Fast Five: the one stunt that’s actually real
According to reader Migu13, the chase scene in which two Dodge Chargers drag a vault through the city is unrealistic. Wrong! Turns out the safe scene in «Fast Five» actually happened in real life as it did on screen. Okay, not entirely. But it’s as close to reality as it gets in «Fast & Furious».
Two matt black Dodge Chargers pull a safe weighing several tonnes through the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Behind the wheel of the American muscle cars are Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker). They’re trying to stop the villain of «Fast Five», the fifth movie in the Fast Saga. Why must this involve dragging around an entire safe? Because it’s «Fast & Furious»!
The roughly ten-minute-long scene is too unrealistic for reader Migu13’s taste.
I stopped watching this bullshit after Fast Five, where they dragged bank vaults weighing tonnes through a Brazilian city... The Avengers are more realistic than that... They should have just stuck to street racing and tuning.
As absurd as it all may seem, the stunt is real. In fact, it’s considered to be one of the most complex and impressive car stunts of the past decade.
Loads of trickery, but no computers
It’s a well-known fact that Hollywood is full of neat tricks. In the case of the vault scene, what we see is actually a bunch of separate takes masterfully cut together. And of course, it’s not really Vin Diesel and Paul Walker behind the wheel. In their place are a few absolutely fearless stuntpeople, driving with a level of skill rarely seen.
There’s so much more to the stunt than just a safe being pulled around. In a video for Vanity Fair, stunt coordinator Jack Gill explains how he and the film’s crew pulled a 4,000-kilogramme safe through the streets. A stunt like this is not something you just wing. Every single metre of the ride was meticulously planned by Jack Gill and his crew before any single stuntperson so much as switched on the ignition in a Charger. According to the stunt coordinator, planning began about four months before shooting.
Different vaults were used depending on the setting, namely:
- two steel vaults weighing 4,000 kilogrammes
- two driving vaults
- two semi-vaults
- a vault on a hydraulic ram
Here’s an example of how the vaults were used. When Dom and Brian drive out of the police headquarters garage, it’s a real four-tonne vault.
Later, when the little girl looks out the bus window at the passing Chargers, it’s a driving vault, i.e. a fake vault with a car inside.
You can tell if you know what to look for – you never actually see the top third of the safe. That’s where the «windows» for the stunt driver are located. What’s more, the stunt driver was surrounded by dry ice and had to breathe through a hose. This was necessary because the engine in the driving vault led to temperatures of up to 90 degrees, which caused the driver to pass out during initial run-throughs. Of course, the dry ice made breathing inside just as impossible. Hence the breathing tube.
Another giveaway that this is a driving safe: the fact that there are no sparks flying on the ground, as opposed to when they first drive out with the vault. At first, Jack’s crew tried to making the vault more slippery. «The problem . . . is once you get the vault moving, it doesn’t want to stop.» So they eventually dressed up a metal box in steel and titanium instead. In close-ups, the vault slides as if it had been ripped out of the wall. «This entire square here was all breakaway wall,» Jack Gill reveals.
How a parking lot became the main street
The location for the scene was Rio de Janeiro, but not the main street you see in the movie. The bank that’s destroyed by the rolling safe at the beginning of the scene was specially created for the movie. It was built on a large parking lot.
In the video, Jack Gill explains that it’s important for viewers to feel the proximity and danger. That’s why he tries to use real people in scenes whenever possible. But the risk of injury was too great in this case – even to pull off one of the most impressive stunts in movie history. So, while the vault we see destroying the bank is, in fact, a vault, it’s not actually being pulled by the Chargers in that precise moment.
The vault smashing through the bank is one of the 4,000-kilogramme vaults, but it’s mounted on a hydraulic ram and attached to a rail. This allowed Jack Gill’s crew to know exactly where the metal block would break through the glass wall. In turn, the stuntpeople could safely enough stand just a few centimetres away from the vault.
The bus stop that’s destroyed by the safe was also specially built for the movie. And the cars along the side of the road? All of them are vehicles specially prepared for the film that were driven over by a vault suspended at the front end of a truck.
The one sequence with a CG vault
Migu13 is not entirely wrong in accusing the movie of being unrealistic. There is a moment when the safe is not real, but computer generated. The sequence is 5 seconds and 18 frames long – so almost 6 seconds. It’s this one here:
The car in the foreground is real. The stuntman had to do a 180-degree turn – or a «one-eighty», as Jack Gill calls these – on a track. But Jack Gill and his crew weren’t satisfied with that alone. The stunt driver had to turn the car in the right half of the frame very close to the camera and at high speeds. The margin of error? About half a second.
Still, that’s nothing compared to the one-eighty when Dom decides to use the vault as a weapon against Reyes. Yup, that’s a real vault. Dom disconnects Brian’s cable from the vault and makes a sharp turn on the Ponte Rio-Niterói (actually the Puente Teodoro Moscoso in Puerto Rico). And the safe slides right on by.
The safe is real. The car is real. The street is real. The bridge is real (though it’s in Puerto Rico, not Rio). The danger – also real. The stunt driver is very tight on road space. And behind him is a four-tonne chunk of steel, inexorably barrelling toward the rear of the converted Charger. If he drives a bit too far ahead, the bumper will hit the barrier of the bridge. If he doesn’t drive forward enough, the vault will flatten the car.
Otherwise, computer effects were used throughout the chase only to make cables disappear from cranes. The big crash at the end – the one where the Charger crashes into the Brazilian bad guy’s VW Touran – was, of course, also shot with real cars. But instead of catapulting the cars uncontrollably through the air, Dom’s Charger was suspended using two cranes and then crashed head-on into the Touran.
The Charger’s got the power... almost, maybe
Time to examine the last component of the stunts: the cars. Dom and Brian are each driving a 2010 Dodge Charger SRT8 in matt black. The cars were modded for the stunt, of course. Everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary was torn out of the interior.
In addition, a specially reinforced roll cage was added, which you also see in the movie behind the driver’s seat. The chassis was strengthened; a winch and an additional cage were added to the rear so it could withstand the tensile load of the vault. And Dom’s Charger was equipped with an NOS by the brand Holley. Some nitrous oxide for that extra boost, of course. And to make the matt black Charger look even cooler, it was equipped with XD Rockstar rims – with all logos blacked out.
On the other hand, the engine didn’t have to be replaced. After all, Dodge is a brand known for extremely high horsepower. In the latest «Fast Saga» movie, Dom drives a 2020 Dodge Charger SRT8 with 808 horsepower. The 2010 model wasn’t quite as powerful, but still had 430 horsepower coming from a 6.1-litre V8 engine. The 2010 Charger packs some serious punch. But Dodge has never released any numbers on the vehicle’s towing capacity. Users on ChargerForums report successfully moving 3,800 pounds, or 1,723 kilogrammes. So, according to these anecdotal reports, two Chargers could move 3,446 kilogrammes – which falls slightly short of the four-tonne vault. However, this is not necessarily due to the engine. It could be due to the structural integrity of the car. Could that be why Jack and his crew added the cage to the back of the car?
And just like that – after four months, a seemingly endless budget for cars and other stunt equipment, skilled personnel and some crazy ideas – movie history was made.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
