The most ridiculous problems in the Fast and Furious movies can be traced to the franchise’s insatiable thirst to perpetually one-up itself in every way imaginable. The globalization and commercialization of Hollywood’s major studios has fostered an environment that allows for massive financial resources to be dumped into making sure a sequel makes more money than its predecessor. And hey, who can really blame that logic? Who doesn’t want to make more money this year than you did last year? Unfortunately, no one bothers applying such logic to the actual films, hence this list of Fast and Furious logic fails.
“Trilogy” has a nice ring to it. For filmmakers, it’s the seemingly perfect entity to fully develop and execute a rich, thought-provoking dramatic arc or construct a complex mythology. But when a string of loosely connected movies goes far beyond that structure, you’re left with what could be nicely called a hot mess, such as the dumb decisions and library of things that make no sense in the Fast and Furious series.
Creative liberties aside, the list below contains some of the most fascinating Fast and Furious plot holes, character inconsistencies, illogical decisions, and just straight up ridiculous things throughout the franchise.
Deckard Shaw is one hell of a super villain in Furious 7. Motivated, ruthless, impossible to harm, and able to jet around the globe as he pleases without the cumbersome burdens of long flights. You see Shaw in London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, back to Los Angeles, in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, and finally in Dubai, in the first half of the movie. For anyone keeping score, that's about flight 31,000 miles, and doesn't take into account time required for customs and ground transportation (Tokyo's airport, for instance, is about 40 miles from the center of the city).
One more note: Shaw engages in nothing short of terrorism in every location, but seems to have no trouble traveling internationally, at his leisure. He's either got the most reliable private jet service in existence, or his face is just too jacked up to register on any facial recognition software in any airport on earth.
Dom and Leon were like brothers. They came up together, built cars, raced cars, partied at Race Wars, and even stole DVD players together. They would have killed, or been killed, for each other. Leon was there from the beginning, from childhood. Brian wasn’t. Han came years later; so did Roman. All those guys, and more, are family to Dom. He’ll risk it all for them and then some. But Leon’s services and personality haven’t meant anything to Dom since 2001. Let’s hope Dom at least transferred ownership of Toretto’s Market & Cafe so Leon had something to live for.
Fast Five followed the newfound tradition of starting hard and fast. Dom, Brian, Mia, and even Vince join a crew of Brazilian gangsters to steal a handful of exotic cars off a fast-moving train. The twist? Dom and Brian don’t know the other gang’s lead man Zizi is after only a microchip hidden inside the radio of the Ford GT40 they’re after. Their collective plan is to cut off an entire side panel of the train with blowtorches, then wench each car to a flatbed ramp, and reverse them to freedom. All for a data chip inside one car’s radio. Everything is going smoothly, until it’s not, and the ensuing commotion garners the unwanted attention of some DEA agents onboard. Why not just send one guy on the train to steal the GT40’s radio? Without, you know, blowtorching the train while it's moving?
After Fast Five’s high octane shootout foot chase through the Rio de Janeiro favelas, Hobbs and his team return to Dom and Brian’s abandoned hideout on a clue-gathering mission. It’s where they find the elusive Ford GT40 from the memorable train heist, only now it’s half disassembled. Hobbs follows his always-accurate instincts and knows he needs to put the super car back together to find out what Dom was looking for.
Hobbs tells two of his guys to “put all this mess back together,” referring to the now half-built GT40. You can’t disobey Hobbs, so they oblige. Lucky for Hobbs, their entire adult life presumably spent in the military and then special task force law enforcement perfectly prepped them to be able to reconstruct a limited edition super car on the fly in a shanty hideout garage without any documentation manuals. Not only did they complete the task in a matter of hours, but the engine started up on the first try!
A Yakuza Boss Takes Input from an American Teenager
Yakuza is a flexible term used to reference members of one of several Japanese crime families that came to prominence after WWII. Those gangs try to mask their origins behind legitimate businesses, but they are largely still involved in serious, criminal activities ranging from extortion to drug trafficking and prostitution. Some members apologize to their leaders by amputating their own fingers.
You have to wonder why, in Tokyo Drift, Sean Boswell is able to waltz into a private club and directly approach a yakuza boss, in order to apologize for causing business losses, and explain that he plans to make up for it by racing the boss’s screw-up nephew, DK. After all, what better way to catapult a yakuza crime family into the 21st century than to let an American kid in high school tell you how to run your business?
In The Fate of the Furious, the villain Cipher lives on a 787 with two giant satellite dishes that constantly circles the globe, undetected by any and all government agencies. She seems to get off and on the plane at will, but there's no footage of the plane docked at an airstrip, and there's no scene where she takes a small plane out of the big plane to get to her earthly destinations. Although, at one point the plane does touch the ground for about 10 seconds so Dom can drive into it. Other than that, it's in the air the entire time. Who is refueling this plane mid-flight? And when does it get the constant upkeep that a plane needs to stay in the air? How do they get food on there? The fans of the Furious need answers.
