Fast & Furious - ★★★★☆
So far, this is my favorite of the series. I like when someone decides to make a sequel in a different genre from the original movie. Like, I don't want to see that Jump Street / Men in Black crossover movie, but I'd be happy for them if they made it.
Dom's superpowers begin to manifest in this movie.
Fast Five - ★★★☆☆
Another sequel, another genre. I like the inventiveness keeping the series cranking along. Cheers to the writer who decided that we can now, 5 movies in, simply assume that our heroes always win all street races.
Dom's superpowers are more openly on display now. Notice metal bars clang off of his bare arms, among other weird and inhuman behaviors.
The Rock's superpowers are that it's always raining on only him in this movie, and that he's terrible at acting in it.
Fast & Furious Six - ★★☆☆☆
The hallmark of this series is spending the downtime between action set pieces reminiscing about previous installments and what good, down-to-earth friends everyone is (they're such pals that even the guys who only met Dom once come running when he calls). But planting the movie's feet so firmly on the ground makes it really, bizarrely jarring and dissonant when the characters start doing arbitrarily impossible things.
I mean, sure, they do impossible things all the time, but early on in the series we can pretend that they're actually just incredibly skilled mechanics and drivers. Just about any car stunt they want to pull off, we'll buy it. But this doesn't seem like the right movie to make you believe a man can fly.
What this entry does have is a whole lot of punching. Substantially more hitting than seen previously. On the Dom super powers front, he seems slightly more vulnerable to harm than in the last movie, but new powers make up for it.
(Also, why doesn't anyone go and look for Gisele? Everyone else survives falling off of that plane. She probably just needed a medic. Nobody even checked on her.)
Furious 7 - ★★½☆☆
This one's just a cartoon. The first movie in the series to not lead off the credits with a disclaimer reminding you not to attempt the stunts you've just seen, because, of course not. Nothing in this movie would work in any way; the veneer of realism from the earlier ones has completely washed away. Which is fine, but it leaves me hoping that maybe part 8 will be about street racing somehow. Otherwise I think they've got to go to space.
The God's Eye ranges from superfluous to ridiculous, the marriage is a retcon too far, but I'm going to subscribe to the idea that it's Dom that died in this movie. He's the one that "left without saying goodbye." All that stuff on the beach and whatnot, that's his bridge at Owl Creek. His super powers are probably at an all-time high here, but they weren't enough. He's a ghost!
