The 20 Year Evolution of Fast and Furious Car Chases

With Fast X right around the corner, we figured it's time to look back at the Fast and Furious franchise to examine how they combined stunts, practical effects, and some cgi to create some of the best movie car chases ever put on the big screen. From the DVD player heist scene in the OG film, The fast and the Furious, to the vault chase in Fast Five, to the Furious 7 insane moments like the Furious 7 Plane drop, we're going to break down how the best action scenes of the Fast & Furious films were shot.
The Fast and the Furious (2001)
In this first Fast and Furious film, we're going to talk about how director Rob Cohen made Vin Diesel and Paul Walker into LA's best street racers. In this section, we're going to look at how they used vfx to pull off the drag race scene, which early on was the franchise's most influential movie car chase. And we'll look at how they used to incredible action movie stunts and practical effects to pull off that final drag race between Dom Toretto and Brian O'Conner.
2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
In this section we're going to talk about how director John Singleton pushed the visual effects and practical effects envelope to create the yacht jump at the end of the film.
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
The Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift brought two major contributions to the franchise: director Justin Lin and drifting. In this section we're going to example how Justin Lin used real stunt driving and a CGI Tokyo to create the visual effects spectacle that is the Shibuya Square drifting scene.
Fast & Furious (2009)
For Justin Lin's rebootquel, he did wat all rebootquels do well remake the original movie just on a grander scale. We discuss how he took the heist scene from the first Fast & Furious movie and used some explosions and special effects to really plus up this reimagined car chase.
Fast Five (2011)
Fast Five is arguably the best film in the franchise. It introduced the audience to Hobbs (The Rock) and has some of the best action scenes in the franchise. We're going to talk about the Fast Five vault heist as well as all the vfx, special effects, and action movie stunts that went into the train heist, at the beginning of the film.
Fast & Furious 6 (2013)
Fast & Furious 6 featured some truly unique vehicles like the flip car and the tank. We take a deeper dive into how they both the Flip Car scene and the Tank scene practically, with good 'ol stunt drivers and special effects (plus obviously some CGI).
Furious 7 (2015)
For Fast and Furious 7, we're going to look at both the Furious 7 plane drop scene and the tower jumping scene. Cars don't fly, traditionally, but in Furious 7 the do a hell of a job trying. We're going to examine how James Wan used vfx, stunt driving, and special effects to create some of the franchise's best movie car chases.
The Fate of the Furious (2017)
In Fast and Furious 8, director F. Gary Gray brought us scenes like the one where the gang is harpooning Dom's car and The Fate of the Furious final battle where the gang needs to outrun the submarine. Obviously, they didn't have a sub. That's CGI. But the explosion they that forces those cars into the air, that's some real special effects going on there.
F9 (2021)
F9 is an odd title for the Fast and the Furious 9. Regardless of its title, it has some amazing action scenes and it did bring John Cena into the mix. We're going to take a BTS (behind-the-scenes) look at both The Rope Swing Scene and the magnet chase (you know, the "Flipping the Truck Scene").
While we don't Fast X (a.k.a. Fast and Furious 10 ) featured in this video. We're looking forward to adding to this once we finally learn what it took to have Jason Momoa blow up Rome.
Thanks for watching this CineFix deep dive into practical effects, for more be sure to check out:
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