There’s a key Dominic Toretto action scene in Fast Five that ended up changing the Fast & Furious franchise forever – and, crucially, it didn’t involve a car. Fast Five is widely regarded to be the movie that turned the Fast & Furious saga from a popular action series into a bona fide blockbuster franchise. It left behind the street racing backdrop of the previous movies and went for a more evergreen action-adventure story about a daring heist in Rio de Janeiro, which appealed to a broader audience.

Before Fast Five came along, the franchise revolved around racing. The big climactic showdown with the villain in the movie’s finale was an intense street race, or involved trying to outrun the baddies in a fast car. But Fast Five shook up the formula. It has a couple of racing sequences – and the climax does see the heist crew driving the vault away from the authorities – but the Toretto action scene that defined the movie had nothing to do with cars.

Fast Five's Toretto Vs. Hobbs Fight Changed Fast & Furious Forever

Every Fast & Furious movie builds to a big fight these days

Although Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs would eventually become a close ally to Toretto’s crew, he was introduced as an antagonist in Fast Five. Hobbs is the DSS agent trying to track down Toretto and his team. Around the midpoint of the movie, Toretto and Hobbs get into a brutal fistfight where they resolve their interpersonal issues with punching. After this iconic sequence, the Fast & Furious movies stopped settling the disputes between their heroes and villains in a high-speed race – it all came down to an actual fight.

Fast Five Started A Tradition Of Great Hand To Hand Combat In Fast & Furious

Toretto vs. Hobbs was the first of many great fight scenes

This fight between Toretto and Hobbs was the first of many great fight scenes in the Fast & Furious franchise. Fast & Furious 6 had an awesome subway fight scene with Joe Taslim. Furious 7 split up Toretto and Hobbs – now friends who can rely on each other – to each enjoy their own separate boss battles with Jason Statham’s villain, Deckard Shaw. Hobbs and Shaw came to blows again in The Fate of the Furious with their ruthless brawl at the prison.

There seems to be more and more fight scenes with each passing Fast & Furious film. In F9, Toretto got into a fight with his estranged brother Jakob. Fast X had a fight between Toretto and Dante Reyes, a fight between Letty and Cipher, and a revenge match between Han and Shaw. Since Fast Five, the Fast & Furious series has really upped its game with climactic fight scenes.