At the beginning of the summer I started my deep dive of the Fast and Furious universe, or the #Furiverse as I insist on calling it. Since then I have blogged about each movie and also listed my favourite Fast and Furious stunts. Now that I’ve done all that it’s time to summarise.

I think this is such a cool franchise and series of films. I really enjoyed the first one back in the day, from the first time that I saw it. I did think it was a bit cheesy and that it was a blatant rip-off of Point Break, but the cheese had charm, and it was a bloody good rip-off of Point Break and Point Break is a great premise to rip-off. So I was definitely a fan from the start. Like most people, however, I wasn’t quite fully on board with the second and third movies at the time. They were fine but just didn’t hit me as hard as the first one had. So after their gap when they came back with the fourth film I wasn’t really that jazzed and I didn’t get round to watching it. And even when the fifth movie came out, to great reviews, I didn’t watch it until a couple of years later. But when I finally got round to watching Fast Five I was blown away. I watched the rest of them and I was hooked into this franchise again. This family. 

The Fast and Furious films have been many things over the years. They have been car films, they have been stunt films, they have become absolutely bonkers heist films. But at the bottom of it all is Dom and Brian’s bromance and the family around them, and for me that’s always worked. The chemistry just works. Vin Diesel as Dom is perfect in the role, but personally I think Paul Walker as Brian is the glue that holds it all together. He’s the cop who flipped for them. He’s the one who brought most of the new gang together. He’s the only guy to really get inside Dom’s head. He’s married to Dom’s sister. He has a boyish charm that lets him get away with saying some very silly stuff, he has stunning good looks and his character also has a pretty interesting arc with some difficult decisions throughout the movies. It’s the perfect role for him. Heck it was actually specifically written for him. It’s so sad that he’s gone, and it’s absolutely incredible what they did with Fast & Furious 7 to keep him in it. It’s just not quite the same having the series continue without him, but his memory is always there and I’m glad they are carrying on.

The series of films as a whole is just bat-shit crazy. It shouldn’t really exist. It shouldn’t really work. And yet it does. Some of the stunts would make people scoff in other films but in F&F it’s done so well that you just go with it, and then they also refer to the absurdity of it later in the film in a totally natural way that completely lets them get away with it.

Like the true geek that I am, I just had to do some stats and make a spreadsheet about this series. To the spreadsheet, Robin!

Here are the appearances of all the main characters. My points system was that they get one point for a main role in a full length movie, half a point for role in a short film and a quarter point for a cameo role. The red squares represent a character dying (spoilers) and an orange represents a supposed death (spoiler).

So who is the most Fast and Furious-y character? Who has the most points?

The top 3 after 8 films
Dom 6.75
Brian 6.25
Letty 5.25

But the top 3 after 7 films (the only ones Paul Walker was alive for) were…
Brian 6.25
Dom 5.75
Mia 5

So that’s cool. Paul Walker gets his ‘technical win’ and Vin Diesel gets the overall win.

FINAL RANKING
It’s very hard to score and rank these. Particularly three of them that are almost neck and neck, and in fact had the same score, but I had to put those ones in some sort of order. The top four films in this list are all fantastic. Here is the list in reverse order.

Turbo-Charged Prelude – 2/10 – Funny
Los Bandoleros – 3/10 – Intriguing but not much happens.
The Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift – 6.5/10 – Actually not too bad, but only because Han is in it. Doesn’t really feel like F&F
Fast and Furious – 7/10 – Meh. The franchise trying to find its feet again but not quite getting there
The Fate of the Furious – 8/10 – A great last half hour
2 Fast 2 Furious – 8/10 – Great banter between Brian and Roman
Fast & Furious 6 – 8.5/10 – Great film. Great plot points. Very emotional story. And that runway
Fast & Furious 7 – 8.5/10 – Amazing stunts and emotional farewell to Brian
The Fast and the Furious – 8.5/10 – Raw and historic. Oozing cheese and charm
Fast Five – 9/10 – This film made the franchise great. The first heist. That safe scene. Unbelievable

I love this whole franchise, and it was great to watch them all again in chronological sequence. 

Salute familia.

PS – I’ve not seen Hobbs and Shaw yet and don’t count it as a main series F&F film, so that’s why I didn’t include it here at all.