A story that spans decades and even jumps around in time is bound to have a few plot
holes that could bring the audience's enjoyment to a screeching halt. However, when it comes to the
Fast and Furious franchise, those reality-busting moments might just be part of the charm.
In the oft-forgotten 2 Fast 2 Furious, Brian O'Conner finds himself an outlaw living in
Miami and doing what he does best — street racing. The person behind the
Miami underworld's street racing scene is mechanic and organizer Tej Parker.
When fans are first introduced to the character, he's a humble mechanic who used to street race,
like Brian. However, after hitting a wall doing 120 miles per hour,
he doesn't drive anymore. Instead, he just organizes races.
Tej then disappears until Fast 5, when he's called to Brazil to help Brian
and Dom Toretto with a heist. That's where he also demonstrates a renewed ability to drive,
an intimate knowledge of high-tech safes, and the ability to acquire
almost anything in the world for their odd little safe house in Rio.
By The Fate of the Furious, he's also demonstrated that he's an expert martial artist and a hacker
that's capable of impressing Ramsey, who multiple governments are seeking for her technology.
Tej goes from being a humble mechanic to a world-class criminal mastermind, hacker,
driver, fighter, and acquisitions expert.
At no point is the impressive expansion of his skill set adequately explained.
A brief attempt to justify his skills was made in Fast 5, but Tej simply said he had a life
before Brian met him in 2 Fast 2 Furious. That actually muddies the waters further,
implying he had these skills back then and chose not to use them. People can get good
at things over the course of their lives, but Tej is simply too good at too many things.
In Fast and Furious 6, Owen Shaw is introduced as the man that's been using a team similar to
Dom's family to conduct all kinds of unseemly business around the globe.
Furthermore, he's recruited Dom's old childhood flame, Letty, taking advantage
of the fact that the attempt on her life in Fast and Furious left her with no memory.
By the end of the film, Owen is responsible for the death of Gisele, a member of Dom's crew.
After defeating Owen, Deckard Shaw comes out of the woodwork to get revenge. He starts by
assassinating Han, a longtime member of Dominic's crew. He doesn't stop there.
Deckard blows up Dominic's Los Angeles home, which he shares with his sister, Brian,
and their son. Fortunately, everyone makes it out alive. Shaw later attacks Dom at Han's
funeral and makes several other attempts on his life before being captured and thrown in jail.
However, one film later, Dom is backed into a corner and has no choice but to trust his
old enemies with none other than his own baby. Despite straight-up murdering his close friends,
stealing his girlfriend and trying to kill his family,
Dom trusts the Shaw brothers to not betray him while they do his dirty work.
Once the mission is over, he even welcomes Deckard to a
"family" barbecue in New York City. Forgiveness is a very complicated thing, but this is a bit much.
The first movie opens with Brian O'Conner taking his
shot at becoming a detective by going undercover in the street racing world.
The film ends with him befriending Dominic Toretto and letting him escape custody.
Just like that, he goes on the run and becomes a full-fledged criminal and fugitive.
He's eventually found by the FBI in Miami, but instead of arresting him,
they recruit him to do a job for them and bust a worse criminal.
He complies with the request, leading to his record being cleared.
But it doesn't stop there. The next time the audience sees Brian, he's a full-on FBI agent.
Now, someone with a clean record can presumably go through the steps to become an FBI agent. However,
given that the FBI are the ones that cleared him in the first place, it's improbable to think that
they weren't aware of who he was or his propensity for letting street racer friends escape justice.
It's almost like the feds get what's coming to them when Fast and Furious ends with Brian,
predictably, offering to let Dominic off the hook only to have to orchestrate his
daring prison break weeks later. In the end, Brian ends up on the "wrong side of a wanted
poster," but he frankly shouldn't have ever been trusted on the right side in the first place.
Fate of the Furious had the burden of having to top the seven movies that came before it.
Its attempt to do that can be summed up in a daring scene in which Dominic Toretto has to
face off against his own team in a New York City chase. Dom, however, has the support of
the criminal mastermind Cipher, who has her team of expert hackers take over autonomous
cars in the city and remotely drive them like they're a sea of unfriendly metal. Cipher says,
"I want every chip with a zero-day exploit in a 2-mile radius around that motorcade, now."
“Hack them all.”
To put it really, really simply, a "zero-day exploit" is basically a bit of software that
hackers are able to, well, hack. On its own, it doesn't come anywhere close to explaining
how minivans and older model sedans could get "hacked" and driven like remote control vehicles.
Simply put, the impressive-looking sea of cars that Cipher has her team manifest to aid Dom in
stealing a nuclear football simply cannot exist. Not only would the gridlock in New York City be
too immense to get the cars past a few miles per hour, but the scene shows her controlling cars
that the audience is led to believe have both a cassette player and a high-tech auto driving chip.
The big plot twist in Fate of the Furious hinges on Dominic's old lover,
Elena, having secretly given birth to his baby. However,
for those keeping track of the timeline of events, that really doesn't add up.
Elena is introduced and develops a romantic relationship with Dominic
in Fast Five. When we see her again in Fast & Furious 6, she agrees to let Dom
go so he can be with Letty now that she's alive. Weird, sure, but it's her choice.
To help move on with her life, she joins Lucas Hobbs at the Diplomatic Security Services.
When we see her again in Furious 7, she's a full-fledged agent, having clearly gone
through whatever presumably lengthy process goes into making a local Rio police officer who ran
off with a wanted international fugitive into a DSS agent. What's more, she doesn't seem to
be showing a baby bump at all when Deckard Shaw explodes her and Hobbs out the window of a very
tall building. Fortunately, that death-defying stunt had no impact on her unborn child.
Overall, it just doesn't really track that she would have had a baby with Dom.
She would’ve had to conceive a child, experience the events of three movies, and get a new career
off the ground in a matter of weeks. She certainly wouldn't have been able to hide it from Hobbs,
who would have likely told Dom that he's got a love child out there. It's a pretty big
plot hole for something that will seemingly inform a lot of the franchise going forward.
“Everyone meet Brian.”
Anyone who watched Fast & Furious 6 was likely struck by
two things during its climax — the first being the thrilling action
and the second being the fact that it appeared to take place on a seemingly endless runway.
For those who don't know, the climactic scene sees the bad guys trying to escape in a plane
with one of the good guys as their hostage. Dom's crew has to catch up in their cars and
somehow find a way to ground the plane and get their friend off before it takes off.
What ensues is a roughly 13-minute action sequence that's truly unlike anything that came before it.
Since the movie premiered in 2013, many internet sleuths and amateur mathematicians have done
their best to calculate exactly how long the runway would have to be in order to accommodate
the lengthy chase. The people at Vulture factored in the cars' speeds and consulted an
actual pilot to tell them how fast a cargo plane like that needs to go before it can take off,
and their estimate put the runway at about 28.8 miles long.
The folks at the BBC, however, factored in the idea that the movie was cutting
between multiple things happening at once and put its estimate at 18.37 miles long.
Regardless, they both agree that the film's runway
well exceeds the largest paved runway in the world, which is around 3.5 miles.
Fast and Furious reunited the original gang from the first movie and is,
in many ways, the first direct sequel to the original The Fast and the Furious movie.
The thing that brings Brian O'Conner and Dominic Toretto back together
is the sudden and tragic death of their mutual friend, Letty.
When Brian convinced Letty to be an informant to the FBI,
she got involved with some bad runners. One of them, Fenix, betrayed her and chased her down.
He wrecked her car and is believed to have put a bullet in her head.
Later in the movie, he tells Dom that he doesn't remember Letty's face. He couldn’t.
"Last time I saw it, it was burning.”
So, apparently there was a fire.
In Fast & Furious 6, Brian goes to prison and is told by Fenix's boss
that Fenix actually pointed his gun at the gas tank and blew up the car. First of all,
a bullet to the gas tank doesn't always blow up a car in real life, but that's not the main issue.
The main issue is him saying he definitely killed Letty and even saw her body burning.
As fans know, Letty was blown clear of the wreckage. No bullet wounds and definitely
no burns. Instead, she just has a nasty case of amnesia, which explains why she doesn't remember
Gisele bringing her to the hospital where she was found and recruited by Owen Shaw.
Fate of the Furious begins with Lucas Hobbs being approached by a fellow DSS
agent to inform him that he needs to recruit Toretto's team for a job retrieving an EMP.
He's told in no uncertain terms that this operation in Berlin is off the
books. If he's caught, he will go to prison and be completely disavowed by his agency. Hobbs accepts,
not knowing that Toretto had been approached by Cipher and blackmailed into betraying his team.
Hobbs is arrested and sent to prison, as promised. However, despite committing a crime in Berlin
and being disavowed by the DSS, he finds himself in a DSS prison, the same one that's housing
Deckard Shaw. The question is: If the DSS wanted to disavow Hobbs for getting pinched in Berlin,
why didn't they just let police in Berlin imprison him? How did he end up in the
custody of the people that are actively trying to pretend they have nothing to do with him?
One could argue that Mr. Nobody orchestrated the whole situation so he could bring
Shaw into the mix. However, before Hobbs actually goes into his prison cell,
he's approached by Mr. Nobody with an offer to work for him, which he rejects.
This makes the ensuing prison riot a clear Plan B for Mr. Nobody.
Admittedly, no true fan of the franchise would sacrifice the prison riot scene
in that movie for all the international prisoner exchange logistics in the world.
However, the fact remains that it's a big plot hole.
At the conclusion of Furious 7, Letty reveals that
at some point during the movie she got the entirety of her memory back
just in time for the news to somehow heal Dom's wounds and bring him back to consciousness.
By the eighth movie, she's back to the character we saw last in
Fast and Furious. However, it's not fully explained how Letty got her memory back or
why in the world she decided to sit on that information until Dom was basically dead.
It's very subtly implied earlier in the film that her fight with Kara in Abu Dhabi
may have knocked something loose in her brain. Sadly, it's never fully explained,
and it doesn't look like the remainder of the franchise has any plans to backtrack to
address that. Instead, odds are good they'll forge ahead with even more reality-bending,
over-the-top action movie insanity. Not that anyone's complaining about that.
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