metaregress

I wanted to elaborate on this.

Fast Five is the best because it's a heist movie mashed up with a car driving action movie, and it's where they really start to 'get' the ensemble vibe that will drive the rest of the series. It's still semi-grounded in its stunts and stakes, while still being enjoyably ridiculous and over-the-top, perfectly captured by the setpiece finale. The crew is at best rivals with the cops.

2 Fast 2 Furious is fun because it comes from a simpler time when sequels didn't have to be part of a Cinematic Universe; sometimes you just had a few characters carry over and you could send them on a separate, mostly-unrelated adventure. It hinges entirely on Brian and Roman's abilities to drive cars fast; they have to impress the crook by driving fast, then do jobs for him that involve driving fast, and finally they have to escape and betray him while driving fast. Then at the end they hide a bunch of his money from the cops so they can have it for themselves.

Tokyo Drift again is good because it's not unduly burdened by continuity; it's just an entirely new story. It's more connected to Better Luck Tomorrow than it is to either of the two previous movies. Dom may get a cameo, but Han is a central part of the movie. This movie is also great because it's unabashedly anime. Sean has a whole training montage and a designated rival who he has to best in the road of honor. They killed a major character (even if it didn't stick).

The first movie hasn't aged incredibly gracefully but still has a solid core; the cop who goes too deep undercover and winds up sympathizing with the people he's supposed to bring in is just a good core for the plot, especially since it ends with him letting Dom get away. I liked how personalized the cars in this movie felt; there was a lot of focus on the work that each character put into their car to make it theirs, as well as a lot of general focus on street-racing culture and how a lot of different people can be united by this shared passion that the filmmakers clearly also felt.

6 was where it started to go down hill; I'll lump most of the rest of the list together here because a lot of them follow similar trends and generally get marginally worse with each iteration while still remaining entertaining enough at their core to be broadly fun action movies even as they shed a lot of what made the series interesting. The crew gets cozier and cozier with the cops and the shadowy paramilitary arm of the government, the stakes get raised so far they stop mattering and also become almost entirely impersonal to the characters, or they find extremely ham-fisted ways of making them personal - hello Fate of the Furious and F9. There are still cool stunts, many of them surprisingly done practically - I was blown away to find out dropping the cars out of the plane in Furious 7 was mostly practical. But without the characters to tie them down they just end up being cool displays of technical achievement without any particular emotional resonance to the narrative.

I will say I enjoyed the weird time shenanigans for 4-6 - it was a nice way to keep themselves away from total continuity brainrot for a while and made it feel like they were just telling the stories they found interesting rather than being beholden to always Advancing The Metaplot.