So Fast Five is the first of these movies to be genuinely great, or at least near-great. The key thing about it is that where so many of the previous movies were about undercover sting operations, this one is structurally a heist movie. So they get the gang together, they make an elaborate plan, it’s all the great stuff of a heist movie, but also it’s building on the mythos built up in the previous four movies — there’s literally callbacks to all of them, with characters here reappearing even from the weird third movie that didn’t share any characters with the others.

(It also has Gal Gadot, which I had no idea she was in these things before Wonder Woman, so go figure. Oh, and it’s the first one with The Rock in it, who now plays the skeptical cop that learns to respect this gang of criminals, after the previous skeptical cop got too fully co-opted.)

It’s a bunch of ramped up ridiculousness, but when you put all that ridiculousness in the service of a heist plot with a band of great characters and top-tier actors and over-the-top driving action sequences, it works super-well. I can’t recommend that you watch all these movies just to watch this one, and I don’t think this one works if you haven’t watched the others, but there’s some real GvK energy here, where it pays off a bunch of mediocrity with a movie that is genuinely excellent at what it is.

Fast and Furious 6, on the other hand, is just… you know, a movie. The characters are all still solid, the action sequences actiony, but I literally right now could not describe the plot to you, and I just finished watching it. It’s somehow a movie that’s less than the sum of its parts. It’s not bad — it’s atmospheric and fun and produced extremely competently, but it’s just got a big ol’ pile of nothing at its core.