Every Fast & Furious Movie, Ranked
You could call it Vin Diesel’s retirement fund, you could call it Hollywood’s leading repository of big, bald men, or you could call it the Michelle Rodriguez Arms Appreciation Society. Most know it by various combinations of the words ‘fast’ and ‘furious' with some numbers thrown in for good measure.
What began as an LA cop infiltrating a street racing gang boosting DVD players has gradually morphed into a billion-dollar, globe-trotting, action-adventure franchise where the craziest missions to catch bad guys (or the worst bad guys, at least) must be accomplished from the driving seat of a car.
Meanwhile, the worldbuilding, mythology, and cast of the Fast and Furious series have grown to become as daftly dense as the likes of the Star Wars and Avengers sagas. These are films in which you can die either on or off-screen and still make a cameo in the next movie.
As the franchise has just celebrated its 25th anniversary – at the Cannes Film Festival, no less – now seems as good a time as any to rank all 11 Fast and Furious films. So, crack open a Corona with your familia and flip that NOS switch as we race through the list, from least good to best.
With an unappealing lead and hackneyed story, Tokyo Drift is objectively not a good film, but IMO, it’s still a ‘so bad it’s good’ watch. Not helping the third instalment in the series is the fact that it stars none of the original cast and shifts the action to a completely different location. Fast and Furious would later become synonymous with James Bond-esque international travel, but at this point, the switch to Japan made Tokyo Drift feel like a total outlier.
The in-story reason for the change is the (unconvincing) high school-aged Lucas Black being shipped over to Tokyo in the hopes that his dad can ‘straighten’ him out. Instead, Lucas soon falls foul of the drag racing yakuza – but it’s all for love! Despite being the weakest in the series, Tokyo Drift is noteworthy for the introduction of fan-fave Han Lue, whose later death caused the creators to shift the franchise’s entire timeline so that Drift takes place after the sixth movie and during the seventh. It also features the immortal line: “Everyone and their grandmas drifts in Tokyo!”
Hobbs & Shaw is so far the only live-action Fast and Furious spinoff. Unusually for a side project to a mainline series, it was a big hit at the box office, but I can’t say that it stacks up among the best in the franchise for me.
The film is an extended enemies-to-friends prequel for Dwayne Johnson’s DSS bounty hunter Luke Hobbs and Jason Statham’s reformed assassin Deckard Shaw, whose chemistry the entire thing hangs on. Personally, I think the banter is laid on a bit too thick and doesn’t always hit comedically. Vanessa Kirby is a scene-stealer as Shaw’s sister, but it’s uncomfortable to have to watch her pretend to be attracted to a man nearly two decades her senior, even if that man is The Rock. The climactic set-piece on Samoa, which obviously must have meant a lot to Johnson, is worth waiting for, though.
Possibly the most-memed Fast and Furious title outside of Tokyo Drift, 2 Fast 2 Furious is the only film in the main series not to feature Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto (he returns in a cameo at the end of Tokyo Drift). Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner does come back for this direct follow-up to the first film, this time paired with future franchise mainstay Roman Pearce, his ex-con buddy, played fantastically by Tyrese ‘WOOOO!’ Gibson.
The pair is enlisted by Eva Mendes’ US Customs Agent to catch a money-laundering Miami drug lord in one of the less interesting capers of the series. We do, however, get introduced to another long-running cast member, Ludacris’ race host, Tej Parker, and the sadly shorter-lived racer Suki, played by fashion queen Devon Aoki, whose hot pink car is the stuff of my childhood Barbie-brained dreams.
Just before Fast Five is, confusingly, Fast and Furious, the fourth in the series, which is even more confusingly set five years after the first film, after the second but before the third, so that we can have Han back. Still following? Don’t worry about it – all you need to know is that muscle-mommy Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty Ortiz has been killed, so Dom and Brian (an FBI agent at this point) re-team to get revenge on yet another drug lord.
Aside from the fridging of the series’ main female protagonist (which is, spoilers, later undone anyway), it definitely feels in this one like the series has run its mileage on the street racing premise. However, the escalation of the emotional stakes surrounding Letty’s death makes man-on-a-mission Dom more compelling, and it’s the first sequel to really feel like it’s building on what came before.
Fast Five may be middle of the pack compared to the rest, but it’s possibly the most important in Fast and Furious history: this is when the shift from street racing to global heists happened, with producers aiming for more mass appeal going into the 2010s. It certainly worked – the film was the highest-grossing of them all at that point, and those numbers only kept going up from there.
This is also where Dwayne Johnson enters (and fills) the frame, initially, like most F&F characters, as an antagonist hellbent on arresting Dom and his gang, including ex-lawman-turned-full-criminal Brian, before they can steal $100 million from another drug lord. Originally, Diesel wanted Tommy Lee Jones to play Luke Hobbs, perhaps echoing his U.S. Marshals and The Fugitive role, but Johnson certainly makes a lot more sense, physically, as a sufficiently imposing threat to Dom and Co. Fast Five is a solid stepping stone towards bigger things, though it lacks the pacing and sharpness of future films. Bonus points for the Han/Giselle ship sailing, and that iconic safe heist.
The OG feels more and more foreign to revisit with each new Fast and Furious entry. With the most ground-level stakes and stunts, it feels retroactively quaint, but even in the daring highway sequence at the end, you can see the bones of the impossible bombast the series will become infamous for.
Compared to the likes of other extreme action, criminal-cop team-ups, such as Point Break, the first Fast and Furious film can’t hold its own, but there’s enough style and charm to see why a sequel was warranted (and then some), and it’s certainly worth revisiting to see where it all started. Remember when Dom ran a sandwich shop? Make mine a tuna sub and a date with Mia, please.
Now we’re really starting to cook with NOS. In the sixth Fast and Furious film, Dwayne Johnson’s Hobbs does what will become a classic franchise move, switching from antagonist to ally when he offers to throw out Dom and Brian’s criminal records if they can help him catch British baddie Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), who runs a mercenary organisation.
This organisation includes (GASP!) the not-so-dead Letty, who has a case of plot-convenient amnesia. Despite having moved on with Brazilian cop Elena from the previous film, Dom can’t resist getting his wife back, culminating in one of my favourite ‘you can do anything with a car’ moments in the series when Dom safely catches Letty on the hood of his Dodge after she’s flung from a tank. Fast & Furious 6, overall, has both the personal and operatic stakes that define the appeal of these films from this point on: the gang have, by now, become Robin Hood-esque folk heroes. The cherry on top is Jason Statham’s then-mysterious mid-credits cameo, murdering Han and setting himself up to follow in his brother’s footsteps.
F9 is essentially a prelude to the grand two-part finale of the series: Fast X and the long-delayed Fast Forever (currently slated for release in 2028). With director Justin Lin – who helmed four F&F films previously – back for the first time since the sixth movie, F9 features a long-lost brother (John Cena’s Jakob Toretto), returning villains (Charlize Theron’s Cipher), and a returning dead person (Sung Kang’s Han Lue). And to top it all, the Tokyo Drift trio blast Tej and Roman into space in – what else? – a car.
With a sprawling cast that would only be topped by the next instalment, and possibly shark-jumping sequences like the space thing, F9 is an absolute balls-to-the-wall blast of an action movie. For long-time viewers, the worldbuilding is perhaps the most satisfying payoff: we see Dom’s younger years, properly meet the Shaw matriarch, played by a perfectly cast Helen Mirren, find out that Han’s death was faked, completing Statham’s redemption arc, and a page boy-bobbed Cipher creepily references the “famous mixed bloodline” of the Toretto clan, perhaps as a throwaway explanation for how Vin Diesel and John Cena could be related when all they have in common are their hulking frames.
The eighth film in the series became the fastest film in history to fly past the $1 billion mark, until a little movie starring another motley crew of world-saving heroes came along a year later. The Fate of the Furious thoroughly deserves its brief history-making flowers – it nails every single key franchise element of the saga’s back half, and adds the one thing it had been missing: a truly great supervillain.
This is the introduction of the aforementioned Cipher, a cyberterrorist played icily cool by Charlize Theron, who kidnaps Elena and her son (revealed to be Dom’s) to force Dom to work for her and against his own crew. Building on characters and storylines established from Fast Five onwards, Fate goes full Bond-ian with an ending setpiece aboard a Russian nuclear sub, and has the Stath pull off some incredible, baby-safe ‘gun-fu’ to save Dom’s son. That son ends up being named Brian in tribute to Paul Walker, who sadly passed away in 2013 – a lovely touch that is a bit weird in-world considering adult Brian is still alive.
Directed by The Conjuring and Aquaman’s James Wan, Furious 7 is jam-packed with iconic franchise moments: the car jump between the Etihad Towers in Abu Dhabi that gives any Mission: Impossible stunt a Tom Cruise-run for its money, Dwayne Johnson flexing out of an arm cast, explaining, “Daddy’s gotta go to work,” Statham shooting a bag of grenades aboard a helicopter, and Letty crying Dom back to life like the Disney princess he truly is inside.
If that weren’t enough, the legendary Djimon Hounsou is on Big Bad duties, pursuing a piece of surveillance tech with the sufficiently overblown name, God’s Eye, and Kurt Russell joins as the mysterious Mr. Nobody – a nice nod to the oily ‘80s machismo that F&F owes much of its legacy to. And, of course, there’s the emotional send-off to Paul Walker, his final film appearance, soundtracked by Charlie Puth and Wiz Khalifa.
