The Absurdity of The Fast and the Furious Franchise

Hello again my friends. Post after post after post. You gotta keep the machine well-greased for it to work. Keep chugging the engine. Today in the factory, I manufactured a post about Fast and Furious. Yes, we’re going there today amigos. You’ve seen Mission Impossible, you’ve seen Aliens, you’ve seen Die Hard, you’ve seen Terminator. While all movie franchises begin grounded to a certain extent, none gets more ridiculous and over-the-top and so far off base than The Fast and Furious movies. We are going to delve in and talk about all 10, yes all 10 Fast films and talk about how they make less and less sense over time. With that let’s begin.

So, we go way back to 2001 to start. The starting line. In 5 years, F&F will be 30 years old. Let that sink in. 25 years ago I was starting 4th grade. I remember my parents had rented the movie. The only Fasts I’ve seen in theatres are Fast 5 and Fast X. So, let’s go back to very beginning where we meet young Paul Walker (R.I.P.) driving his first car (green 1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse) under the orange sky of the downtown Los Angeles skyline. Brian O’Connor is but a noob in this film and his job is to find out who is hijacking semis. He’s got 3 main options- Johnny Tran’s crew, Hector’s crew, or Dominic Toretto’s crew. He goes undercover and joins the illegal street-racing underworld to find out who the real mastermind is. We are introduced to Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto- the poster boy and alpha male of the franchise. I never realized that Fast and Furious actually and literally is Point Break with cars. There isn’t much to criticize or comment on with the first film. Brian gets into Dom’s world, knows he’s making big money somehow by hijacking trucks although it’s only a suspicion he can’t yet prove up the point when Dom and his crew (Letty, Vince and Leon) disappear into the desert at night during Race Wars and Dom’s sister Mia confirms to Brian what they’re up to. Brian helps Dom and his crew out of a bad situation and saves Vince’s life and just after that Dom finds out that Brian was a cop. The look on Dom’s face looked like he wanted to murder Brian right then and there. Would he have? I don’t know. Maybe he would have beaten him to a pulp but Dom needed to get Vince and Letty out of there and dip before more police arrived (not to arrest Dom but to get Vince flown out by helicopter). Dom and Brian confront each other again when Brian initially goes to bring Dom in but that takes a turn when Tran arrives and kills Dom’s friend Jesse. After dealing with Tran and being shot to death by Brian, Brian lets Dom go after a quarter-mile drag race and gives him his Toyota Supra. Why he lets Dom go will always be a mystery. In 2 Fast, Brian tells Roman that he let him go because he felt bad about becoming a cop and Roman going to jail even though Brian wasn’t involved with that. In Fast 4, Brian tells Mia he doesn’t know why he did it. My guess is that Brian went native and would be hypocritical if he arrested Dom because he himself became infatuated with street-racing. The first film is no oscar-winning masterpiece of cinema but it’s a solid entertaining film with characters we like and have dimensions. It’s got a simple plot but it’s told well and it’s not bland.

Next we have 2Fast 2 Furious. Things still stay pretty grounded but there’s more fun to this one. This one lightens the mood and adds flavor with the addition of Tyrese Gibson as Roman Pierce and Ludacris as Tej Parker. The setting is now in Miami. Gone is the orange pollution of L.A. and we enter a more tropical setting. There are more colours abound and we see that when Rome and Brian race to work for Carter Verone. We see a red mustang, corvette, yellow viper, Brian’s yellow Mitsubushi Lancer Evo, Rome’s purple Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder 2003, and the two American muscle cars, the blue Chevy Camaro and the orange Dodge Challenger. For a bonus, there’s Suki’s pink Honda S2000. Again, no criticisms for this movie. No over-the-top unbelieveability. Just a good time. An ideal rewatchable popcorn muncher. No bad actors. No bad characters. Enrique and Roberto are a laugh. That’s pretty much it for this one

Numero Tres. Tokyo Drift. I’ll admit when this movie was newer, I liked it more but over the years it’s a plain movie, not as entertaining as its predecessors. Sean is not as likeable or pretty to look at as Brian is. Bow Wow doesn’t add much and only serves as the meh comic relief. Our brother Sean doesn’t even get the girl and by that I mean he doesn’t kiss her at all. She’s just eye candy. The drifting is cool. The music is cool. Six Days is a cool song. Honestly it’s Han and DK who make the movie. Brian Tee has a face that looks so arrogant and yet so cool right as he’s about to race. If the lead actor had been different and if the movie didn’t feel so contained and small, I think I would’ve liked it more. I didn’t care about seeing Sean again and seeing him in Fast 9, I was like…..ok. Sean all of a sudden standing up to the Yakuza just felt random to me, not heroic. I mean he starts flirting with DK’s girl, he’s beaten and warned to stay away, and his dad kicked him out because he was racing again. The sensible thing would have been to leave Tokyo. I mean, sure it’s honorable that he stood up for Han because Han was stealing from DK who was his business partner but I don’t know. Maybe it was Lucas Black’s performance that didn’t sell me. He didn’t have the tough guy attitude to convince me he could be the badass to confront the Yakuza. All in all it’s a decent watch 7/10. I’d give Fast and 2 Fast 7.5 each.

Next is Fast 4. The gang’s all back (the ones they wanted back anyway). Fast is becoming the franchise that everyone knows and “loves”. The first scene of absurdity we ever witness in this franchise is Dom somehow timing just right when to drive and avoid a tanker full of gas. He drives right under it and turns slightly to avoid being squashed. So when did Toretto turn into a physicist? Does he have a degree we don’t know about? He’s also become an expert in forensics somehow by deducing how exactly Letty died and how her car maneuvered before she crashed and “died”. Then, later on, Dom seems to have some kind of super-soldier strength and shows it for the first time when he gets into a fight with Brian for hiding the fact that Brian was secretly running Letty. It doesn’t make it clear whether Dom blamed Brian for Letty’s death because she later says herself that she wouldn’t have done anything she didn’t want to do and Dom probably knew that. Continuing with the unrealistic nature of Fast 4, we come to the cave tunnels that act as a border between USA and Mexico. Even Google AI (yes, you got to pick your battles with what you trust and what you don’t trust) confirmed that you can’t be driving at the speeds that they were in the tunnels lest you crash. If you have common sense, it’ll make sense to you. This is not a science website.

Fast 5- the one that takes place in Rio, Brazil. The one that brought the fans back because it went from 2 main characters to an ensemble with Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Han, Gal Gadot, Tego Calderon, Don Omar, and The Rock. Who wouldn’t go see a Fast movie with the Rock in it? My friend convinced me to. It doesn’t get more summer movie than this one. And things are starting to escalate with the absurdity. First off, knocking a bus down with a Dodge Charger, and not only that, but also expecting us to believe no one was injured or killed inside that bus? Absolute bullshit. And why did Brian have a change of heart after Dom was sentenced and decide to betray his principles? Pussywhipped? Probably the best answer if you ask me and most likely the actual one. He did it for Mia more than anyone else. Now he was on the run and became a criminal. Smart move. Mia was for the streets brother Paul because she definitely should have gone down for aiding and abetting or negligence/compliance with Dom’s past criminal activity. Now let’s talk about the canyon where Dom and Brian fall into the river. According to my friend Google, the train they were riding beside was going at 241 km/h which means the car they were in must’ve also been matching that speed which I already think is unrealistic because of the rough desert terrain we see and then the height of the cliff they fall off is supposedly 300 ft high. That’s really fast and really high. According to physics, it only take 4.32 seconds to hit the water from 300 ft and then again according to science, the total velocity is 285 km/h which means Dom and Brian should have been dead. Moving on. Dom taking Hobbs down is not believable as Dwayne is so much bigger than Vin is, Vin isn’t even jacked and then we have the famous bank vaults scene. Everyone and their dog on the internet says its not believable and I can believe it. Again, I’m not a physicist but the vault is 10 tons and if they say that the vault is too heavy for two Chargers to pull, I believe it. If they say that even if it were pulled that it would go out of control because of its weight, I believe it. And that leads us to the 2nd point about the vault- reckless endangerment. Dom and Brian were rolling that vault through Rio causing damage to the infrastructure and, I bet, causing harm to civilians. Let me tell you people, Dom and Brian are not good guys. I’ll say they’re likeable sure but they are NOT role models, they are criminals. The good thing is that these are just movies and any sensible person would be able to separate fiction from non-fiction. Idolize them all you want in the movie, but if you idolize people like that in real life, there’s a problem. As a teenager, you can root for those two ne’er-do-wells but as an adult I actually was rooting for Hobbs.

Which brings us round to the sixth installment. Hobbs has found Dom and Brian and offers them amnesty if they help him capture mercenary Owen Shaw. This is where Mission Impossible begins. All of a sudden now everyone is a tech expert, knows hand-to hand combat, and know how to use a gun. The only ones who should be capable of that are Gisele and Brian. Tej had a “life before we knew him”. Plot BS. The man was a street-race organizer and yes he may actually have the smarts on the side to be a computer hacker but to hack world-class tech and highly classified tech? I don’t buy it. Ramsey I understand because she’s introduced to us like that. She invented the God’s Eye for crying out loud. What has Tej invented? Let’s go to the highway scene where they deal with a tank. First big mistake. Rome’s crushed car tethered to the tank would not have anchored it WHATSOEVER. It would have have snapped off. This isn’t my brain, yes I googled it and it confirmed that it was 1 vs 60 tons. I’ll let you figure out which is which. And then and then and then……Dom catches Letty. I don’t know if he was going fast enough or how he managed to steer the car when it was decelerating because there’s no way his foot was on the gas and then there’s his exact timing and positioning which was astronomical, not to mention how didn’t anyone sustain injuries or how did Dom not damage his back? Mooooooving on, to the plane scene. First off, the longest runway scene ever. The plane even takes off but is held down by 3 cars. Three. Numbers aside, that makes no sense at all. Single-digit-ton-weighing vehicles under 5 tons holding a hundreds-of-tonnes plane. OK. I think that’s it for Fast 6.

Furious 7: We have the cars parachuting down and of which I just learned that parachutes aren’t meant to withstand and hold the weight of cars, especially falling down at terminal velocity which would make the cars snap in half. Then there’s the mountain scene where he drives down the mountain with Ramsey. No explanation needed. We know there’s the tower scene where Dom jumps from tower to tower where apparently crashing into the glass at the angle he did would have killed him. Let’s not forget his ridiculous show of strength when he lifted said car he was driving (Lykan Hypersport) with his sheer strength. Mr. Superman Toretto himself. I don’t know if it was just coincidence that when he stomped, the already crumbling garage managed to fully break down taking Deckard down with it, albeit with one of the corniest, non-sensical lines ever- when it comes to street fights, the street always wins. Don’t try fighting a street guys. Also, how did Shaw get out unscathed when Dom’s Charger smushes him? Super-soldiers people, that’s the ony explanaaaaaaaaa…….waiittttt they ACTUALLY DID THAT. IN CALVIN AND HOBBS AND SHAW. So if they themselves are not super-soldiers what the hell are they? Pseudo super-soldiers lol? And how does Dom last longer than Hobbs in a fight against Shaw? Dom was struck right across the face with a wrench and is still getting up. It’s not believable that Dom has more stamina than Hobbs and able to keep up with a highly-trained professional who most likely has more agility and speed. And then it’s Dom vs Jakande in the helicopter. I’m not even going to get into it. Building coming down. Dom manages to get out. Yeah, no. It takes time to accelerate in a car vs an already falling building at the mercy of gravity. Even if Super Dom got out, he cannot magically be able to turn the car at an angle in aiir even if calculated the exact right trajectory to drive and jump towards the helicopter and magically hang the bag of grenades for Hobbs to shoot and then there’s all of that rubble which fell on him and the car. He would’ve been dead. The one thing Fast 7 did right was paying an emotional tribute to our man Paul Walker. RIP brother.

This is getting tedious brethren. We’re only at number 8 of 10. Trust me, I want to be done here too. F8 of the Furryous. Hobbs is all of a sudden buddy-buddies with Dom’s “crew” or “family” who have all for some reason felt obligated to come together every time Dom is involved with something. This makes Round 4 when Hobbs tries to steal an EMP device in Germany. None of them owe Hobbs or Mr. Nobody anything. Next we have Hobbs and Shaw in breakout scene orchestrated by Mr. Nobody and Hobbs performing the most outrageous super-soldier feats yet. The parkour is believable but both of them punching out guards wearing armor? Get the fuck outta here bruh. And there’s Hobbs taking rubber bullets and sliding then bouncing off the wall. Yeah it’s getting fucking stupid. And we’re not even in space yet people (smh). He’s not a FUCKING SUPERHUMAN. He’s throwing the guards around like toys. And the headbutt. Geez. I forgot to mention about Hobbs breaking his cast off by fucking flexing. It’s going into cartoon territory folks. Make me fucking believe that Shaw put up a fight against Hobbs in Fast 7 and wasn’t immediately knocked the fuck out. They don’t even try with inconsistencies. Ugh. The 5000 HP Plymouth vs 5 cars. Nuff said. And we arrive at the submarine. We know that cars can and do drive on ice, as well as sand and mud. Apparently submarines would face much more resistance from water and ice than cars do driving on ice which checks out- there’s wind resistance but water creates more resistance that wind does. The cars would get away because Mr. Sub tops out at only 56km/h. Dom would definitely not be able to outlast a missile which can travel from Mach 2 to Mach 4. No driveable super-car even passes the speed of sound. Again we see the unrealisticness of the Fast franchise when we see the sub already cracking the ice underneath some of the cars. They would’ve lost traction already by then and spun out or been overtaken. If the missile was somehow pointed back towards the sub if would target the sub instead because of its much larger heat signature. Again Mr. Dom and his impressive knowledge of physics astounds us a 3rd time when he times the jump and missile to hit Mr. Sub. Dom’s car is engulfed by the fire, the car spins at a very fast speed, and he somehow times a jump out of the car onto solid ice mind you, and fucking survives. Ok then. And fire doesn’t fucking work like that broskis, it would sweep over and under the cars turning Dom into crispy Dom no matter how many cars were there plus igniting the fuel inside the cars. Ok I’ll admit that while the Hobbs-moving-the-torpedo-scene is a “flex” (pun intended), he would not be able to move something that heavy and I doubt he’d be able to hold himself steady for that long while sliding across the ice. It’s not just physics-defying stunts we’re assessing here folks. Dom and Shaw also happen to become buddy buddy after Shaw protects Dom’s son (who he named Brian for some reason) for Dom clearing their records for rescuing Brian of which Shaw had absolutely no reason to be invested in. A smarter plot would have seen that Shaw was only working with Hobbs and the team to take down Cipher and once that was that, things would go back to the way they were, as enemies again. It would have been more interesting to see the Shaws as recurring villains. Farts.

The penultimate paragraph. We have to wait until 2028 for the eleventh and final film folks, oh deary me whatever will I do? Watch the upcoming X-Men MCU films that’s what. When that film comes out I will add it onto this page, for now this is the second last paragraph. Ye olde F9. The one with John Cena, the BROTHER. There be a plethora of things in this here film. I tell you writing this post is more exhaustive than a car. First, there’s the minefields, the bridge, and the car swing in Montequito. A 5th grader, maybe even a 4th grader, would be able to see how stupid and ridiculous the action scenes of Montequito were. No cars are fast enough to avoid detonation from a mine because they are set to blow the instant it feels any sort of pressure and blown to pieces at that. Then we have the bridge sequences. We see Tej, Rome, and Ramsey driving across a falling SUSPENSION bridge. The tension left once the main part of the bridge began falling and without sturdy ground for the car to drive on, it would just fall right down because of gravity. They should’ve made a cartoon series to show these kind of things. And then there’s Dom somehow swinging across a canyon by turning the axle and hooking a tire onto a bridge post and somehow there’s tension on a snapped cable…….give me a freaking break. Let’s talk about Dom and Jakob flipping the 26-ton truck over with their 2 cars. So they use the magnets to repel the truck from both sides (which apparently can’t be done with steel, it can only be pulled) forcing it to be stuck in between them and then from what I observed they both stomp the brakes to stop the truck’s forward momentum and cause the back of the truck to lift and flip over. Realistically we know that the truck’s wheels would flip the cars themselves. Then, with God on his side and watching over him, Dom somehow manages to survive inside the truck as it rolls down the hill just slow enough for him to jump and carefully watch his footing and then knew exactly when to grab the steering wheel because the truck knew exactly when to land right-side up for him to drive it. Cypher shoots twin missiles at the armored truck which survives because of course when it would be annihilated and this causes the truck to flip into Cypher’s plane because of course. I confess that when I saw Dom strolling around and just finding his footing inside the rolling truck, that’s when I lost it and had the impulse to turn off the movie and stop watching the franchise. I didn’t care about Fast X but I told myself to push through because I have watched worse (ahem The Last Knight) and I needed to do it for the post. The final item is the one everyone’s been waiting for- the space scene. Basically, Sean Boswell and his Japanese friend haven’t had a purpose or are useful up until this point and are all of a sudden, for plot convenience, rocket scientists. Jakob and his crew of baddies plan to upload Project Aries onto a satellite and from there hack any computer on the planet. Spy shit guys. Spy shit. Sean just happened to be modifying a car to be able to go into space so they can destroy the satellite. According to our faithful friend science, a little Pontiac Fiero does not have the capacity to hold enough fuel and oxidizer to reach the speed of orbital velocity to get past the atmosphere, it would be put in its place by gravity and in the film they apparently reach space in 30 seconds which is itself unrealistic since it apparently takes 8 minutes to reach orbital velocity which is a speed of 7.8km/s. It’d apparently crush them with all the downward pressure/inertia. The ceramic-polymer that they spray on would burn at 1000-1600 degress Celsius and also enflame Tej and Rome. Lastly, there’s no steering or controlling a car in space since it needs friction to move and the scuba suits are no protection for them since they don’t accommodate for freezing, extreme heat, radiation, and lack of oxygen. Sorry for bursting your space bubble gang. Finally, and with a sigh of relief, let’s move on to Fast X.

At long last, we reach Fast 10. I don’t think we need to spend much time here. Once again, Dom performs an impossible feat of accuracy and precision by mathematically calculating or miraculously guessing the angle of the crane and position of the ball and then somehow he doesn’t die from the following explosion. Funnily enough this film is the most unmemorable of them all or unmemorable for all the wrong reasons. We got the first one, the 2nd one, the one in Japan, the one where Letty dies, the one in Rio, the one where Letty comes back, the one with Jason Statham, the one where Dom goes bad, the one with Dom’s brother, and now the one where Jason Momoa is gay. He wants revnege for his father’s death and honestly I can’t feel bad for Dom’s crew because they brought it upon themselves. They thought they’d just go ahead and rob a powerful drug lord for kicks and now it’s come back to bite them. Let’s remember I’m not doing a character assessment, I’m doing an assessment of the ludicrousness of the stunts of this franchise and other things that don’t make sense. Because I’m so done with this post, I’m just going to brush over the most silly of sillies in Fast X. 1. How is Gisele still alive? It’s just as absurd as Han being alive and are they going to explain it by the fact that it was faked? How are Roman, Tej, and Ramsey not dead after the plane crashed? Better come up with a good one for that. We have Brian Toretto making a superhuman jump into his dad’s car which doesn’t even look realistic. Dom’s car was definitely more than a few feet away. Dominic Toretto is an absolute wizard I tell ya. Ha, I just realized something. Dom is pissing on his friend Vince’s memory by naming his son Brian instead of Vince who he has known since the 3rd grade and who named his own son Nico after Dom. Real great friend ya are Dom. The final nail in the coffin is Dom driving down the dam with his sonny boy. I’m not even going to go into the science. We all know the angle was way too steep, gravity would’ve taken them, and how he outpaced the explosion is beyond Ludacris. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Fast and the Furious movies.

Well everyone, there you have it. I have painstakingly re-watched and analyzed the most incredulous stunt and scenes for your better enjoyment. In conclusion, my final say is that I won’t be paying money for the final Fast movie and if I do, well then shame on me. Stay furious my friends.