Harpoon guns, planes, zombie cars ... you name it.
It's been 16 years since the first Fast and the Furious movie and in that time we've all watched as this series evolved from somewhat respectable street racing movie into one of the most popular, melodramatic and over the top action franchises in motion picture history.
But even though the Fast and Furious movies claim that they're all about family - and they claim it over and over and over again, don't they? - we all know they're really here to wow us with incredible and implausible car chases, stunts, and action sequences.
Now that we've seen The Fate of the Furious[1], (minor spoilers below) it's time to take a look at all the times that this franchise has gone beyond the suspension of disbelief and into the realm of absolute madness… just the way we like it.
13. CARS VS. TRAIN
From: Fast Five
Brian and Mia get to Brazil a little bit ahead of everybody else and they decide to kill some time by pulling off an epic train heist, sidling their cars up against a freight car filled with classic cars and driving them off into the horizon. It all goes pear-shaped of course, and eventually Dom and Brian are flying into a canyon because that's pretty much the life they lead.
12. CAR VS. FIRE
From: The Fate of the Furious
You can't have a Fast and Furious movie without a street race, but after eight movies simply dragging down a city straight doesn't cut it anymore. That's why The Fate of the Furious opens with Dom racing a stripped down jalopy that explodes halfway through the race, forcing him to zoom to the finish line with his vehicle completely on fire. That would kill anybody else in the world, but not the cast of the Fast and Furious movies, because they have +100 invincibility to cars.
11. CARS VS. BUS
From: Fast & Furious
Dominic Toretto is en route to his incarceration but Brian and Mia, sick of living a life when they aren't America's most wanted felons, decide to rescue him in a daring car stunt that t-bones the prison bus. That should, of course, kill every single person on board but again, they have +100 invincibility to cars. Everyone's fine, instead of battered and bloody and ripped limb from limb. Nothing to see here. Move along now.
10. CAR VS. SKYSCRAPER
From: Furious 7
To capture the villainous Deckard Shaw, the Fast and Furious team has to steal the God's Eye, so they scale a skyscraper in Abu Dhabi and, while Letty and Rhonda Rousey beat the hell from each other, they also steal a car and burn rubber through the windows, flying through the air and landing in another nearby skyscraper… and then flying through ANOTHER window and landing in a THIRD skyscraper. It's an amazing idea but it gets knocked down a few pegs because the stunt was borrowed wholesale from the Tommy Lee Jones movie Black Moon Rising (which did more-or-less the same thing and without the benefit of CGI assistance).
9. CARS VS. TRUCKER
From: The Fast and the Furious
Before the Fast and Furious franchise went completely insane, the climactic car chase from the original film was a spectacular highlight. Dominic Toretto and his crew were just high-speed thieves, but they've bit off more than they can chew this time, facing off against a trucker with a shotgun who refuses to pull over. Vehicles speed under other vehicles and the danger is palpable. Car sequences in these movies would eventually evolve into over the top spectacles, but this one is still a badass thrill.
8. CARS VS. RAMP CARS
From: Fast & Furious 6
Dominic Toretto's crew finally meets their match in Fast & Furious 6, revving their engines against a crew led by Owen Shaw and an amnesiac Letty Ortiz. How do they compete with a team of, essentially, vehicular superheroes? With high speed cars built like ramps, straight out of an old Carrot Top sketch. Head on collisions lead to crazy jumps that turn what could have been an easy mission into absolute chaos.
7. CARS VS. GRAVITY
From: Furious 7
Before the skyscraper stunt, the Fast and Furious crew first tries to steal the God's Eye from the mercenary Mose Jakande, and rescue a kidnapped super hacker. These things happen. To get the job done the team has to air drop their cars from the sky, then get in crazy fights on top of every moving object. And of course, then Deckard Shaw shows up with his own deadly ideas.
6. CARS VS. HELICOPTER VS. DRONE
From: Furious 7
Mose Jakande and Deckard Shaw finally get their hands on the God's Eye and decide to put it to good use with an aerial drone, while Dom and Deckard fight so hard a building collapses. Eventually Dom shoots his car into the helicopter and hooks grenades into it and Hobbs shoots them and it's completely stupid and yet, simultaneously, totally awesome.
5. CARS VS. TANK
From: Fast & Furious 6
As if Owen Shaw's ramp cars weren't enough of a problem, now he's got a tank. How the hell are the Fast and Furious crew supposed to take down a tank? By improvising of course, zipping Roman Pearce across the highway like a cartoon character, and finally flipping it over completely. In the end, Dom and Letty are flown through the air on top of a car, totaling the vehicle but walking away completely unscathed because, again, they have +100 invincibility to cars.
4. CARS VS. NUCLEAR SUBMARINE
From: The Fate of the Furious
By the eighth film in the franchise the Fast and Furious team have already pitted their cars against tanks, airplanes, gravity, you name it. A Russian Nuclear submarine is the natural evolution of the concept, and sure enough, the team winds up zipping across ice floes in high performance sports cars while the evil super hacker Cipher orders a weapon of mass destruction to explode the environment around them and fire torpedoes that slip 'n' slide across the ground. There were bigger, crazier and more satisfying action sequences in the Fast and Furious franchise than that. Isn't that weird?
3. CARS VS. ZOMBIES
From: The Fate of the Furious
In what is DEFINITELY the dumbest action sequence in the whole Fast and Furious franchise, Dom and Cipher are pursuing a Russian politician down the streets of New York City, and they've got a trick up their sleeves. Cipher orders her team of computer expert interns to hack into nearly every car in the city, forcing them to auto-drive down the streets in zombie cascades that put World War Z to shame. It's a tidal wave of vehicular nonsense, a torrent of metal and stupidity that would be the best sequence in all of the movies if more of the characters we know and love were involved.
2. CARS VS. SAFE
From: Fast Five
In the ultimate example of "safe driving," Dominic Toretto's team has to steal the contents of a giant safe but decide to cut the middleman by stealing the whole danged safe, dragging it between two cars like a ball and chain, wreaking untold destruction and yet somehow making it all look like a delicate dance instead of total chaos. Best of all, a lot of this devastation was done for real.
1. CARS VS. AIRPLANE
From: Fast & Furious 6
Owen Shaw is taking off in an aircraft and the whole Fast and Furious team is in pursuit, grounding the plane by shooting grappling hooks into its wings and pulling it back down with their engines. Meanwhile, everyone is fighting to the death inside the plane and the team takes shocking losses in the process. It's a spectacularly overblown action sequence, as enjoyable as it dramatic, and one that completely defies the very concept of physics since that runway would have to be 26 miles long to accommodate a high speed car chase as long as this one. And that is, of course, exactly why we love it.
References
- ^ The Fate of the Furious (www.ign.com)
