10 Mindless & Fun Action Movies If You Love The Fast & Furious Franchise

From the bouncer brawler Road House to the high-octane spy caper True Lies, there are plenty of great mindless action movies out there for Fast & Furious fans to enjoy. What makes the Fast & Furious movies so much fun is that they allow the audience to switch off their brain. They flagrantly defy the laws of physics with their absurd action set-pieces. James Bond movies tend to have complicated plots and the Bourne movies deal with heavy themes, but the Fast & Furious saga doesn’t strive to do anything more than entertain.

There are plenty of other great action movies that fall into this category. Directors like Michael Bay and stars like Jason Statham have made a career out of action movies that stimulate the audience’s adrenaline while giving their intellect some much-needed rest. There are action movies with ridiculous premises that make no sense, like the face-swapping plot of Face/Off, and action movies that prioritize testosterone-fueled bromance over logic and reason, like Point Break. There are a ton of delightfully ludicrous action movies to check out in between rewatches of the Fast & Furious franchise.

10

The Rock


Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage on Alcatraz Island in The Rock

Michael Bay is one of the first names in the kind of mindless action that Fast & Furious peddles in. The pinnacle of Bay’s particular brand of explosive cinematic spectacle — often dubbed “Bayhem” — is the gloriously bonkers Alcatraz actioner The Rock. When a group of rogue Marines take hostages on Alcatraz Island and threaten to release a lethal toxin into the air, it’s up to Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery to save the day.

After establishing his penchant for stunning action scenes in Bad Boys, Bay was granted a much higher budget for his sophomore effort. The Rock is a bigger, bolder, and wilder movie in every way, and a precursor to Fast & Furious. Cage and Connery are well-matched as a nerdy FBI chemist and what is essentially an older version of James Bond, respectively; their bickering dynamic is endlessly watchable.

9

Speed


Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock driving the bus in Speed

Six years after doing the cinematography for Die Hard, Jan de Bont made his directorial debut by transplanting the Die Hard formula onto a bus. Keanu Reeves stars in Speed as a cop who ends up on a bus that’s been rigged with a bomb that will explode if the bus’ speed drops below 50mph. Sandra Bullock plays the put-upon pᴀssenger tasked with keeping the speed above 50 and Dennis Hopper plays the sadistic terrorist who planted the bomb.

The bus action in Speed is befitting of a Fast & Furious film. The scene in which the bus jumps over an incomplete stretch of highway certainly wouldn’t be out of place in a Fast & Furious movie. Speed is more than just a Die Hard ripoff; Reeves’ Jack Traven is more straitlaced than John McClane, and the fast-moving action brings a whole new angle to the story.

8

Road House


Patrick Swayze as James Dalton in readying himself for a fight while covered in blood in Road House.

Part of the absurdist fun of the Fast & Furious franchise is that it turns a bunch of mechanics and street racers into international mercenaries working for a shady government agency. Rowdy Herrington’s Road House does something similar: it turns a bouncer at a rural nightclub into John Wick. Patrick Swayze’s James Dalton is the most badᴀss bouncer in America; he can kill a man with his bare hands.

Although it’s best remembered as a running joke on Family Guy, Road House is a beloved classic of the action genre. Swayze is believably badᴀss enough to play this part, and he’s more than charming enough to get the audience to go along for the ride. If the Fast & Furious movies swapped out street races for bar brawls, it would look something like Road House.

7

Con Air


Nicolas Cage in Con Air

Simon West’s Con Air is a ridiculous premise wrapped in a great movie. Nicolas Cage stars as a Desert Storm war hero who was imprisoned for accidentally killing a man in self-defense. Upon his release, he’s put aboard a JPATS aircraft, where most of the pᴀssengers are high-risk convicts being transferred to a supermax prison. During the flight, these convicts stage a prison break and take the plane hostage, leaving it up to Cage to save the day.

It’s easy to root for Cage, because he just wants to reunite with his wife and kid after eight long years behind bars. The ensemble cast is rounded out by some of the finest actors in the world — John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames — and despite the nature of the movie, none of them phone it in. Con Air is a mindless movie with mindful performances.

6

The Expendables


Sylvester Stallone holds Dolph Lundgren at gunpoint holding Jet Li at gunpoint in The Expendables 2010

Sylvester Stallone ᴀssembled an all-star cast of old-school action heroes to round out his тιтular merc squad in The Expendables. He’s joined by Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, and Mickey Rourke, with cameo appearances by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The cast is just as stacked with action stars as any of the later Fast & Furious sequels.

The plot of The Expendables concerns the eponymous group being sent to overthrow a Latin American dictator. However, they quickly find that he’s just a puppet being controlled by a crooked ex-CIA agent. But the plot isn’t the reason to watch The Expendables — or any of its sequels, for that matter. The selling point of this franchise is having all the world’s biggest action stars sharing the screen, trading quippy banter, and that alone makes them worth watching.

5

Shoot ‘Em Up


Clive Owen as Smith holding the baby and aiming a gun in Shoot 'Em Up

The fact that Shoot ‘Em Up is named after a video game genre should give some idea as to the kind of movie it is. Clive Owen stars as a drifter and former black-ops killer who saves a newborn baby from being murdered by an ᴀssᴀssin, then has to protect the baby from the ᴀssᴀssin’s goons as he tries to get to the bottom of the conspiracy. It stretches the maternity ward shootout from Hard Boiled into its own feature-length movie.

Michael Davis’ riveting action direction ensures that Shoot ‘Em Up lives up to its тιтle. It may have used Hard Boiled as a jumping-off point, but it makes Hard Boiled look understated by comparison. Shoot ‘Em Up offers audiences a glimpse at how Owen might play Bond if he was given the role: a stone-cold badᴀss.

4

Face/Off


Nicolas Cage and John Travolta in Face Off

Fast & Furious is a franchise in which a car was sent into space and a car swung through a jungle like Tarzan — and it still hasn’t done anything as ludicrous as the plot of John Woo’s Face/Off. John Travolta plays an FBI agent and Nicolas Cage plays the notorious terrorist who killed his son. The FBI agent undergoes a secret experiment to switch faces with the terrorist, so he can ᴀssume his idenтιтy, and it only gets crazier from there.

Face/Off is far better than it has any right to be. Having an action movie maestro like Woo in the director’s chair ensures that Face/Off isn’t just one of the most ridiculous stories ever told; it’s also one of the most exhilarating action movies ever produced. Travolta and Cage have a ton of fun playing into each other’s mannerisms after they switch places.

3

The Transporter


Jason Statham driving a car in The Transporter

There’s a reason why Jason Statham was such a natural fit when he joined the ensemble of the Fast & Furious franchise: he’d been making those kinds of mindless action movies for years. Statham’s first major action starring vehicle was The Transporter. He plays Frank Martin, a chauffeur who will transport anyone and anything, no questions asked, for the right price. He’s not just a great driver; he’s a jack of all badᴀss trades.

Frank became the defining role of Statham’s career: he’s stoic, capable, and effortlessly charismatic. He proved to be so popular that he became the star of a blockbuster franchise with two sequels, a TV spinoff, and a reboot. The Transporter has thrilling fight scenes and intense car chases, and much like the Fast & Furious franchise, it throws logic out of the car window at a breakneck speed.

2

True Lies


Arnold Schwarzenegger in the cockpit of a jet in True Lies

Before he exclusively made Avatar movies, James Cameron helmed the big-budget spy actioner True Lies. True Lies essentially imagines what a James Bond movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger might look like, but it’s even more bonkers than any of the Bond films. True Lies combines a spy thriller with a family sitcom as Schwarzenegger’s hero tries to balance his messy double life as a suave secret agent and a suburban husband and father.

The action sequences in True Lies are so ludicrous that they make Fast & Furious look tame by comparison. A horse chase takes Schwarzenegger into an elevator and onto the roof of a skyscraper. An Uzi gets dropped down a staircase, keeps firing, and wipes out all the bad guys. True Lies is the mindless action movie to end all mindless action movies.

1

Point Break


Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze talk in Point Break

The Fast and the Furious is essentially a soft remake of Point Break that swaps out surfing bank robbers for illegal street racers. The central dynamic between Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi and Keanu Reeves’ Johnny Utah is practically identical to Dom Toretto’s relationship with Brian O’Conner. Utah is an FBI agent sent in to take down Bodhi’s criminal enterprise, but he ends up becoming such good friends with him that he doesn’t want to turn him in.

Point Break created the template for the Fast & Furious franchise, and Kathryn Bigelow’s energetic direction proved that mindless action and great filmmaking don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Point Break doesn’t have skydiving cars, but it does have skydiving humans. It doesn’t have a car chase with a bank vault attached to the bumper, but it does have one of the greatest foot chases ever committed to film.

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