The Fast & Furious franchise has become increasingly more insane as time goes on. Each successive film has tried to outdo its predecessor, but in doing so, they've simply built one ridiculous moment on top of another. It's no wonder that people are fully expecting Fast & Furious in Space! It's just about the only thing they could do to top the most recent stunts the series has pulled.
To list every ridiculous thing the Fast & Furious franchise has done over the years would mean we'd be here for a week. We simply don't have that sort of time, so we'll be focusing on the highlights of each film in the franchise. These moments aren't always the big stunt moments, and in a couple cases, they're not stunts at all. Not every ridiculous moment requires a high-speed car.
Stealing Gas From a Moving Truck
In Fast & Furious, the film opens with our outlaw heroes stealing gas from a moving tanker truck. This would probably just fall into just the "normal" ridiculous category, except that, in order to steal the tanks, they have to lock into the trailer hitch by dropping a hook perfectly into place from a moving car. Bullshit. Not only do they do this once, but they do it twice, perfectly. Even if we were to buy that precision, the idea that the truck driver wouldn't notice the weight that he's no longer hauling is insane.
Car vs. Boat
Most of the times that cars jump from point A to point B in these movies, its ridiculous. However, the jump onto a yacht with a car in 2 Fast 2 Furious is just that much more insane because it's jumping onto a moving target. The jump itself is crazy, but the idea that Brian would hit his target is just too improbable. One has to take into account the boat's speed, which must remain constant, factor in the car's speed, the angle of the jump and be sure that the boat will be in the place it needs to be when the car gets there. We have no evidence that anybody in these films is a math genius, but that jump would require one.
Everyone Carries Exactly $2,000 in Cash
The very first thing I noticed watching the first movie is that betting on street racing is easy. The city of Los Angeles has apparently standardized all bets to $2,000. It would be one thing if we were talking about a regularly scheduled street race with a normal buy-in but even when people do impromptu side-bets, they all have the exact amount of money necessary with a rubber band wrapped around it, and in the first movie that is always two grand. I suppose it's better than spending screen time counting out hundreds.
The Vault Chase
I'm no expert in cars. I have no idea what sorts of engines Brian and Dom's cars are supposed to have in Fast Five that gives the two cars the ability to pull a vault out of a wall and go cruising with it. I'll assume that such a move with the cars is at least theoretically possible. I'll assume that since the vault in question is supposed to be incredibly tough to break into that this means it is incredibly sturdy. There is a weak link in this equation though, and it's the cables. In addition to simply being hooked onto the side of the vault, the cables then proceed to crash into every damn thing on the road. While the vault gets swapped halfway through the chase, the same cables are used throughout. At some point, they would fail.
The World's Longest Quarter Mile
The finale of the first Fast and Furious race is a quarter mile drag between the two leads of the film. Dom challenges Brian to a quarter mile race from a particular stop light to a set of train tracks. When the light turns green, both men burn rubber from the start. After they've started racing, the railroad crossing lights start to flash. Lights which start long before any train would ever arrive there, and yet, both cars just barely make it across the tracks before the train kills them. It was only a quarter mile. A soccer mom in a minivan could have beaten that train if she felt it necessary.
A Girl Makes Herself A Prize
As the movie that is actually the most purely about racing in the franchise, and thus has less physics-defying B.S. going on, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift actually has less utterly ridiculous stuff happening. However, since we don't want to leave it off this list entirely, we're going to give that prize to this silly high school girl who decides to offer herself as a prize to the winner of a race. Who in the blue hell does that? We were totally expecting "Douchbag Boyfriend #1" to pull that move, as that's what usually happens in movies at moments like this. It's possibly the most unbelievable moment in the entire movie.
The Bus Flip
Fast Five opens up in the exact same place where the previous film closes, with Brian and his family taking down a prison transport bus in order to get Dom out. They succeed at doing it, but at the expense of the bus crashing and rolling multiple times down the road like a massive rolling pin. The only thing that saves Brian is that he is able to somehow time his speed so that when the bus makes a completely random and unprecedented bounce high in the air, his car can get underneath. Physics doesn't work that way.
This Fucking Jump
Nope. No. Fuck that noise.
One woman jumps from a moving tank. Then a guy throws his car into a wall in a way that allegedly gives him the momentum needed to jump across a gap in the freeway and catch the woman mid-air. Then they both crash into a windshield and somehow nobody dies. This is the single silliest thing that has ever happened in this franchise. It's so ridiculous that you get thrown out of the movie and don't even get to enjoy the spectacle of it.
House Explosion
We really need to hand it to Deckard Shaw. He's a considerate murderer. The explosive set on Dom's doorstep is perfectly designed to completely destroy Dom's house while leaving the surrounding neighborhood untouched. Dom's neighbor's house doesn't so much as catch fire, even though it's closer to the explosion than the workshop on the other side of the house which burns. This must have required careful calculation and also bomb placement. And since we know Deckard was in Tokyo at the time, then he must have had an accomplice place the bomb. Did anybody catch him? We need answers!
