise, only offering a tepid taste of cars versus bus, which is merely a tired rehash of the cars versus trucks and cars versus cars we have grown used to. This likely stems from Fast 4's unusual place within the franchise. It sits exactly before the inflection point when the franchise went from gritty serious action to Mission Impossible style stunts underpinning gonzo heist plots, which was first seen in Fast 5.
This muddled identity marbles throughout Fast 4 and slows the whole thing down dramatically. While many of the earlier films are marred by an attempt at gritty realism that cannot escape the stoicism of their actors or their sophomoric approach to things like gender roles, this one in particular feels like nothing. I cannot remember a single iconic action scene from it. I had to look up its plot on wikipedia for this review. The most notable detail about this movie is that it killed off Dom's girlfriend, Letty. She gets better a few movies later. Overall one of the worst in the franchise, both in general and in terms of car vs vehicle fights.
Tenth - Cars v Car Parks
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the third movie in the franchise, is a truly odd duck. For starters, it ditches our usual cast to feature some completely new guys. These include bad choices like starring the most boring white man of all time and truly wild choices like featuring a character named "Twink". As a white person, I don't feel like I am qualified to dissect these movie's relationship to race. However, I do think it is certainly an odd choice to set a film in Japan and still insist on starring a white guy, who goes on to completely thrash on all the Japanese characters on the racetrack. I dunno, I was kinda hoping for a Japanese protagonist, rather than a cool old Japanese mentor who dies halfway through the film to provide motivation. Don't worry, he gets better a few films later. In fact, Tokyo Drift screws up the timeline. It's actually set between Fast 6 and Fast 7 for reasons that are unclear but seem to be that Han, the mentor figure, was popular and they wanted to keep using him. But then they just reveal he faked his death anyway in 9 so who even fucking cares.
This movie suffers from the same listlessness as 4, only slightly staved off by the change in location. While it does dramatically improve the car race formula of the first 2 movies by introducing a new complexity (instead of going in straight lines, now they go around curves!) they're still just car races. There is a cool slide around the circular entrance ramp to a parking lot, but that's about it. Cars versus other cars and cars versus car parks. That's all we're getting.
The new cast was aged down for this one. Instead of featuring career cops and criminals with resources, we're following high schoolers. It's an interesting decision and I wonder if it was calculated to bring in a younger audience. If so, it didn't work. Boring white man protagonist only shows up again in 9 as a brief cameo and frankly, it wasn't worth it. It does reduce the action quotient. They simply have less access to cool cars and cool firearms. In theory, it should increase the dramatic tension by making the smaller stakes larger relative to the lives of the characters. In practice, it doesn't because these movies lack dramatic stakes. They insist on pulling their punches. He never had to learn to stop being a dick. He just had to learn to be a man. A man who drifts. The Drift King.
It's not a great film. Although, come to think of it, it could've been a great film with the addition of one line ("it's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drifting time").
Ninth - Cars v helicopters
I know what you're thinking. Cars versus helicopters? That's awesome! How can Fast and Furious franchise spinoff Hobbes and Shaw starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Jason Statham reprising their characters from the main franchise in a buddy cop style spectacular adventure that features absolutely no gay kissing (even though it really should've) possibly only rank ninth if it has an awesome action sequence where the helicopter tries to fly away but they form a chain of humans and cars to weight it down?
Well, see, we did helicopters before. We did them in 6. The Rock was in that one. He should know that. You don't get points for repeating a vehicle, sorry. You also don't get points for promoting The Rock to a leading man because oh my god, he is void of chemistry and his fight scenes are somehow worse than Vin Diesel's.
I really need to stress this second point. The fragile masculinity that infuses the writing decisions also frequently drives the fights, particularly of the former wrestlers who can't seem to handle being perceived as "weak". I've heard it said that Vin Diesel has been putting in his contract that he can't lose a fight on screen and whether or not that is true, it is the perfect encapsulation of the problems with both his and The Rock's portrayal. They are both completely unwilling to be seen as silly or cringe in any way and it completely ruins their ability to portray complex characters. During one of the fight scenes in this movie, the Woman Character (tm) hits The Rock in the penis with a motorcycle helmet. Like, full tilt, massive swing, right in the dick. He kinda just goes "oof" and then carries on the fight. And like, I don't buy it. I'm sorry. It's movie fucking magic. I know that you faked the stunt somehow. You didn't really hit The Rock in the dick. You cannot convince me that he could actually just get absolutely walloped in the cock and balls and shrug it off in real life. Why do you feel the need to convince me of that?
Putting The Rock against Jason Statham only emphasizes the problem. Jason Statham is one of the few joys of the Fast franchise. Not because of his acting (which is fine) but because he is so very clearly the only member of the male cast who has actually studied martial arts and it shows. There is a dexterity and a grace present in all his fights that is lacking in elsewhere. It is both far more satisfying and fun to watch and, frankly, less laughable than watching The Rock or Vin Diesel pick people up and throw them across the room to look "strong" and "manly".
The big men are unwilling to be vulnerable for even a moment and it sucks ass. They keep trying to portray The Rock as a good parent but he goes about it in the most masculine way possible. Let me be clear: teaching his girl's soccer team to do Samoan war chants to psych out the opposing team is great. I love that. It's a fun scene. But it doesn't soften his masculine image. There is no vulnerability to it. We see him talk a lot about how much he cares for his daughter. We do not ever seen him interact with the daughter meaningfully except when he tells her he has to break a promise and go kill people, to which she nods indicating her understanding that she is a female character in a Fast and Furious movie and thus has no power or desire. That scene might've been in one of the other movies actually, all of The Rock's stuff has kinda blended together in my brain.
Hobbes and Shaw, apart from our two leading men, features Vanessa Kirby as the Woman Character (tm) because somebody has to kiss somebody and they better put a woman in there because otherwise the audience will realize Hobbes (The Rock) should be kissing Shaw (Jason Statham). She plays Jason Statham's sister so that he can be weird about The Rock kissing his sister, a plotline I find deeply uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons. As well, we have Idris Elba playing actual factual supervillain Cyborg Man Who Probably Has A Name But Fuck If I Know It. He's okay. He's kinda just there for most of it.
Anyway, I like the scene where The Rock jumps off the building to chase the grappling villains, unnecessarily risking his life, while Jason Statham just takes the elevator and basically gets there at the same time. It's a good scene.
Eighth - Cars v helicopt-hey wait a minute
I know what you're thinking. Cars versus helicopters? That's awesome! How can Fast and Furious franchise's tenth movie Fast X possibly only rank eighth if it has an mediocre action sequence where the two helicopters try to fly away the one car manages to pull them down through sheer force of Vin Diesel's will?
Well, see, we did helicopters before. We did them in 6. And also Hobbes and Shaw. And the Hobbes and Shaw version was better than this helicopter version because it A) had a cool cliff B) was set over a cool ocean instead of some random ass highway C) features impressive acts of strength and D) actually made sense instead of Vin Diesel somehow just gritting his teeth and making his car heavier through the power of his big dick or whatever.
No, the real question is how Hobbes and Shaw is losing to Fast X and the answer to that is that Fast X gets a bonus point for having a giant fucking ball, which is at least a new trick. The ball, which is apparently a giant naval mine, loses a few points for not being a cartoon style black bomb with a little fuse and another few for never knocking over a bunch of vertical objects, perhaps to the dulcet tones of a bowling alley "strike!" sound effect. But overall, it's a delightfully silly romp made all the more fun by Jason Momoa's sheer unbridled glee. It doesn't make a lick of sense. The bit where pushing the naval mine into the water to reduce the blast radius doesn't really hold up. It probably could've gone on a little bit longer. But dammnit, watching the serious men chase a deeply unserious ball through Rome was fun. I appreciate that. It was one of very few bits of fun in what was otherwise perhaps the worst movie in the franchise.
Fast X is a muddled mess and, unlike some of the other muddled messes they have made, I can say a lot more about it because I saw it most recently. Also it's more of a muddled mess. The cast is simply too big and they've simply done too much. Perhaps the easiest way to show this is to summarize the plot. We open on a car spinning around a carpark. Surprise! It ain't Dom Toretto driving. It's his kid, Brian. You may remember Brian as being a plot point in one of the previous movies where he and his mother (the woman Dom dated while his wife was dead before she came back to life) got kidnapped to blackmail Dom into murdering people. Overall, this was a shitty plot point only slightly salvaged by leading to possibly the best fight scene in the whole franchise (which we will get back to later). The two have a fairly forced and clunky conversation where the son expresses fear and doubt about his ability to do gravity defying car tricks and asks if his dad ever feels fear. Dom Toretto, the manliest man to ever man, instead of just admitting that he feels fear like a normal human, gives the most awkward vague non-answer made even worse by his manly grimace. He also drops some boomer "kids today" kinda complaints that are just cringe.
I don't understand how every interaction Vin Diesel has is so awkward and stilted. We next see him in the evening having a romance scene with Dom's wife, Letty. It lacks any degree of chemistry. But oh no! They're interrupted by Cypher, beaten and blooded, showing up at their front door to beg for help. Now, Cypher takes some explaining. She's played by Charlize Theron and honestly is kind of a waste of her talents. She's spent the past few movies being the main villain. Likely because she's a woman, her villainy was less direct than the murderous man villains we'd had previously. Instead, she was a super hacker, capable of wrangling computers the way Dom and co wrangle cars, defying the laws of mathematics as easily as our protagonists defy gravity. Her main super power was to always be in control of the situation. Highlight moves include recruiting Dom by kidnapping his ex and son and then blackmailing him. Also for most of F9, she was locked in a clear plastic box without a visible toilet, sink, or any furniture really, and yet somehow she had perfect makeup the whole time anyway. That's just a fun aside. Notably, she has never been particularly martial. Her focus has always been on being in control and having her goons point the guns rather than ever dirtying her hands.
All this is to say that it kinda sucks ass that the only way Fast and Furious can think of to set up their new (male) villain as a serious contender (Dante Reyes played by Jason Momoa) is to have him attack, outmaneuver, and completely humiliate Cypher kinda sucks but fits right with this franchise's usual treatment of women. It's also just confusing. It's implied he is doing it to get her resources and network? But he clearly has resources of his own because he needed substantial resources to pull off this assault? And later, when we see his home territory in Brazil, he basically has a whole army. I mean, for much of the movie, it appears his main superpower is the ability to always summon more goons. But anyway, he orders his goons to kill Cypher and leaves, Cypher does a fight scene that, while almost worthy of Charlize Theron, makes absolutely no sense for the character, and then she goes to Dom's house? So she can talk up Dante and beg for healthcare?
It's confusing and muddled and only gets worse when everyone goes to Italy. The details don't really matter. It's all really just an excuse to transition to the action scene, which is admittedly kind of fun. It isn't the over the top early action scene of F9, but it is fun to watch Jason Momoa cackling about blowing up the Vatican as the protagonists chase a bowling ball through Rome. Questions like "wait, does putting a bomb under 2 feet of water really reduce its blast from "levelling the city" to "ehh rattling some windows" and "how can Dom's car still drive after that crash" and "wait is this the first time the series has acknowledged the collateral damage of their stunt chases" all fall away as we rush to the next plot point. See, our heroes have been making friends with "The Agency", a US organization that behaves kind of like the IMF from Mission Impossible or how super patriotic lunatics imagine that the CIA and FBI should behave. This was good until The Agency decided to bring them in for the damage done to Italy. This makes no sense until you learn that Dante (the villain, remember) has recruited The Agency's current head. That will be detail number one under "there are easier ways for Dante to get what he wants".
So our heroes split up. This causes the movie to fracture into a bunch of different threads, most of which go nowhere. Taking them one at a time, lets start with the side characters. Fast and Furious suffers from massive cast bloat. This movie's trick is to take a whole bunch of characters and group them up. They flee Rome via cargo ship to London, attempt to buy some weapons with some money that one of them was inexplicably wearing as underwear (don't ask), attempt to recruit Jason Statham, and then finally charter a plane where they reach the location of the final battle just in time to immediately get shot down and all die in a giant fireball. I honestly can't wait to find out how they all survived in 11. Apparently the writing team has changed like 3 times, so maybe the mechanism keeps changing too. I really want to believe they wrote that in without figuring it out yet.
The next thread is about Dom's wife getting captured and locked in some weird prison that feels like somewhere Lex Luthor would lock up Superman. Thankfully, someone in The Agency is still loyal to Dom and takes steps to move Letty to hospital where she meets a now healed but also imprisoned Cypher. Cypher uses her computer magic superpower to break the two of them out. Letty, still made at Cypher, proceeds to have an okay fight scene against her, made somewhat better by coming the closest in 11 movies to making me think two women were going to kiss. Sadly, they do not. Letty tries to escape, learns she's being held in the Arctic or maybe the Antarctic, comes backs, meets back up with Cypher who has materialized full winter gear out of nowhere, and the two of them leave together. They hike across the ice for a while until they encounter a submarine inexplicably piloted by Gal Godot's character (who has been dead for the last like 4 movies). The movie ends there for them, to be picked up in F11.
Another thread is John Cena's character (Jakob Toretto, Dom's brother) taking a roadtrip with Dom's son, Brian (not to be confused with Brian, the retired character played by the guy who died). See, while Dom and crew went to Italy, he summoned his sister to look after his son. But because she is a Woman (tm), when goons show up, they have to be rescued by Jakob. Jakob takes the son (he is Important) and leaves the woman (she is Unimportant). The two go on a roadtrip where, by unapologetically liking things regardless of his image, showing a genuine emotional bond with the child, and otherwise being vulnerable, John Cena becomes far more likeable and (in my opinion) masculine than Vin Diesel ever did. There's a blink and you miss it shot where it is revealed that John Cena is watching The Minions Movie during a flight and it's possibly the greatest shot in this entire movie. Anyway, they go to Cena's man cave, somehow get located through bullshit magic, and then take Cena's Mad Max style ride out to begin the final action sequence.
The next thread covers Dante's backstory. Calling it a thread makes it sound cleverer than it is, as though it is a careful and slow reveal throughout the movie. It is rough and juddery, frequently dropping too much all at once while dragging itself out far longer than we need. Basically, in Fast 5, Dom killed a drug lord. Dante is the drug lord's son and he wants vengeance. They milk this for way longer than necessary, likely because F5 is one of the highest rated movies in the series. "Oh, look! We're at the police station where that one scene happened! Do you remember that? Do you remember that bridge? We're going to play scenes from that bridge again, in case you forgot!" It doesn't work. Mostly, it makes me realize how weak the action scenes are in this movie compared to Five.
Dante as a character is interesting and worth talking about. Jason Momoa is clearly having a lot of fun playing him and it shows. He is one of the few redeeming qualities of this movie, being an absolute delight whenever he's on screen. He is also a completely traditional queer coded villain, a thing I thought we had moved past by 2023. He paints his nails and those of his subordinates, talks about ballet, and has an almost flirtatious aspect when talking to Dom. Now, I will admit this appeals to me on several levels. I am a sucker for gender non conformity. Watching a man paint his nails does it for me far more than any of Manly Shit (tm) Vin Diesel gets up to. And, further, this is a shrewd choice for The Fast and Furious, providing a strong counterpoint to Dominic Toretto's insistent masculinity. It's a real shame the script writers are completely unwilling to actually take advantage of that.
Dante's schemes, on the other hand make no sense and take circuitous routes to get to otherwise simple goals. The lead of The Agency is in his pocket but he still has to jump through hoops to get them hunted. All of his schemes turn out to be in order to locate Dom's son, a thing that was easy when he was living at Dom's house before going on the run (a known location). Thankfully, Dom's response is equally nonsense. While it makes this part of the script difficult to parse while watching it, it's easy to summarize. The two keep going places, meeting each other there, reminiscing about F5, and then fighting a bit. There's a big scene on the bridge from F5 where Dante threatens the sister of Dom's ex girlfriend (and mother of his child), a woman introduced seemingly so Dom could chivalrously save her. Anyway, Dante leaves to join John Cena for the final action scene, so Dom gets a plane and does a car jump of plane mid flight trick that is just a lesser copy of the last time they did that one.
Where do you even start on the final action scene? We've done cars versus helicopters before. And we've done it better. We've even done cars versus trucks before. And watching Vin Diesel drive straight down a vertical dam to escape the fireball is okay but honestly mid by the standards they've set. And that's it. The film ends there, Dom and son standing in the bottom of a dam, seemingly most other major characters killed in a giant fireball, his wife hanging out on a submarine in the arctic, and Dante pressing the button to blow up the dam and drown Dominic Toretto for good before walking away. Credits roll.
And you know what? End the franchise here. Do it, you cowards. Dom's crimes catch up with him. Have him drown. You know you want to.
God, what a fucking mess of a movie. They've fired the writing team for F11 like three times, which only bodes well for the continuation. It's like they saw Mission Impossible doing a two partner finale with cliffhanger and, cribbing off Mission Impossible's homework as they've been doing since F5, went "oh, we should do that".
Vin Diesel. Please listen to me. You should not have done that.
Seventh - Cars v cars with a bonus helping of cars v trucks
The Fast and the Furious is the very first movie in the franchise, released in the halcyon days of 2001. 25 years ago. Fuck, I'm getting old. It is far more down to earth than what is to come, telling a fairly quaint story about a cop (Brian) going undercover to investigate a local garage (run by Dom) to figure out who is stealing from cargo trucks using an absolutely insane mid highway grapple hook and board strategy straight out of either Mad Max or a pirate ship. Okay, apart from that one insane detail, it's fairly quaint. There aren't car chases. There are just illegal drag races, the type where they go in a straight line and all the cars are illegally boosted. There are gunfights, but relatively tame ones.
The conflicts of this movie are surprisingly low stakes. Brian wants to figure out who is doing the crimes. Dom and co figure out Brian is a cop basically immediately and don't want to trust him. Brian's bosses figure out Brian is falling for Dom and co basically immediately and don't want to trust him. The plot plays out from there pretty much exactly how you expect. It doesn't carry a lot of surprises, beyond a homophobic slur in the first 15 minutes that had me in hysterics to the concern of the straight cisgender I was watching with. There is a particularly amusing scene where Brian suspects a rival gang is behind the thefts. He breaks into their warehouse to find exact copies of all the stolen goods that just happen to be legally purchased (they learn this after calling for a police raid).
It ends exactly as you'd expect. Their young kid friend dies. Brian and Dom team up to get revenge. Brian is supposed to arrest Dom but instead they have a race. Brian gives Dom his car and walks off into the sunset.
It only offers us cars versus trucks. But it is a rare movie that has the cars using grapple launchers to board the trucks. Besides, as the first movie, it gets a pass. Thus it sits here at the exact midpoint. All the movies before it on this list had problems. All the movies after it on this list also have problems, but at least they're not with the car vs vehicle scene.
Sixth - Cars v helicopters
How do you talk about Furious 7? It sits right in the middle of the golden age of the franchise. It had excellent stunts, some of the best in the franchise, and terrible politics, some of the worst in the franchise. It is the last movie Paul Walker appeared in as Brian. He died (in a car crash) during shooting and his brothers were used as stand ins to film the rest of his scenes. It is the first movie Jason Statham is in and he remains one of my favourite additions to the cast. It was the first of the franchise to have the cars fighting helicopters and so not only wins the helicopter war but gets bonus points for having the cars fight skyscrapers.
The plot is nonsense, as usual. We got a man (Jason Statham) back for revenge after the defeat of his brother. We got a generic black terrorist trying to steal a technology that functions as magic (the "God's Eye", which can hack every camera on the planet to locate anyone instantly) so he can do generic black terrorist things (because we don't have to give our villain motivations if we coast on stereotypes about African warlords). We got the hacker responsible, a British woman who is determined to get the God's Eye into the only place she thinks it would be safe and used responsibly (the American military). Hackers are famous for trusting the US government, so this plot point makes sense. All of this is just an excuse to go from set piece to set piece and oh man, it's kinda worth it.
This movie features all your favourite stunts. It has the one where they airdrop their cars and parachute down resulting in a fun car chase where they attempt to board a bus without stopping. It has the one where they jump a car from skyscraper to skyscraper. It even has the one where Dom rams a helicopter with his car. Couple that with a few fun fight scenes and as action movies go, it's one of the best in the franchise.
Further, this is Brian's last movie. Due to Paul Walker's death, this movie almost takes on a reflective tone. While he is noticeably missing from several scenes, they do a neat job of rewriting and using stand ins to get him through to the end of the movie where his character formally retires. It ends with an actual solid ending, a race between Brian and Dom, serving as a solid recap and rhyming closure of their relationship. This care is present throughout the movie. This could've been the last movie in the franchise and they would've been remembered fondly. This probably should've been the last movie in the franchise.
Fifth - Cars v train
Fast Five is interesting as a movie for two reasons. The first is having a scene that made me (and my brother, with whom I watched all of these) decide that Dom Toretto has incredible psychic powers. The second is having a transition so maddeningly nonsensical we had to pause the movie to try and figure out what exactly just happened.
The real reason Fast Five is interesting is that it's the first movie in the modern style which the franchise is known for today. It's a classical style heist movie. Big ensemble cast of high power actors, multiple moving threads, a detestable villain, all building up to a decently fun car chase with a traditional heist "we knew you would do that and we planned for it the whole time" twist. It's a solidly okay movie. Arguably one of the best in the franchise (low bar). It's remembered as such a high point that Fast X mines it for nostalgia, featuring a set piece set on the same bridge that Fast Five uses for a climax location and bringing back the son of Fast Five's villain.
Despite that, it has flaws. Its portrayal of Brazil of a nest of poverty, violence, and drugs is deeply uncomfortable to watch. I have no idea if Luke Hobbes's deployment into a foreign country with American military equipment is legal, but I strongly doubt it was. It's definitely unethical, although not in a way that would register to the American patriots in the audience. Women remain mostly props, except for when they're using their "assets" to seduce the villain into groping them to get his thumb print.
Also, and this is seemingly minor, but Dwayne The Rock Johnson is the sweatiest man I have ever seen in this movie. There are moisture droplets visible all over his scalp in every scene he is in. He's fucking moist. The only possible explanation is that someone on set had the specific job of continually spraying his head between takes and I cannot think why they thought that was necessary. It's so disgusting. Even thinking about it makes me uncomfortable.
There's a transition so utterly insane that I need you to hear about it. So Dom and co fled the states because they're wanted for crimes. They end up at a safe house in Brazil run by a friend of theirs. The safe house, as is clearly shown when they first enter, is surrounded by a bunch of nebulous gangsters who point guns at anyone who approaches. Dom and co and the fried go to do a job for local drug lord (the main villain) that involves stealing cars from a train. It's a pretty cool sequence involving boarding a moving train from cars, jumping back and forth, and overall secures this movie's status as the fifth best vehicle fight scene. Dom and co bail halfway through and go back to the safehouse. They argue with their friend about the job and then kick him out of his own safehouse by telling him to fuck off. Then drug lord goons show up and somehow all the nebulous gangsters are gone now? While this was going on, The Rock playing a US cop, enters Brazil to track them down. He figures out which city they're in based on following tire tracks and then somehow is next seen walking into the safehouse. There is no explanation for how he found the safehouse. He just sort of teleports there. We straight up replayed the last few minutes to see if we missed anything. Nope! He just kinda does magic.
It's a mess. But hey, at least some of the fights are cool.
Fourth - Car v boat
2 Fast 2 Furious is a legendary movie by the standards of giving us a memetic template for titling sequels. It's also a legendary movie for not having Vin Diesel in it. More movies should try that.
It's a very similar beat to the first movie. Brian O'Conner gets hired by the FBI to infiltrate a local drug lord's organization. He teams up with franchise newcomer Roman Pearce played by Tyrese Gibson. Together, they endure tests of their driving ability, minor crimes, suspicion from their handlers, beautiful women, and ultimately end the movie by driving a car off a ramp in order to ram a boat. This really is what set the standard for a car vs vehicle scene. It's a good one. It's got everything you would want. The car flying through the air. The gentle crunch. The absolutely shocked face of the villain who thought he was safe on his boat. The rest of the movie is forgettable, but that one scene is good.
Roman Pearce is an interesting character though, largely for the progression to come. In this movie, he's just a relatively normal guy and competent driver. Starting from Fast Five, however, he's going to regress into comic relief. His ability will go down, his cowardice and greed will go up, and very quickly no one will take him at all seriously. It's almost a disturbing transformation to watch. It leads to him giving a whole rant in F9 in which he comes this close to breaking the fourth wall, identifying how ridiculous the plots of these movies are getting. It is, of course, another opportunity for the rest of the cast to laugh at him.
It feels weird, in a way, for the lead black man to repeatedly have his "masculinity" attacked (in the way Fast movies understand masculinity). While I don't know a lot about cars and car culture, I can tell that the movies often position the cars Roman shows up in as ostentatious and gaudy. He is portrayed as cowardly, needing to be pushed out of an airplane where everyone else jumps or unwilling to engage in fights. While the rest of the cast leaps into battle "for family" or for "the joy of fighting", Roman's primary motivation is monetary. It's strange for sure. It could all be worth it if he turns in up in Fast 11 driving a cybertruck though. That would be a good bit.
Third - Car v tank plus car v plane
Fast and Furious 6 makes the bold choice to have two cool car vs vehicle fights. This is likely why later movies like Fast 10 had no new vehicles to add. But hey, it's kinda worth it to watch Dom try to take down a tank using nothing but his fancy sports car or a ridiculous scene at the end where they all use grapple guns to hook onto a plane so that the weight of their cars stops it from launching.
There's some odd elements to this one. This is the movie that starts the trend of ludicrous sci fi doomsday device maguffins. In this movie (and it has so little bearing on the plot that I had to look it up for this review) the villain is trying to create a electromagnet bomb that could shut down all electronics over a continent or some shit. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. We've fully left the world of reality and entered the world of shady conspiracy theory where shadowy organizations jockey each other to kill and murder over physically impossible superweapons.
It's an action movie. I don't have a lot to say about it.
Second - Car v submarine
If 5 through 7 were the golden age of okayish action films, The Fate of the Furious (Fast 8) is where the formula starts to break apart. Vin Diesel has seized creative control and the people who knew what they were doing are being pushed out of the room. The stunts are bigger and more ridiculous. The fight scenes have grown more manly. The plot is nonsense. The rallying cry of "family" comes with increased frequency and ever less meaning. It ends with them racing a submarine across an ice flow (their cars are on the ice and the submarine is below).
There's a fight scene in this movie where Dominic Toretto pushes back like 20 guys. It's some anime bullshit but dressed up in hyper masculinity. It's just cringe to look at. It's Mary Sue shit. It is action scenes as a vehicle to make our protagonist look strong and tough rather than action scenes as a thing satisfying in their own to watch. There is no narrative tension or weight to it (there is no reason he had to hold these guys off, he could've just escaped with everyone else). It's the epitome of everything wrong with these movies. And yet, Fast 8, funnily enough, has my favourite fight scene in the entire franchise as well.
Towards the end of the movie, Jason Statham's character does a fight scene on an airplane where he beats up a bunch of goons. While holding a baby. And it's genuinely good. It's one of my favourite fight scenes from anything ever, almost as good as Jackie Chan's ladder scene (at least, that's how it feels compared to normal Fast fare. The ladder scene is one of the best fight scenes ever recorded). Jason Statham's scene works because it makes it extremely clear that he is the only member of the main male cast who has actually studied martial arts. It has a dexterity and a grace to it that Vin Diesel or The Rock never seem to muster. He's moving like a martial artist and it's actually fun to watch.
Further, they've done one of my favourite things an action scene can do. They've given the character a handicap in the fine tradition of stuff like Gunpowder Milkshake's hospital scene where Amy Pond beats up a bunch of injured goons without use of her arms. See, it's not just Jason Statham beating up a bunch of goons. It's Jason Statham carrying a baby beating up a bunch of goons. And it's so full of personality. It would've been so easy to just treat the baby like an object. Vin Diesel would've. But Jason Statham goes out of his way to treat it like a character. He covers its eyes when he does something violent. He makes a joke about changing it. He tries to comfort it so it doesn't get scared. It isn't manly in the slightest and because of it, Jason Statham comes across as far more manly than any of the Big Men who could never pull of something like this. It's a really good scene. It deserves to be in a better movie.
The submarine scene is okay but lacks realism. It feels too cgi. There's no grounding to it. It's a bunch of high paid actors making faces as things explode. It rates high on the vehicle scale for silliness, but honestly I think it could've been a lot better. The cars and the submarine barely even interact.
The rest of this movie is bad and sexist. The plot is that Cypher, a supervillain hacker who is retroactively responsible for the past few movies, blackmails Dominic into going against his friends. She does so by kidnapping his ex-girlfriend (the woman introduced in Five who willing 'stepped aside' when Dom's previous girlfriend returned from the dead). But Dom would never go against his family for a woman, so she's given birth to his son without ever telling him. Cypher can threaten his son, she gets to be evil in a Woman Way without ever having to do any fighting, and Dom can be Manly and Family and so on.
It's bad. Don't watch it.
First - Car v satellite
Look, I said what I said. They put rockets on a car and launch it into space and ram a satellite. How do you argue with that? If they'd stopped here at F9, they could've gone out on a high note. I walked out of this movie and said "yeah, I have no idea how they're going to top this in F10". Look at where F10 ended up on this list and tell me I'm wrong.
In some ways, F9 blows it's best shot early. It opens with a decent chase through Generic South American Military Dictatorship into Other Generic South American Military Dictatorship, culminating in a truly insane canyon jump where Dom catches the rope from a fallen rope bridge around the wheel of his car and swings across the canyon. And yet, the movie manages to keep the stakes up. As action movies go, this one admittedly delivers. It's got some real cool scenes. They pick up some big magnets in the middle and do some truly wild shit with them, dragging other cars into the road as ambushes or pulling up along side someone and blowing them away. It's not at all how magnets work (equal and opposite reaction comes to mind a lot of the time) but it's fun to watch.
The plots have gotten even more nonsense. Dom's brother (played by John Cena) is back from the dead and trying to kill our heroes because of some generic eastern European dictator. (Side bar: it's really uncomfortable how these movies openly worship places like New York, Los Angeles, London, and Abu Dhabi but cannot stand South America or Eastern Europe). Cypher the supervillain spends this movie in a glass prison about the size of a shipping container. She's in a fancy dress with perfect makeup but the glass box doesn't have a sink, mirror, or even toilet so I have questions because she was in there for days. She got locked up by new villains to show they're cool. Now that I think about it, that's two movies in a row where that happens if you count 10. I wonder if it'll happen in 11 too. They hate their only woman villain.
The Tokyo Drift guys show up halfway through as a cameo for some reason. It doesn't really add anything and it made me think about Tokyo Drift so honestly it was kind of upsetting. Also there's a little woman maguffin in this movie. Like, there's a character who is a woman who has zero agency, is treated like an object, and everyone wants to get her.
Conclusion
It is difficult to determine if an action movie is good or not. It is even more difficult to boil down what makes an action scene fun to watch. Is it the scale? The speed? The drama? The tension? There are as many directions to take an action scene as you can imagine. An action movie features a bunch of action scenes strung together by plot. Is the movie good if the scenes are fun but the plot is unwatchable? Is it unreasonable to ask for a decent plot and decent acting as well as fun action scenes? Is it okay to go to a movie just because you like cars, explosions, and montages of scantily clad women? Have I mentioned that yet? Every movie features a montage of scantily clad women throwing themselves at men.
I don't know if it's too much to ask for an action movie with a good plot. But I do know that I can ask for one that doesn't hate women.
I have watched every Fast and the Furious movie. And boy howdy do I regret it.
If some of the action scenes sounded cool, just watch them on YouTube. Don't put yourself through this. If anything else about any of these movies sounds appealing, watch Mad Max: Fury Road. It does everything these movies are trying to but is actually good. If you want something with similar vibes but better action scenes, watch Mission: Impossible. Say what you will about Tom Cruise, but his stunts are honestly good and done with a realism and sincerity that none of these films have ever matched.
Allegedly they're making three more Fast and Furious movies, including Fast 11, the series finale, Hobbes and Shaw 2, which won't feature Shaw, and a supposed all woman spin off, about which details are scarce. I don't know if I can bring myself to view them when they release. They've lost all the okay writers and directors because Vin Diesel is supposedly exceedingly difficult to work with so they're scraping the bottom of the barrel. I've got a few years so maybe I'll have recovered by then? I'm bringing alcohol though, I'll you that much. They can drive as fast as they want but they can't escape that they probably should've stopped a while ago.
God, these movies hate women.
Fuck.
Hey, you might say something like "oh great and noble hat, where have you been? I need your wisdom and your ability to entertainingly review bad media and your skill with words"? And like, yeah. That's fair. I've been going through it. I'm currently getting the most sci fi medical treatment of all time and it's exhausting (maybe I'll tell you about it in 6 weeks when I finish it). I'm still pretty disabled. Also, I've been getting into painting Warhammer and that's been eating all my creative energies. Now that I have this mess out of my brain, maybe I'll write the Warhammer painting blog post and you can learn about that too.
Today's link of the day is Tabletop Time, a youtube channel I've been watching for painting inspirations and tips. It's pretty nifty.
Also check out this sick ass dragon I painted a couple months ago:
