Fast & Furious 8: Ranking Every Character From Worst To Best
Who says it's only about Dom Toretto?
Every ensemble movie with a large cast faces the same issue: how to balance every character without making too many of them seem superfluous and pointless. To achieve that, film-makers inevitably cut screen time for less key figures, sharing sub-plots across a franchise that perhaps promotes them elsewhere or at least gives them interesting things to do in their limited screen-time. Or they kill them off to make space for the sequels.
The Fast & The Furious franchise seems conspicuously reluctant to do the latter, so F Gary Gray was faced with the rather unenviable task of juggling close to 20 characters who all had enough to do to qualify them as "integral" to the plot of The Fate Of The Furious without the luxury of being able to thin the herd. That he managed to make a film out of that that is even remotely coherent is remarkable, but the fact that he managed to make a Fast & Furious movie with multiple complex moving parts that didn't just distract from characterisation with muscle cars is downright astonishing.
Obviously there are casualties in the sequel's story with space to breathe in this movie at a premium, but Gray deserves significant praise for not making it all about Vin Diesel, The Rock and Jason Statham alone and actually trying to give everyone else something to do. It's just rather a shame that some of the most exciting new additions to the film could probably have been left out entirely, judging by how poorly they rank on the cast ladder.
As the cast swells further, these rankings are going to get increasingly difficult. Here's to Fast 10's probably 200 character-strong roster and still no major character deaths...