Since the theatrical release of The Fast and the Furious on June 22nd, 2001, adrenaline junkies and exotic car heads have felt seen on a big screen at the movie theater, and with every sequel to the original film that has come out, the fan base has evolved even past those niche fans. With ten movies (eleven if you want to count Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw) on the slate and a supposed grand finale eleventh one now in the works, many fans of the franchise are going to want to take a look back at how far this blockbuster franchise has come over the last nearly quarter century.
The Fast franchise is loaded with fleshed-out characters for viewers to get invested in, high-stakes drama, and action sequences that were once just simple car chases through the streets of Los Angeles but have now evolved into some of the most over-the-top set pieces of all time. It’s hard to think which one is the best one. Fast & Furious does what the old car chase films of the 1970s wish they could accomplish but didn’t have the budget or special effects to, and there is one scene that, to many, stands out as the perfect one in the whole franchise.
Dragging the Vault Through Downtown Rio
Fast Five is a standout installment in the franchise. Just look at any film with five or more sequels. Usually, by this point in a franchise’s run, it doesn’t take itself seriously (and sometimes it shouldn’t), and the many themes of what made the universe of the film good have run its course. That’s not the case with 2011’s Fast Five. Think of this film as a reboot or an installment that breathed new life into the franchise. Some even call it the best of all the Fast movies. It was this movie that brought the whole gang back from all previous installments. Fast Five was also the debut of Dwayne Johnson as Luke Hobbs, and it became more of a heist movie than a high-octane action film about fast cars and beautiful women.
[RELATED: 7 Best Heist Movies of the Last 20 Years (That Aren’t Fast & Furious)]
In Fast Five, Dom (Vin Diesel) and the crew decide to rob $100 million from a Brazilian drug lord. The money all remains in a huge safe, and rather than learn how to crack open the safe, Dom and Brian (Paul Walker) end up attaching the safe to a pair of Dodge Chargers and pulling the giant safe out of the Rio de Janeiro police station and dragging it through the city.
The $100 million vault now becomes a wrecking ball, taking out cars, buildings, and whatever else gets in its way as Brian and Dom try to get it to a hideout. The scene takes the franchise’s two best drivers and puts them on their wildest mission yet (it got wilder in the next few installments). The vault chase is an insane sequence to watch unfold, as it lines up with many other classic car chase scenes in action movie history. It’s so impressive that at the end of the film, Hobbs looks Dom in the eye, tells him how impressed he was with the heist, and gives him a head start on their next cat-and-mouse game.
In the films that would follow, we would see a sequence on an unrealistically long plane runway, Brain’s bus jump, a car jumping from one skyscraper to another, and a tank used in a high-speed chase. However, it was the vault chase that elevated the franchise to what it is today. It is also highly realistic and again proves that Dominic Toretto’s crew is fast, but they’re also furious.
Fast Five is available to stream on Netflix.
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