‘Fast and Furious’: The Best and Worst Car Chases in the Franchise
The Fate of the Furious made a massive $532.5 million at the global box office this weekend. But how does director F. Gary Gray’s car-careening action stack up to previous sequences in the series? Here are our picks for the 10 best — and four worst — set pieces that have appeared in the series to date.
[Ed. note: This ranking was previously compiled in 2015; it has been updated to include Furious 7 and The Fate of the Furious.]
THE BEST
The Truck Hijack
As seen in: The Fast and the Furious
The setup: Dom and his crew stage a daylight truck hijacking that undercover cop Brian can’t resist getting mixed up in.
Best moment: Brian leaps from his speeding car to the side of the speeding truck to rescue a trapped Vince.
Fun fact: Director Rob Cohen approached the sequence, which almost costs Dom and his crew their lives, as a kind of Buddhist rite. “This is karma,” he remarks on the DVD commentary track. “I am a student of Buddhism and believe this is the truth of life. There is a debt to be paid for one’s actions and this is the debt for these anti-heroes in the picture.”
Sean’s Drag Race
As seen in: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
The backstory: Facing down a jock at his Arizona high school, gearhead Sean agrees to race through a construction site for the ultimate prize: the bully’s hot girlfriend.
Best moment: Sean pilots his muscle car through the facade of a house and leaps out the other side.
Fun fact: The sequence was shot on an actual construction site owned by the Victorville, Calif.-based Frontier Homes, whose owner was a big Fast and Furious fan. But construction didn’t stop while the cameras were rolling. “They were literally on the other street building the houses,” director Justin Lin says on the DVD commentary track.
Downtown Drift
As seen in: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
The backstory: After Han is confronted by his business partner about the fact that he’s skimming off the top of their profits, he hops into his car to escape but ends up meeting his maker.
Best moment: The crowd of pedestrians in Shibuya parting as the cars drift by.
Fun fact: Because they weren’t allowed to shoot the majority of the chase on Tokyo’s streets, Lin and his crew had to re-create the city on several blocks of L.A.’s famed Wilshire Boulevard. As he remarks on the DVD commentary track: “It was tough getting all the businesses to let us put up signs and redesign everything, and we had it for a couple weeks. But it all felt seamless. There was always compliments when we showed the movie to people who lived in Tokyo, and they couldn’t tell what was L.A. and what was Tokyo.”
The Train Heist
As seen in: Fast Five
The backstory: Joining their old comrade Vince in Rio de Janeiro, Brian and Mia agree to aid him in a train robbery. Dom shows up just in time to discover that they’re being used as pawns in a scheme orchestrated by a drug kingpin Hernan Reyes.
Best moment: A truck rams into a train car and catches on fire as Brian dangles from the side.
Fun fact: This entire sequence is one of the costliest in the franchise’s history, starting off at a base price of $25 million and rising from there. “What you have to do is you have to basically buy out a live track,” Lin reveals on the DVD commentary track. “Then we had to go and buy our own train because we had to wreck it.”
The Safe Chase
As seen in: Fast Five
The backstory: Eager to appropriate Reyes’s ill-gotten funds for their own pay day, the Fast crew busts into a police station and makes off with a cash-stuffed safe, dragging it through the streets of Rio.
Best moment: Dom pulls the safe forward while Brian pushes it in reverse before doing a 180 and driving alongside his partner.
Fun fact: The young boy who is briefly glimpsed watching the cars speed by from a bus is Lin’s then 2-year-old son. He wasn’t the most natural of performers, though. “We’d have the stunt guys tow the vault and he wouldn’t look at it! We were finally able to get his attention on take three and he did it perfectly.”
The Tank Battle
As seen in: Fast & Furious 6
The backstory: Dom’s crew clashes with terrorist Owen Shaw on a highway in Spain, with Shaw piloting a full-size tank.
Best moment: Dom leaps through the air — and across a plunging gap — to rescue Letty.
Fun fact: According to Lin’s DVD commentary track, this sixth installment was going to be a two-part extravaganza, with the first installment titled The Fast and the second The Furious. In that version, the highway chase would have been the final scene of The Fast, sending the audience out on a high note while they waited to return a couple months later to see The Furious.
The Runway Chase
As seen in: Fast & Furious 6
The backstory: Shaw is in the midst of fleeing the country armed with a computer chip when Dom shows up and puts a stop to his airborne escape plan.
Best moment: Dom drives his car through the nose of a burning plane.
Fun fact: On the commentary track, Lin says that he originally had the idea for this sequence after Fast & Furious, and it took him four years to bring it to life. At one point, it was going to be the big climax to Fast Five, but the director decided he didn’t have the resources until the next chapter.
The Parachuting Cars
As seen in: Furious 7
The backstory: Tasked with rescuing kidnapped hacktivist Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), Dom airmails his team to the winding mountain roads of Azerbaijan.
Best moment: Tej forcibly ejects a terrified Roman out of the cargo bay by deploying his chute ahead of schedule.
Fun fact: The crew worked closely with the U.S. Air Force to make this wild stunt a reality, filming it over an eight-day period along a section of Colorado’s picturesque Pikes Peak Highway. “We wanted to drop the cars from 12,000 feet and open the chutes at 2,500 to 3,000. The Air Force wanted us to drop them from 18,000 feet and open at 12,000,” second unit stunt coordinator Andy Gill told Popular Mechanics in 2015.
Dom’s Tower Jump
As seen in: Furious 7
The backstory: Having secured the all-important God’s Eye device, Dom improvises a bold escape plan: leaping between not just one but two skyscrapers in Abu Dhabi.
Best moment: The “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” look on Dom’s face when he realizes the brakes are nonexistent and he’s got to make a second leap.
Fun fact: Sorry to burst your bubble, but that vehicle isn’t really hundreds of stories up in the air. Instead, the stunt team shot the car through windows that were rigged above an ordinary parking lot, where a heavily padded crash pad waited below. “We’d get the exit from one side, and then the entrance on another side,” explains Gill in this behind-the-scenes video. “We did it multiple times for the different buildings it was supposed to go into.”
Zombie cars in The Fate of the Furious. (Image: Universal)
The Smartcar Swarm
As seen in: The Fate of the Furious
The backstory: The mysterious Cipher (Charlize Theron) creates her own convoy by hijacking the “smartcar” computer systems, rendering actual human drivers unnecessary.
Best moment: It’s already been teased in the trailer, but the sight of driverless cars swarming the streets of Manhattan under the command of Furiosa herself is enough to make you want to trade in your car keys for a bike helmet.
Fun fact: Here’s one more way that The Fast and the Furious franchise is taking its cues from superhero cinema: The bulk of the Manhattan sequence was actually shot in Cleveland — the same city where the Avengers fought the “Battle of New York” at the end of that 2012 blockbuster.
THE WORST
Brian’s Race
As seen in: 2 Fast 2 Furious
The backstory: Having fled L.A. for Miami, cop turned fugitive Brian makes his living by racing against drivers with names like Orange Julius and Slap Jack.
Why it’s lame: Director John Singleton relies too heavily on green-screen and non-practical effects to create the illusion of speed. Instead, it all kind of looks like the characters and cars are sitting still on a soundstage.
The Relay Race
As seen in: 2 Fast 2 Furious
The backstory: Roman and Brian challenge a pair of muscle drivers to a race in order to pick up additional cars that will come in handy in the climax.
Why it’s lame: Singleton remarks on the DVD commentary track that he was inspired by video games like Gran Turismo, and you can tell because the use of CGI throughout this sequence is distractingly obvious.
The Tunnel Chase
As seen in: Fast & Furious
The backstory: Dom and Brian pursue drug lord Braga and his henchmen through an underground tunnel that crosses the Mexico-U.S. border.
Why it’s lame: A dark tunnel is just a really boring place to stage a car chase, especially compared with the exotic backdrops glimpsed in the other movies. It doesn’t help that the driving action is as repetitive as the underground scenery.
Race Wars
As seen in: Furious 7
The backstory: With her memory freshly restored, Letty gets back in the driver’s seat to compete in the desert drag race that she and Dom invented.
Why it’s lame: James Wan’s visual imagination is perhaps best suited to improbable stunts like dropping cars out of planes or sending them careening between skyscrapers. Tasked with choreographing a straight-ahead road race, he creates a sequence that’s disappointingly free of excitement or tension. The random, widely panned Iggy Azalea cameo doesn’t help.
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