Aside from that scene in Fast & Furious 7, the Fast & Furious series isn’t exactly known for its emotional moments, even if it is one of the most melodramatic movie franchises in cinematic history. However, thanks to the connection these characters have built over the series, there are a surprising amount of meaty and emotive performances.
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The Fast & Furious series is built off grounded crime and high stakes drama, but even when the franchise shed it’s very 2000s skin and abandoned its street racing novelty in favor of becoming an imitation of Mission: Impossible, the emotional scenes still remained intact. In fact, some of the most emotional scenes come in the series’ later years.
2 Fast 2 Furious: The Car Scramble
As the Fast & Furious series is known, almost to a humorous extent, for its emphasis on family, there tends to be a lot of melodrama underlining most of the movies. But on the other side of the coin, there are entries in the franchise that don’t even try to make the audience feel anything.
Though 2 Fast 2 Furious doesn’t exactly make viewers cry, it’s fun as hell. The closest the movie gets to audiences feeling any kind of emotion is on an exciting level, and the most exciting moment comes with the car scramble, in which dozens of souped-up imports bounce out of a huge garage as Brian tries to confuse the feds.
Hobbs & Shaw: Samoan Warriors
Hobbs & Shaw isn’t exactly one of The Rock’s best movies, as it’s a spin-off considered inferior to the main series and introduces the franchise to superpowers. If the series hadn’t jumped the shark three films ago, it certainly has now.
However, there are some highlights that keep the film from being terrible, most of which is the camaraderie between Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham. But even better than that are the Samoan Warriors, in which Johnson was able to include a lot of his culture into a huge blockbuster movie, and it’s the only passionate moment in the film.
Fate Of The Furious: Elena’s Death
Elena’s pregnancy is one of the things about the series that makes no sense, but it doesn’t make her death any less shocking. As she is the mother of Dom’s son, the FBI agent was Dom’s one-time lover who got caught up in the middle of one of the F&F crew’s covert missions.
Being one of the reasons why Cipher is the best villain of the series, she shows no mercy as she holds Dom’s child behind glass whilst one of her henchmen murders Elena at point-blank range.
Fast & Furious: The Reunion
It just goes to show how strong the acting actually was in The Fast And The Furious, as even though they’ve only featured in one movie together, when Dom and Brian meet for the first time in eight years, it was a transformative moment.
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Fast & Furious is sometimes seen as the worst movie in the series, and it’s the first in the franchise to sloppily mesh the street racing and grounded crime of the original with the globe-trotting, espionage superhero-ness of the recent movies, but it nails the first scene between the two stars. There’s so much weight to the history Dom and Brian have together, and with it being so long since they last met, that weight is felt in just the looks that they share.
Tokyo Drift: Han’s Death
Hans’ return to the franchise was one of the moments the series was so bad it was good, as it made no sense and totally turned the Fast & Furious timeline into a contrived mess. But before that happened, Han had one of the most hard-hitting deaths in the series.
Tokyo Drift gets a bad rep, but it continues not only the hair-raising races but the high stakes too, as killing off one of the lead characters rarely happens these days (just in case the studio wants to make a sequel). Though audiences had only spent an hour with Han until his nasty death on the streets, it was tough to watch after he had become somewhat of a mentor to Sean.
Fast & Furious 6: Gisele’s Death
Before donning the whip and invisible jet in the DC cinematic universe with Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot’s breakthrough was in the Fast & Furious series as Gisele Yashar. Though it’s only Gisele’s second outing with the Fast & Furious crew, she definitely made her mark as one of the gang, which makes her death all the more devastating.
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As Gisele forms a romantic relationship with Han, who is holding on to her when she’s hanging from an airplane, she sacrifices herself to save his life, and it almost makes audiences forget how ridiculous the whole scene is.
Fast Five: “I’m Pregnant”
Being Brian’s love interest ever since The Fast And Furious (except for Monica in 2 Fast 2 Furious), which had been going on for 10 years at this point, his relationship with Mia is surprisingly one of the most earnest in any movie. In a genre where the lead actors bounce between relationships with every new release, it’s endearing to see Brian stay in the same happy relationship for the whole series, and that’s why Mia’s pregnancy announcement is so powerful.
The scene is made even better when she tells Dom, as she’s almost scared about how he’ll react, only for him to be completely emotional. However, this scene might be to blame for being the catalyst of the whole “Family” meme.
The Fast And The Furious: Brian Blowing His Cover
Though the razor-thin storytelling is one of the franchise’s flaws, the original The Fast and the Furious is a grounded crime movie with a lot of heart. Throughout the whole movie, audiences see Brian and Dom form a brotherly bond, and that’s why it’s heartbreaking when Dom finds out Brian is an undercover cop.
At the end of the movie, Brian is at odds over whether or not to blow his cover. If he doesn’t blow his cover by radioing in for medical help, Vincent will die, but if he does blow his cover, Dom will most likely want to kill him. When Dom does find out, his anger and sense of betrayal are visible, and there hasn’t been a more intense scene in the series since.
Furious 7: “It’s Never Goodbye”
The final five minutes of Furious 7 seems as if it could very well be from a completely different movie, as the whole 140-minute movie doesn’t slow down between action set pieces. From jumping off sky-scrapers to cars reversing out of airplanes, the movie was for all intents and purposes a theme park ride, as Martin Scorsese would say.
However, after Paul Walker died during the production of the movie, he was given the most beautiful send-off possible, as it showed Brian playing on the beach with his family before a final drive with Dom. It then ended with a montage of clips of Walker bonding with the cast from the previous movies, and it’s one of the times the franchise could have ended.
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