Fast & Furious 8: Ranking Every Character From Worst To Best

5. Dom Toretto

There are lots of flashes of greatness in Vin Diesel's performance as Dom Toretto here: he's excellent when he's under the mask and riot gear attacking the Russian motorcade, for instance, but he really doesn't sell the emotional conflict of Dom's circumstances as well as he needed to.

Diesel's Dom isn't really an emotional guy though: instead of complexity and nuance, he tends to go in for shouting FAMILY and being bros with people so hard it hurts, so it's inevitable that he'd lose something in the film's attempt to soften him. That all starts when he's reimagined as a sort of Robin Hood figure in the prologue, but it's not effective enough to set up why he betrays his team, and it all would have worked a hell of a lot better if the film had played in the murder mystery style without us knowing that Cipher had something on him heading into the Berlin job.

That would have at least covered up the fact that Diesel's robotic, dead-eyed performance after he goes rogue carries no hallmarks of a man wrestling with internal emotional conflict.

Still, when he eventually reverts to type and comes back to his team it's a great moment, and he's still definitely the hero you want to hang this franchise on. It's just a shame his rebellious turn wasn't better orchestrated in story terms.