10 Movie Sequels Way Better Than They Had Any Right To Be

Played out though it may be to joke about how The Fast and the Furious franchise went from spotlighting a crew of crooks stealing DVD-TV combis to them going to space and becoming secret agents, the trajectory of this series is truly deranged. The most recent efforts are devoid of peril or thrills, and come across instead as a place for various Hollywood actors to star as their most marketable selves. Worse still, since 2017's The Fate of the Furious - where The Rock physically realigns the trajectory of an oncoming torpedo with his bare muscles - the series has gotten in on the joke, embracing the outlandish with a nod and a wink, and thinking that's enough to get away with murder.

There was a point in time when Fast and Furious was sincere though. Beyond the endearing 2000s-ness of the first three efforts, the film that really announced Fast and Furious as a leading action franchise was 2011's Fast Five. Directed by Justin Lin, Fast Five ended up becoming one of the best heist thrillers this side of Steven Sodebergh's Ocean's trilogy, tapping into the emotional, familia and Corona-laden crux of the initial films and giving it a major action upgrade.

The step up in quality between 2009's Fast & Furious and 2011's Fast Five is kind of staggering. While the preceding effort was a functional but slightly stale cops n' crooks action film, Fast Five marshalled the human drama of Dom (Vin Diesel) and Brian's (Paul Walker) story and put them in a fight for their future against a new-age Terminator in Dwayne Johnson's Agent Hobbs. The series has all but sanded the edges off of Hobb's character now, but his debut is still frenetic and punchy, with Johnson the perfect actor to embody the sudden and explosive escalation of the series.

Fast Five and Furious 6 remain franchise high points, but the emergence of that iconic and definitive era was a total surprise.