With eight movies in the franchise and a brand new spinoff doing so well in theaters that more are likely on the way, the Fast and Furious series has become incredibly popular with audiences. The movies make a billion dollars a pop and with each ensuing entry the stakes and the stunts only get raised.
While the first Fast and Furious movie was a pretty straightforward movie about illegal street racing, things have gotten progressively out of hand since then. The highlight of each film is, of course, the stunt-driving action, but it's possible that the need to continually impress the audience has resulted in the franchise losing pretty much all touch with reality. Not that this is a problem or, of course, that it was ever actually aiming to be in touch with reality to start with. While normally, we'd do a nice, well-rounded, top ten here, there have only nine movies, so I've taken the craziest moment from each film, and ranked them accordingly. Here are the most exaggerated, insane, and just plain bonkers moments from the Fast and Furious franchise.
9. The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift - "Winner Gets Me"
Nobody would accuse the Fast and Furious franchise of being the most culturally progressive movie franchise in history. The representation of women in the series has sometimes been a little problematic and even the women who are in the movies are aware of that, but the franchise hit a low point with The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
Two school rivals get into it with the trash talk and they decide to settle it with a race. The stakes? The girlfriend of one competitor, who is maybe interested in the other, makes herself the prize. Moments like this pop up in a lot of movies throughout history, but Tokyo Drift is from 2006, surely even then we were beyond this. The moment has nothing to do with insane stunts or an utter disregard for physics, but it's just as laugh-out-loud hilarious. But bet you haven't forgotten it.
8. The Fast and the Furious - The World's Longest Quarter Mile
In the grand scheme of things, the original The Fast and the Furious is downright sane. It has street racers performing grand theft at high speed, but whatever. However, the movie does get a little more unbelievable at the end. If only because the final race between Dom and Brian is supposed to be only a quarter of a mile long, and yet, it takes these two street racers, who are absolutely flooring it, a good two minutes to travel that quarter mile.
If they were really only going a quarter mile they would have crossed the tracks without ever noticing the train was coming. At the speed they actually appear to be going they should have both driven into the side of the train.
7. 2 Fast 2 Furious - Breaking Into Impound
The first sequel in the franchise is already full of outlandish moments. 2 Fast 2 Furious' The bridge jump where Brian's car goes over another car while they're both in midair, and the finale jump onto a yacht with a Camero, are both completely implausible if not outright impossible, but the moment from the movie that I can't stop looking at is a very different scene.
Early in the movie Brian and his buddy Roman break into a police impound yard to steal a package from an impounded car. How do they break in? They just crash through the front gate. On a police impound lot. There's clearly a large bollard stuck in the ground between the two halves of the gate, and yet, it's apparently not actually driven into the ground, because if it were, it would have ended up stuck in the middle of Brian's engine block.
6. Fast And Furious - Tanker Heist
The opening of Fast and Furious is probably the highlight of the movie. The team robs a tanker truck of its cargo by hitching up their own trucks and basically just driving away, hopefully without the driver knowing what is happening.
While the exact speed that all this is happening at is unclear, the tanker is certainly capable of freeway speeds and isn't going slow. This becomes a problem as Dom's team has to drive their trucks backwards in order to latch on. Most vehicles aren't actually capable of going all that fast backwards. Add to this the precision required to keep from causing a massive accident if the tanker accidentally jackknifes the trucks that are attached to it, and the whole this is just too silly to believe.
5. Furious 7 - House Explosion
I had several candidates for the most ridiculous moment from Furious 7, jumping a car between two skyscrapers was certainly up there, but, honestly, by the time we get there, so many crazy things have happened in the film. Instead, I'm going with a much simpler moment: The destruction of Dom's house.
Think about the pinpoint accuracy that would be required to place a bomb in a shipping box, then put it in just the right spot on Dom's front porch, so as to destroy his house completely, and yet, do essentially no damage to the surrounding buildings. Nobody else's house catches fire from the explosion. Nobody else is apparently hurt. If was awfully nice of the villain to direct the explosion in such a way to prevent collateral damage. Maybe that's why Jason Statham gets to be a good guy now.
4. The Fate Of The Furious - Torpedo Diversion
We might be numb to the insanity of your average Fast and Furious movie by the end, but sometimes the end then goes and does something so off-the-charts bonkers that it still blows you away. The Fate of the Furious decided that the tank of Fast and Furious 7 wasn't nearly impressive enough, as this movie has the family take on a submarine.
Of course, things get even crazier when said submarine fires a torpedo at our heroes, and Dwayne Johnson then takes it upon himself to physically divert the torpedo along its trajectory, by simply driving alongside it and pushing it away (because all this is happening on top of a layer of ice, you see).
3. Fast Five - Bus Crash
While the first four Fast and Furious movies have some ridiculous moments, it was really in Fast Five that the franchise realized it could do so much more if it didn't even try to pretend to be serious. It's actually the reason this is probably still the best movie in the franchise.
While it's easy to look toward the safe heist, where two muscle cars drag a bank vault through the streets, as the most ridiculous part of this movie, no moment is so out of control hilarious as when Brian, driving Dom's car, stops short in front of a prison bus transport, and, instead of being run over as he should, he causes the bus to flip, completely over his car. Somehow, this was the plan and he didn't kill Dom, himself, or anybody else in the bus.
2. Hobbs & Shaw - The Rock Pulls Down a Helicopter
You don't actually need to have seen the new Fast and Furious spinoff to know what insane shit this movie gets up to. The studio used it to sell the movie. The trailer for the movie itself includes a sequence where Dwayne Johnson lassos a helicopter with a chain and then attempts to pull it down with his bare hands.
While it turns out Dwayne Johnson only holds on to the chain attached to the helicopter for a brief moment, that moment is probably still honestly enough to rip the man's arm off. Outlandish. Perfect for #2.
1. Fast and Furious 6 - This Physics-Defying Jump
If you've seen the movie, you know exactly what I'm referring to here. There's nothing else to call it. The finale sequence of Fast and Furious 6, which includes Luke Evans driving an actual tank down the freeway, would probably have made this list anyway, but there's a single a moment in this final chase where Dominic Torreto jumps out of the window of the car he is driving, flies through the air, and catches Letty, who has been thrown from the previously mentioned tank and is headed for the ravine below the divided freeway.
He catches her, his momentum somehow completely overpowers hers, pushing them both to safety, and somehow, when they both crash into the windshield of another car, neither of them is killed by the impact alone.
The Fast and Furious movies are nuts. They're full of the improbable, the impossible, and the absolutely ludicrous. But then again, if they weren't, we probably wouldn't love them nearly as much.
