Fast Five’s canyon jump
The first four Fast & Furious movies may have enjoyed a casual relationship with the laws of physics, but they finally left them behind in the early scenes of Fast Five. Escaping a heist gone wrong, Vin Diesel’s Dom and Paul Walker’s Brian drive a 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray Grand Sport off a cliff into a river hundreds of feet below – and survive.
Jumping between Etihad Towers in Furious 7
The Furious 7 team have some imagination. First, they find a reason for a Lykan HyperSport supercar to be at the top of one of Abu Dhabi’s Eithad Towers. Next, they find a reason our heroes must steal it. Then, they make sure that Dom has no choice but to drive out the window, through the air into the tower opposite – not once, but twice.
Fast & Furious 6’s flying headbutt
Not every insane moment in Fast & Furious involves cars. During the climax of Fast & Furious 6, Dom, Brian and Hobbs battle the bad guys in the back of a Antonov An-124 as the massive plane attempts take off. Taking advantage of the sudden shift in gravity, Dom hurls himself off the ground in a flying headbutt to take out his adversary.
Zombie cars in The Fate of the Furious
Eighth instalment The Fate of the Furious pits the crew against cyber-villain Cypher, whose hacking ability enables her to take control of hundreds of cars en masse in New York City. The ensuing madness sees scores of cars plummeting from parking garages and thundering through the streets at high speed – particularly hard to believe given the traffic is bumper-to-bumper on a normal day in Manhattan.
Skydiving cars in Furious 7
In Furious 7, the crew need to stage a high speed assault on a stretch of remote road they can’t reach by land – so naturally, they choose to hit it by fitting their cars with parachutes and dropping them from a plane at 12,000 feet. Incredibly, the filmmakers really did drop actual cars from that height, though unsurprisingly the actors weren’t in them.
Dom drives down a dam in Fast X
The explosive climax of Fast X delivers another of those breathtaking instances of Dominic Toretto showing the laws of physics who’s boss. Cornered by the villainous Dante Reyes, and with his young son Little B in the car with him, Dom drives his Dodge Charger over a dam whilst an explosion goes off behind him, and lands safely on the sloping wall below.
The vault getting dragged through Rio in Fast Five
In the climactic Rio bank heist of Fast Five, the crew find it outside their ability to break into the vault – so instead, they decide to take it with them. Our heroes proceed to drag the mighty metal cube at high speed via chains attached to two black Dodge Chargers, doing millions of dollars’ worth of damage to the city streets in the process.
Dom catches Letty in Fast & Furious 6
One might think the highlight of a highway chase sequence in which the car-loving crew battles a tank would be, well, the tank. Fast & Furious 6 has other ideas, however. During what looks set to be a lethal collision, Dom jumps from his car, soars through the air to catch a free-falling Letty, and they both land without so much as a scratch.
Hobbs breaks his cast in Furious 7
Another mind-blowing Fast & Furious moment that has no need for motor vehicles occurs in the final moments of Furious 7, when Hobbs – hospitalised with his arm in a cast after being blown out of a window in the first act – sees that the crew needs his help. Telling his daughter “Daddy’s gotta to work,” Hobbs simply flexes his mighty bicep and the cast shatters.
A car goes to space in Fast 9
With cars having seemingly done everything they could on Earth, there was nowhere for them to go but space. As such, Fast 9 sees Roman and Tej strap into a Pontiac Fiero fitted with rockets, from which they must disable an orbiting satellite. Moments like this make it easy to forget this franchise began with street racers stealing DVD players off the back of trucks.
