Aaaannnndddd now we’re back to the testosterone overdrive of the Fast and the Furious movies, going through the three most recent sequels (all from Tokyo Drift director Justin Lin) before Furious 7 drops. Here are my thoughts on the first three movies.

Fast & Furious (2009): Wait, I’m confused. I thought Tokyo Drift was the worst in the series and this bafflingly titled sequel was meant to be a return to form? You get the original cast back and this is what you give me? The movie distances itself from the first three by trying to be darker, grittier. The colors have been sucked out of the imagery. There aren’t really any jokes, aside from maybe the way Diesel says “pussy.” It opens with a sequence of Dom and his crew, including a bit of fanservice in the form of Tokyo Drift’s Han rolling with them, in a heist going bad. But we’ve seen this sort of thing already in the first movie, and it was far more entertaining then. It’s supposed to give us a closer example of Dom’s relationship with Letty, played by Michelle Rodriguez, so that we’ll feel bad when we later find out she’s been killed, but it doesn’t work. They didn’t have any chemistry in the first film, and there isn’t any here either. There’s no emotional connection with Dom as he goes out for revenge. The movie is also supposed to be about Dom and Brian rebuilding their friendship, and the chemistry between the two is there, but all the bromance, all the homoerotic subtext is thrown out, and the movie seriously suffers for it.

This movie is so boring that it makes me look back on Tokyo Drift more favorably, even though this one’s more competently made. There’s nothing interesting to the car stuff at all. That opening heist was a lesser version of something the movies had already done, as was the street race that comes later. They make a big deal about the streets not being cleared, but it isn’t anywhere near as thrilling as the Tokyo chase in the previous film, and it’s way too dark to be able to follow what’s happening for the most part. The finale has Dom and Brian being chased across the Mexican desert by more than a dozen cars, and I got my hopes up that we’d get some vehicular carnage not too different from Mad Max, but it never happens, it’s just a brief, cool visual before they head back into these lousy CGI tunnels. Vin Diesel as a machine for revenge, despite the lousy motivation, has his moments early on, but those too are frustratingly fleeting, tiny glimpses of what could’ve been a much better movie.

Fast Five, extended cut (2011): This is more like it! This is where it all comes together and becomes the kind of movie I’ve been wanting to see from the beginning, where the franchise really morphs from cheap car culture wannabe crime movies to full on blockbusters. They finally realized that playing Paul Walker as the world’s worst cop or federal agent wasn’t working, so now he’s on the criminal side, with Dwayne Johnson filling the role of the government guy trying to hunt down and stop this crazy crew of thieves. Everything is better in this movie, even the acting. I finally found myself actually invested in Brian, Dom, and their relationships as they really started showing more charisma here. I was stupidly excited when Ludacris, Sung Kang, and Tyrese Gibson returned, commencing the movie’s transformation into the kind of heist film they’ve been leaning towards since the first movie. The dumb humor and bromance sucked out of the last movie are back in full form. Thank god.

All of the action is great, and isn’t just limited to car chases. The train heist at the beginning pushes that Mad Max aesthetic hinted at in the previous movie just a tad further and in a much more satisfying manner. The foot chase in Rio is fantastic, especially when Hobbs catches on to Dom hopping rooftops and follows through the buildings, obliterating any goons coming between the two of them. Things are more extraordinarily violent, with one later sequence looking more like it belongs in a gritty war movie than here, and I’m not really sure it works. The finale, Dom and Brian with a colossal vault strapped to the back of their cars being slung around like a weapon, chased by an entire police squad, completely disregards the laws of physics and I love it. Not that those laws have ever been firmly in place in this series, of course.

Fast & Furious 6, extended cut (2013): By this point, going through the series is like watching someone grow up. The first three are the teenage years, obsessed with a particular car subculture and sneaking in some classic crime genre elements in the back. By the fourth movie, early adulthood has been reached, with directionless floundering caused by an apparent shame of the past. Fast Five was when the identity of the series was rediscovered and molded into a bigger, more mature form. Now we reach Furious 6, with that identity firmly and confidently in place, settled into adulthood but confidently still taking risks. This may just be the adrenaline high I’m on from having just finished watching it, but it very well may be a perfect popcorn-munching action movie.

This is also where the series’ evolution into a comic book really takes shape, pulling an old trick out of X-Men or Captain America by reviving a dead character and making them a villain. Michelle Rodriguez never got to do much in the other movies, but they’ve finally figured out how to handle her here, putting her up in hand to hand fights with Gina Carano. You can tell Justin Lin was watching a lot of good fight movies by bringing Carano in, as well as Joe Taslim, who played Jaka in the Raid, and he’s gotten better at shooting those fights too. This movie just delivers on just about every level, and the action is so much more satisfying than anything the Marvel movies have really given us, each setpiece crazier than the last. Taking the comic vibe even further, the team is essentially fighting their alter egos, as Tyrese happily points out in one scene, and you get a great mid-credits stinger setting up the next movie as well.