The Action Movie That Saved a Failing Franchise Turns 14 This Month

Fast Five is celebrating its fourteenth anniversary this month. The fifth installment in the beloved Fast & Furious franchise is often credited with getting the saga back on its feet after a string of underwhelming sequels.

Directed by Justin Lin and starring Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, and Jordana Brewster, Fast Five was a huge stylistic switch-up for the franchise. Where previous entries had prioritized grounded, character-driven storytelling, Fast Five pushed the boundaries of these movies' propensity for exaggerated, lighthearted action sequences.

‘Fast Five’ Was the Beginning of ‘Fast & Furious’ as We Know It Today

After hitting its lowest point yet with 2009's confusingly titled Fast & Furious, the franchise clearly needed to head in a new direction for its fifth installment. Despite exceeding box office expectations and becoming the highest-grossing entry in the franchise, Fast & Furious was a critical bomb that scored just 28% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Much of the film's criticism sounded the same: the saga had overstayed its welcome, and its self-serious melodrama was becoming tired. There are only so many dramatic twists that can be feasibly executed in a franchise about racing cars and stealing DVDs.

And so, Fast Five changed the formula completely. Instead of committing petty crimes and moping about their strained friendship, this time Dom & Brian were stealing $100 million from a Brazilian crime boss while evading capture from the FBI.

It was the beginning of a huge transition for Fast & Furious—these are no longer grounded crime thrillers, but rather huge-scale action blockbusters with immense set pieces and even more dramatic stories.

Undeniably, this bold transformation of the franchise is what saved it from inevitable failure. Universal Studios would never have canceled the franchise while it was making such a reliable profit, but if the reviews had continued to decline, it would have only been a matter of time before audiences got fed up.

Fast Five, Fast & Furious 6, and Furious 7 all had something in common—beyond the unusual naming conventions. Each movie felt bigger and more dramatic than the one that preceded it, and for a while, this kept the franchise afloat.

While general perception of Fast & Furious has now dwindled once again, with sequels such as F9 and Fast X pushing the limits of this large-scale action storytelling to its limits, it's fair to say that Fast Five was the shock to the system that Fast & Furious needed to avoid dropping into irrelevance.