I can't believe they are still making these films to be honest but if you were making hundreds of millions of dollars simply by repackaging the same idea over and over again, wouldn't you do it as well? After a while the makers of the Fast N Furious were going to have to get more and more ridiculous in the things that their drivers are able to pull off but i think that Fast Five probably takes the cake for completely ignoring physics in their portrayal of what cars, and their drivers are capable of.
[src](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cf/de/36/cfde369eea2a81535f8ec5be1b098349.jpg)Before I get to the silly physics in this movie let's talk about overall quality: This movie is actually very entertaining and the breaks in the laws of the human world are part of the fun because there are so many of them. The fact that people somehow manage to drive their cars all over the world unimpeded and the fact that Dom (Vin Diesel) is able to drive one of the world's most conspicuous cars while the FBI and Interpol are looking for him is just one of the very silly aspects of this film as far as realism is concerned.
That being said: I don't think that anyone watches F n F films for their incredibly realistic situations and if you put that aside I think that this film, just like all of them other than Toyko Drift is worth seeing.
Gonna be some big spoilers ahead, and not just on the ridiculous cars
There is a scene very early in the movie where Dom and Brian have to drive a car off a cliff into a river than is hundreds of feet below them. Both of them, in reality, likely would have died during this because there are experienced cliff divers who have jumped from heights lower than this scene in the film and suffered horrible injuries. The fact that the two of them simply surface and swim away is funny, but not very sound in a physics sense.
There is a pretty epic fight between Diesel and The Rock about halfway through that is just riddled with physics impossibilities just like most fights in films are. All you have to do is watch a MMA fight or two to realize that even people who fight for a living can not take 15 unblocked punches to the face and just have a bit of blood coming out of their pretty face at the end - there are about 20 punches in this brawl that would kill almost anyone and certainly KO them.
At one point they latch onto one another and because they are both so tough, strong, and heavy, they crash right through a cement wall on the floor of the next room. While this is technically possible, in order to generate the force necessary to make that happen both of those guys would be red splatter on the ground after the wall fell.
The most fun scene in this film is when they have a very long Dodge Charger advertisement at the end involving the pulling of a gigantic walk-in safe that weighs 10 tons. They whip it around the streets of Rio like it was a cardboard box and at no point does the cement, street friction, or even the buildings and cars they whip it through have any effect on their forward progression.
According to physicists that have watched this film with a chuckle they have said that you would need 20 Dodge Chargers to simply get that safe to move in a straight line at a very slow pace and that even if the safe was on wheels that 2 500 HP cars would not be able to move it. In fact, they said that if you had two 3000 HP big-rig tractor trailers, you would still struggle to move it, the friction on the ground would be just too much.
Also, if you look at the picture above the safe appears to be tumbling and when it did that the tow cables that the two cars have on them would get tangled up. Not to mention the fact that somehow the safe doesn't manage to get tangled around the cement blocks or even tangled up in the one building that it crashes though.
In this one 10 minute chase scene the makes of Fast Five break the laws of physics hundreds of times and perhaps that is what makes it so much fun.
At the end of the day these films are guilty pleasures of mine. They are riddled with impossibilities such as skydiving in your car and landing safely on a highway never missing a beat. Rather than look down on this impossibility, I tend to appreciate it and I would also get a kick out of it if there are some really really dumb people out there that try to replicate this situation since almost all of what they do outside of FF1, simply isn't possible.
Should I watch it?
Absolutely; and while you are doing so go ahead and make a tally for all the things you see that are not physically possible. There are only a few moments in the film that are realistic and for me, that is part of what makes these films so much fun. Now of they could just do away with 90% of the dialogue.
