10 Times Fast & Furious Defied Physics, Logic, and Common Sense

Back in 2001, the first Fast and Furious movie came out. Now, 20 years and many movies later, the Fast and Furious franchise made famous for thrilling street races and high-stake heists, has also become notorious for unrealistic stunts.

From impromptu canyon swings to space travel, there's not a law of physics or logic that Fast and Furious is afraid to break, and these moments prove it:

Dragging a bank vault through Rio (Fast Five)

The crew took robbing a bank to the next level and stole an entire vault which caused a high-speed chase through the city with the massive metal vault tethered to two of their cars. How the cars weren't ripped in half, or how the giant metal vault crashing around didn’t kill people or get caught on infrastructure is beyond logic and physically impossible.

Skyscraper jump (Furious 7)

This scene made for one of the most over-the-top sequences of them all, as Brian and Dom speed off the floor of a skyscraper in a stolen sports car, smash through the glass windows and soar through the air hundreds of meters up, crashing into the neighboring skyscraper and managing to land the car safely between levels. As if this wasn’t far-fetched enough, the brakes failed on landing and the pair continued speeding through the building, smashing out and soaring through the air to land safely into a third building.

Parachuting cars (Furious 7)

Is it a bird, or is it a plane? No, it’s a convoy of cars being dropped out of a plane from 12,000 ft and parachuting down to land on a mountainous road. There are no parachutes large or strong enough to hold a car, and probably no cars strong enough not to fall apart in the air. Even if the cars achieved a safe descent, they would realistically never be able to stay on course and land at their desired location.

Space travel (F9)

If flying cars weren’t enough, Fast and Furious decided to take it one step further and go to space. Roman and Tej blast off into space in a modified car kitted up with rockets, and homemade space suits on a mission to manually disarm a satellite. Was it scientifically accurate? Absolutely not. Will Fast and Furious ever find a way to top this impossible intergalactic stunt? We’ll have to wait and see.

Zombie cars (The Fate of the Furious)

Fans call this moment ‘zombie cars’ as evil villain Cipher hacks a fleet of parked cars and pursues her target in a chaotic mass chase with surprising order and control. This level of hacking and precision would never be possible, and logically, all it would have taken was one person in a hacked car pulling their manual handbrake to cause a pile-up or jam and stop the whole thing.

Yacht Landing (2 Fast 2 Furious)

No boat? No problem. Many of us battle to park, but in this scene, Paul Walker races his car up a tilted jetty and soars through the air landing perfectly on the yacht of the villain holding his woman captive. The only logical thing that happened in this scene was that both drivers put their seatbelts on before ‘taking off.’

Racing on Ice (The Fate of the Furious)

If you thought ice skating was hard, how about a high-speed chase via submarine on breaking ice? How did an entire convoy of cars manage to continue straight without sliding or crashing on the rapidly cracking ice while at the same time taking on a nuclear submarine?

The never-ending runway (Fast and Furious 6)

The stunts in this scene aren’t as physics-defying as others, but there is one gaping hole in the logic of it all. A plane chase feels like nothing unusual for Fast and Furious, but the fact that they pursued the moving plane for a 15-minute-or-so long scene on the runway makes the whole thing logically impossible unless the runway was 200 miles long.

The Jump (Fast and Furious 6)

This Superman moment has gone down in Fast and Furious history as ‘The Jump’. The moment in question sees Dom jumping from a speeding car on one side of a high-rise bridge to grab a falling Letty in mid-air and cushion her body, landing safely on the hood of a car on the opposite bridge. All we can say is, physics and the fragility of the human body went out the window for this one.

Cable swing (F9)

With Letty in the car and their enemies in hot pursuit, Dom drives straight into a cable bridge and sends the car soaring off a massive cliff with the cable caught in the front of the car. This results in the car plunging towards the water below before doing a Tarzan-like swing thanks to the luckily attached cable that sends the pair soaring to land on the opposite side.

Like many other Fast and Furious scenes, no amount of luck or skill would have pulled this off in reality, but it was undeniably epic to watch. It’s clear that no matter how ridiculous and unrealistic some of their stunts may be, fans cannot get enough of the franchise’s unhinged action.