Every Fast And Furious Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

Over the course of ten movies (and counting), the "Fast and the Furious" franchise hasn't just changed direction, it's swapped entire genres. What started as a series about street racing would eventually grow way out of control until its main characters were using their driving skills to literally avert global thermonuclear war. It has been quite a journey.

But that big of a change comes with some pretty inconsistent quality; below, a breakdown of which ones reign supreme, and which deserve to be left in the dust. 

For most moviegoers, the question of how Brian O'Conner got from Los Angeles to Miami wasn't really one that was keeping them up at night. It's like, we've seen the movie. We can go ahead and assume he drove there in a car. It's kind of the whole deal with these things. "Sure," you might be saying, "but which car did he drive?" Good news! The answers can be found in the six-minute short film "The Turbo Charged Prelude For 2 Fast 2 Furious," a mouthful of a title they presumably chose because "1.5 Fast 1.5 Furious" didn't have a great ring to it.

Originally released as a bonus feature on DVDs of the first film, "TTCPF2F2F" is the definition of unnecessary. It's literally just Brian driving across the country trying to elude the cops, which he does — something that we already know because there's a sequel and it's not 90 minutes of Brian in jail.

At only six minutes, there are a couple reasons to give this one a watch, but they're not exactly indicators of quality as much as they are hilarious. The cops handing out Paul Walker's handsome headshot as his mugshot is one of them, and the overlays of a map of America to indicate Brian's drive, which have not aged well, are another. The best bit, though, comes right at the start, when Brian looks into a mirror and it turns into a skewed, badly CGI'd scene from the first film. If you're doing a marathon of all the "F&F" films, then put this one on while you hit the bathroom or make popcorn and you might catch something funny on the screen. Otherwise, you're safe to skip it.

It might not be a good movie, but there's one thing that you really have to hand to "2 Fast 2 Furious": it really was the sketchy blueprint for what the franchise would eventually become. It doesn't actually get there, but it does have the first stumbling steps towards making movies that aren't just about a dude going undercover to bust street racers.

Ludacris and Tyreese Gibson's addition to the cast as Tej and Roman — this generation's Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, just waiting for a holiday movie to star in — was the first step towards putting together the crew that would turn the movies from buddy pictures into a full-on ensemble cast of total badasses who never lose a fight, and the setup of O'Conner being blackmailed into action with the promise of his freedom? That's the premise of at least three of these movies — maybe even five, depending on how loosely you want to define "freedom."

Unfortunately, even though it has what stands as the single best title in the franchise, it's simply not very good. The car stunts are just okay, the characters are flat, and worst of all, it's the only movie in the franchise that doesn't have Vin Diesel in it. That dude even showed up for "Tokyo Drift," but for this one, he was too busy filming an action movie that ends with him smack-talking a completely inanimate boat. And for the record? That movie is way better than this one.

"Los Bandoleros" is a short film that serves as a prelude to Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez's return in "Fast & Furious," and looking back from a world where those two characters had to fight a nuclear submarine to keep someone from holding the entire planet Earth hostage, it seems weird. It's a movie for all the fans who wanted to see the quieter, more introspective side of Dom Toretto. It's just not clear that any of those people actually exist.

The one big justification for sitting down with "Los Bandoleros" for the duration of its 18-minute runtime is that both Diesel and Rodriguez are shockingly underrated as dramatic actors. Diesel in particular has been playing the stoic, self-serious action hero for so long — and seems perfectly happy in those roles — that it's easy to overlook the underlying skills that have made him so compelling in those roles. Anyone can do a deep, rumbly voice, but there's a reason he was cast as the Iron Giant, and became a fan favorite in a film where his entire performance consisted of saying exactly three words with various inflections while a talking CGI tree did all the emoting.

More than anything else, "Los Bandoleros" — which Diesel also wrote and directed — is indicative of how deeply he feels connected to Dom Toretto. Unfortunately, Toretto's quiet, slice of life moments are best featured in small doses between explosions. That said, "Los Bandoleros" does have Han in it, and everyone wants more Han.

The weirdest thing about the original "The Fast and the Furious" is that it's not actually weird at all, and really, that's the problem.

It's both accurate and actually pretty charitable to refer to "TF&TF" as a paint-by-numbers ripoff of "Point Break," with the surfing and skydiving swapped out for street racing. It's not really bad. Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and Michelle Rodriguez all have an undeniable chemistry that would end up serving them much better in later movies, and Diesel in particular turns in a performance that the Chicago Reader accurately pegged as an "unsettling mix of Zen-like tranquility and barely controlled rage" that showed exactly why he was destined to become one of the next great action stars. 

At the same time, it's also incredibly basic, without much in the way of characters, a script that offers zero surprises, and some car action that, despite being the very thing meant to bring viewers into the theater, was good, but not great.

If you skipped ahead from the first movie in the franchise to the last, you'd never believe that this was the story that would eventually find its main characters being threatened with a literal nuclear apocalypse. 

"Tokyo Drift" feels like a movie from an alternate universe where the "Fast & Furious" movies never became the completely insane over-the-top action saga, and instead just became the car-based equivalent of "Bring It On" or "American Ninja," where some new actor would show up for a vaguely connected street racing adventure every few years until the heat death of the universe.

From a storytelling standpoint, it's another one that's pretty bland but not terrible, with a plot that follows the "Karate Kid" formula but with sweet drifts instead of crane kicks. There's some really fun stuff to be had — a character literally being named "Drift King" is genuinely great, and Bow Wow's smug "if you're not out of control, you're not in control" is one of the few lines in the entire franchise that can stand up to the hilarious quotability of Dom Toretto growling "I live my life a quarter mile at a time" — but calling it the most unloved film in the series is a pretty massive understatement. This is, after all, the one that has a major character death that the rest of the movies just straight up ignore until they finally get around to addressing it three movies and seven years later.

Really, that's a shame. It might not be a great movie, and fans will happily take Han Seoul-Oh and his amazing pun name back anytime, but it's still a little heartbreaking that Lucas Black never got to join the crew, even after his story was finally made official "F&F" canon.

Now we're getting somewhere. Seriously, if you've somehow managed to live this long without seeing any of these movies and want to just go ahead and skip to the best ones, skip the first three and start here.

Not only is this the movie that starts to ramp things up with buck wild missions and stunts that are only vaguely related to cars — the opening sequence of Dom and his crew hijacking oil tankers by driving semi trucks backwards and snapping them off the convoy with liquid nitrogen is awesome and bonkers in equal measure — and not only does it set the pattern of globe-trotting adventure, it also marks the first great team-up of the series where neither person was named "The Rock" or "Vin Diesel": director Justin Lin and screenwriter Chris Morgan.

Okay, admittedly, they actually first showed up on "Tokyo Drift" — meaning Morgan can be credited with writing the "out of control/in control" line and Lin with keeping it in the movie — but that one was a side story at best. This movie marked the first time that they were unleashed with the core cast, and they made the most of it with Morgan's increasingly imaginative (and improbable) set pieces and Lin's incredible talent for action.

If there was any doubt "Furious 7" had completed the franchise's shift from heist-oriented action to full-on superheroes, it was thoroughly obliterated by the arrival of "Hobbs & Shaw." Swap out the names, and Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson could've been playing virtually any members of the Avengers, battling against a straight up bulletproof cyborg superman with a robot motorcycle and defeating him with the power of friendship. Also, considering that there's a part where the title duo blow up about three square miles of oil refineries in Siberia, it has a claim on possibly being the loudest film ever made.

Unfortunately, "loud" doesn't always translate to "good," even in the world of "Fast & Furious." Statham and Johnson have a muscled-up "Odd Couple" chemistry, but without the larger context of la familia around them, it's hard to find any tension with two gigantic dudes who never lose fights. Idris Elba brings his undeniable charisma to the role of Brixton Lore — a name so straight out of comic books that it would seem over the top in the Marvel Universe — but as a villain, he has the depth of a coffee cup and makes about as much sense in the fight scenes. Thanks to his unstoppable cybernetic enhancements, Brixton is the ultimate soldier who can take down any opponent ... unless he has to fight two guys, in which case he goes down like a sack of potatoes. Good thing one-of-a-kind cyborg super-soldiers are never going to be outnumbered, right?

There's a lot of fun to be had with the wilder moments of "H&S." The Rock flexing so hard he can move a helicopter and a semi truck is a hoot, Helen Mirren is every bit as delightful in her tiny role as Shaw's dirtbag mom as she was "Fate of the Furious," and Vanessa Kirby handled the transition from "The Crown" to "Fast & Furious" about as well as anyone could be expected to. Still, if this movie showed anything, it wasn't that you can pull two characters out of the "F&F" ensemble and make them work on their own — it was that the ensemble is a way bigger part of the appeal than perhaps first thought.

Family. That's the core theme running throughout every "Fast and Furious" movie. It's such an integral part of the franchise's DNA that it has become a meme. So, it is a bit strange that 2021's "F9: The Fast Saga" — also directed by Justin Lin — reveals in true soap opera fashion that Dom had abandoned his own flesh-and-blood brother, the previously unmentioned Jakob Toretto (played in flashbacks by Finn Cole, and in the present by John Cena), who is now a shady super-spy.

It's even more strange that this somehow ... works? The reason for Dom's hatred comes from Jakob killing their father during a race — which makes a certain amount of sense — until he later learns from Jakob that it was an accident, eventually leading to Dom forgiving him. Cena holds his own in the ever-expanding cast of characters, as both a threat and later as part of the family.

There's also many great action set-pieces that continually raise the bar — such as Dom using a rope bridge on his car to escape falling from a cliff like a physics-defying metal Tarzan. The filmmakers even finally get the characters into space, leading to Roman and Tej amusingly debating whether they are, in fact, invincible.

Despite all that, one of the main reasons it's not higher in the pantheon of "Furious" films is its decision to bring back Han. Even though he's a fan-favorite — and for good reason — it robs the franchise of any lasting stakes or consequences.

2023's "Fast X" had a rough start getting out of the gate, with Lin very publicly leaving the franchise, replaced by French action-auteur Louis Leterrier (the "Transporter" films). 

But Leterrier fits the series like a glove, directing some of the most inventive, explosive action sequences yet to hit the franchise. Both the sequence with the rolling neutron bomb wreaking havoc in Rome and Dom driving his iconic black 1970 Dodge Charger R/T down the side of the almost 800-foot Hoover Dam are crowd-pleasing showstoppers.

Jason Momoa makes a great villain as Dante Reyes, the demented son of "Fast Five" villain Hernan Reyes. He's over-the-top and flamboyant, but also convincingly able to turn on a dime into scary and intimidating. He steals the show as what is basically the "Fast and Furious" version of The Joker.

Unfortunately, there are some issues with the film. Despite Momoa having a lot of fun, there are some disappointingly retrograde characteristics of the homophobically gay-coded "foppish" villains of the past. This includes Dante painting his nails and talking about "being more open about our masculinity," in contrast to Dom's more traditional form of masculinity. He also harasses women, another trait unnecessary for selling villainy in 2023. The reveal of Gal Gadot's Gisele at the end doesn't help; it rings even phonier than Han's resurrection in the previous film.

Lastly, while it was stated before the film was released that it would end on a cliffhanger, the ending seems hurried, sudden and unsure of itself. Very little is resolved, making "X" feel particularly inessential.

If Lin and Morgan were the architects and Diesel and Walker were the core, then "Fast Five" introduced the last ingredient that would make the series truly great: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as Luke Hobbs, the truly massive government agent who is essentially what would happen if the Terminator was a lovable single dad.

Hobbs added a believable nemesis for Toretto — something that was actually pretty necessary when you consider that by this point in the franchise, Dom was just snapping handcuffs at will like it wasn't even a thing — but more than that, his arrival and the subsequent fight-then-team-up story pushed the crew's adventures into a full-on international espionage style that the following sequels would deliver on.

As for the plot... well, it's not the best. They spend a lot of time practicing a heist that becomes more-or-less irrelevant once Hobbs joins the team and they can just drag a bank vault through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, and they don't even bother to go to Tokyo when it's time to learn how to drift like DK. Really though, the movie's fun enough that its shortcomings in the story department hardly matter.

In some ways, this is just a superhero movie. Consider the following: The villain is a super-hacker headquartered in a high-tech plane that flies through mysterious invisible holes in a global surveillance network introduced in the last movie. Her evil plan is to steal the world's supply of nuclear weapons. The villain's big plan to kill the good guys is just straight up turning every car in New York City into a zombie. Zombie cars. Seriously.

Speaking of airborne scenes, at one point two dudes are flying around on jetpacks with wing suits that look like Falcon from the MCU.

Dom Toretto wins the movie's one mandatory street race by driving backwards across the finish line in a car that he has torn apart with his bare hands. The car is also on fire and explodes immediately after he wins. If this sounds unlikely for the average human's abilities, also consider that during an escape from an ultra-max prison, Hobbs gets shot at point-blank range by a guard with a shotgun, and replies with "Rubber bullets. Big mistake." He is then shot three more times and then beats up the guard with no visible effect whatsoever.

Oh, and the good guys fight a submarine.

The big trick of the "F&F" is that it's not really about the cars. It's not even about a crew or a heist team. It's about that one word that Diesel rumbles into his dialogue whenever there are more than four characters onscreen: family. It might just be shorthand for the big ensemble cast, but there really is something about the combination of characters that makes them easy to believe as people who genuinely care about each other, and it's the reason why all of their enemies keep on switching sides and joining up with the good guys.

That's not just something that happens to Hobbs, either. It eventually happens to the bad guy in this movie, who was so evil that he played Dracula in another movie, and gave us the beautiful hope that by the time we get to the ninth one, they're just going to decide that vampires are real and bring in Wesley Snipes as Blade to even the odds. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

The point is, after a solid decade of paper-thin plots bolstered by increasingly great action, "F&F6" proved that the series could actually build a story around an emotional core that showed. It's a completely insane emotional core, of course, with the beautifully soap operatic plot twist of Letty returning from the dead with amnesia, but in the universe they've made for these stories, that actually works pretty well. Plus, by the time we actually catch up with a movie that came out ten years before and actually get Han's death, it finally feels like it means something. That's a pretty tough trick to pull off.

"Furious 7" might be the single greatest action movie ever made. There may be other movies that are smarter, that have better fights, and that make more sense — that last one's not that hard — but there's only one movie where the Rock stands up out of a hospital bed with a broken arm, flexes so hard that his cast explodes, steals an ambulance, takes out a drone that's trying to murder his friend, and then rips out the drone's machine gun so he can kill a helicopter. Keep in mind, this is something that happens to one character in one sequence. 

The movie also has two dudes driving into each other at a combined speed of about 200 miles per hour, then getting out of the wreckage and having a fistfight, and another scene where someone dies and is literally resurrected with the power of love. Oh, and also they drive a car out of one building and into another, 40 stories up.

It is relentless from the jump, while also managing to be charming and funny, and the ending's memorial to Paul Walker is surprisingly emotionally affecting. In other words, it's great. It's just really weird to think about how this whole thing started with street racing.