1. Fast & Furious 6

Release Date: May 24, 2014
Starring: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Jordana Brewster, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Luke Evans, Gina Carano, Shea Whigham.
Director: Justin Lin
Read the original Pop-Break review.

As if the title shenanigans throughout the series weren’t enough, based on the title card alone, the real name of this movie is Furious 6. Regardless of what you call it, it’s the best in the franchise. It’s the culmination of everything that came before it.

The team dynamics never work better than they do here. Take the scene where Dom’s team collectively figures out what kind of engine the villain’s car has simply by the sound and the way it handles. Each character adds an element while Hobbs nods knowingly in the background. It’s pure gold. Even better, not only do the characters split into groups to complete their assigned tasks to hilarious or action-packed effect, but they all figure prominently in the finale too. And what a sequence that is. As a cargo plane zooms down a seemingly endless runway, the characters brawl and jump between the cars and plane with relative ease. This is the movie where the franchise completely did away with plausibility and turned the characters into superheroes and the sequence is insane and wonderful precisely because it’s impossible. No matter how many hits they take or how far they fall (with one notable exception), they never get hurt.

However, as good as the action is, the movie never forgets to make it matter to the characters and this movie does that better than any other. While Dom/Letty are by far the most important couple, the Han/Gisele and Brian/Mia relationships are vital to the story too: the first finally gets us to Tokyo and the second gives us the cargo plane scene. It’s the first movie that gets the balance between family/friendship drama and action perfectly right. It’s fun and spectacular and everything a modern action movie should be. And hopefully it’s only up from here.

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By day, Marisa Carpico stresses over every detail of America’s election system. By night, she becomes a pop culture and celebrity obsessive. Whether it’s movies, TV or music, she watches and listens to it all so you don’t have to. You can find her risking her life by reading comic books while walking down the crowded streets of New York City, having inappropriate emotional reactions at her iPad screen while riding the subway or occasionally letting her love of a band convince her to stand for hours on end in one of the city’s many purgatorial concert spaces. You can follow her on Twitter to read her insightful social commentary or more likely complain about how cold it is at @MarisaCarpico.
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