The 17 most ridiculous ‘Fast & Furious’ scenes

‘As long as we obey the laws of physics, we’ll be fine!’ Sure, Luda. Given the series’ increasing similarity to the heyday of Roger Moore’s Bond, it was only a matter of time before they went full Moonraker. Of course, this being Fast & Furious, it would only make sense if our heroes went to space in a car – with rockets attached, obviously. Exactly what they’re doing there is a mystery to viewers and characters alike, but it’s weirdly intoxicating to see a movie franchise get quite this far out.

Bond, eat your heart out. Cruise, keep climbing. The big centrepiece stunt in film 7 is one of the maddest in movie history, as Vin Diesel and Paul Walker hijack a rich guy’s car and drive it through a fancy party on the hundred-and-something-th floor of the central building in Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Towers. There’s only one way out: through the window, executing a vertiginous car-jump into the adjacent tower, crashing straight through and then leaping into the next one. Back off, gravity. They’ve got this.

Stick with us, because this gets complicated. Introduced to the franchise in Tokyo Drift, where he played mentor to the young, fish-out-of-water hero before being unexpectedly killed off, Sung-Ho Kang’s wordly wise Han was actually lifted from an entirely unrelated film: director Justin Lin’s 2002 crime-flick debut, Better Luck Tomorrow. Incredibly, he was then resurrected in the Fast & Furious franchise, reintroduced in the fourth movie (which apparently took place before the third one… or something) before being killed off again in Furious 7. But wait! Did somebody say Korean Jesus? Han came back again in Fast & Furious 9, having faked his own death at least one of the previous times.

Not content with introducing the series’ best villain – Charlize Theron’s ice-cold, freakily dreadlocked hacker queen Cipher – film 8 also sports a fistful of its best action scenes, topped by this berserk smash-up on the streets of New York. When her efforts to snatch the Russian Defence Minister are stymied by Vin and the crew, Charlize hacks into the electronics of every car in the city, sending them careening down streets, through windows and into massive, snarling pile-ups. 

It may not be as physics-defyingly absurd as some of the others on this list, but the climactic chase from film 5 is without a doubt the most fiercely tactile, gorgeously directed sequence in the entire franchise. After breaking into a police station, our heroes end up towing a full-size bank vault through the streets of Rio. All the elastic possibilities of this scenario are lovingly explored, from ploughing up the concrete to shattering glass bus stops, from scattering crowds of terrified pedestrians to pancaking enemy cars. Sheer joy.

‘My female costars are always amazing and I love ’em. My male costars, however, are a different story. Some conduct themselves as stand up men and true professionals… The ones that don’t are too chicken to do anything about it anyway. Candy asses.’ With this Instagram post, Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson put the cat firmly among the pigeons (or chickens), making public a feud that had been rumbling in the background for months. The identity of the ‘candy ass’ was almost certainly Vin Diesel, whose reported on-set behaviour had rankled Johnson, and would lead to him leaving the series after 2017’s Fast & Furious 8. The full beef is too tangled to go into, but it appears to be ongoing: a rather patronising olive branch extended by Diesel in late 2021 (‘My little brother Dwayne... the time has come’) was dismissed by Johnson as just ‘an example of his manipulation’.

Tyrese Gibson spends most of 2 Fast 2 Furious tooling about in a shocking purple convertible that wouldn’t look out of place on a fairground carousel. The car briefly achieves coolness, however, when it turns out that the passenger seat has a bespoke flip-up ejector mechanism, perfect for removing annoying and/or psychotically murderous fellow travellers.

He may have played the bad guy in film 7, even planting a bomb that almost took out Paul Walker and his pregnant missus, but by part 8 all was (pretty much) forgiven, and Cockney scrapper Jason Statham became just the latest member of Vin’s ever-growing family. In a film crammed with wild silliness – the submarine! The frozen lake! The wrecking ball! – it’s the sight of Statham taking out a plane-load of bad guys while simultaneously tending to an adorable goo-gooing baby that sticks in the mind. 

Things you’d expect to find in an old Mexican copper mine: deep shafts, narrow tunnels, low ceilings, dust, darkness, donkey skeletons. Things you wouldn’t expect to find in an old Mexican copper mine: wide corridors, a flat sandy floor, well-maintained roofs, racing cars. This Temple of Doom-style action sequence from the fourth film marks the point where the franchise abandoned logic entirely in favour of daft thrills and impossible spills. Not that we’re complaining.

This outrageous silliness from the winningly dumb 2 Fast sees Paul Walker tracks the bad guy to his luxury yacht, only to find it sailing off into the Miami sunset. There’s just one thing for it – rev that throttle, fire up that nitro tank and find a conveniently up-sloping jetty. The resulting stunt doesn’t, as physics would seemingly dictate, sink both boat and roadster to the bottom of the bay.

Matters get seriously medieval in this mighty slaphead-a-slaphead smackdown. When weary hero Vin Diesel and vengeful villain Jason Statham meet in a darkened car park, we know things are bound to get feisty. Then Diesel pulls out a grimy socket wrench the length of his arm, Statham responds with a three-foot iron bar, and they go at each other like two tooled-up testicles in a sack.

Easily the best of the bunch, Brazil-set heist flick Fast Five offers myriad pleasures, from the welcome addition of the Rock and his ill-advised goatee to a brace of flawlessly directed action sequences. The first of these kicks in when the gang steal a boxcar’s worth of high-end jalopies from a speeding train using a funky hydraulic racer, before trashing the locomotive and flying off a cliff into a nearby gorge. All in a day’s work, really.

Back when the series began, it was more about racing, heisting and vigorous bonding than, say, driving cars to outer space. But the Point Break-apeing first film does contain one moment of top-flight daftness, as cop Paul Walker and crook Vin Diesel express their star-crossed man-love by racing into the path of an oncoming locomotive.

Series stalwart Paul Walker tragically passed away in 2013, but he went out on one heck of a high in the seventh instalment. His star moment arrives halfway through, when after a knock-down, drag-out dust-up with Ong-Bak star Tony Jaa, Walker finds himself dangling from the back bumper of a bus, balanced, Italian Job-style, on the edge of a cliff. His method of escape is admittedly unlikely, but undoubtedly thrilling.

It’s easy to forget that the Fast & Furious franchise doesn’t just do high-speed stunts – there are some pretty tidy punch-ups, too. In the London-set sixth instalment, the highlight is a two-front smackdown in an Underground station, surrounded by rubber-necking commuters who seem to think they’re witnessing the latest trend in extreme busking.

This mindblowing moment can only be fully appreciated by readers who choose to see Fast and Furious 7 on an Imax screen. We’ve known for a while that Dwayne Johnson is a hefty dude – he used to be a wrestler, after all. But you have absolutely no idea of the true, terrifying vastness of the man until you’ve see him in a hospital gown, chest exposed. The effect is unsettlingly akin to standing at the foot of Everest – if the entire mountain was made of raw meat.

The most straight-faced of all the ‘Fast & Furious’ movies thanks to its dour industrial Tokyo backdrop, glowering Yakuza villains and general lack of Vin Diesel, Tokyo Drift does contain one ridiculous element – and it’s right there in the title. The racing technique of ‘drifting’ – pulling the handbrake and letting the car glide into steep bends – is inherently daft, as is the scene where jumped-up American high-schooler Lucas Black takes on the local ‘drift king’ and, naturally, wins.