Fast & Furious Franchise: 20 Greatest Action Sequences Ranked

The Fast and the Furious has become one of cinema's most successful and enjoyable action franchises for a number of reasons.

These include great characters, well-judged screenplays and a killer cast, but at the end of the day the franchise's awe-inspiring action scenes have played a huge part in its success. The action sequences in this franchise are basically a genre of action at this point and many different ingredients go into them.

These include plenty of hilarious zingers (usually spoken by Tyrese Gibson), a lot of car porn, an epic sense of scale, an undercurrent of suspense and most memorably of all, ridiculous stunts that knowingly give the laws of physics the finger.

Of course, many of the best action scenes are from Fast Five and beyond, but the early films still have a fair amount to offer.

This franchise does have an incredible track record on the action front and with Fast and Furious 9 having arrived recently, it's a great time to look back on the franchise and see how the action scenes stack up... not that it's terribly easy to rank them, of course. When the quality is this high, ranking can be very difficult.

Fast & Furious is by far the creative low-point of the series, but that's not to say it's without merit. It certainly got the finale right.

The opening tanker-hijacking sequence is forgettable and the rest of the film's action is pretty mediocre, but the film's finale is considerably better and definitely the best thing in the film.

In this last set-piece, Brian and Dom have captured the film's villain and are going through a series of narrow tunnels which lead from Mexico to the US, all while being pursued by a group of henchmen.

The result is a well-filmed, tight and consistently suspenseful car chase that makes excellent use of the claustrophobic surroundings and finally kicks this bland action film into gear. It's a damn shame that this comes at the very end of the movie but still, at least it got one thing right.