10 Movie Sequels WAY Crazier Than The Original

Back when the original The Fast and the Furious was released in 2001, nobody would've described it as a quaint little action movie, given that it was centered around a group of criminals stealing DVD players in extremely stylish fashion.

The next few sequels modestly raised the stakes, and though the fourth movie, Fast and Furious, flirted with more over-the-top action, it wasn't until Fast Five that the series truly accelerated into another dimension.

Fast Five ultimately downplayed the series' petrolhead vibe in favour of a broader heist-actioner tone, but in turn wore the series' already-frayed tether to reality down to the nub.

This is the film that began to truly depict the series' Family as death-defying superheroes - namely with Dom (Vin Diesel) and Brian (Paul Walker) driving a car off a cliff edge and leaping from it in mid-air - while ramping the ludicrousness of the action sequences up many-fold.

Fast Five's unforgettable climax, in which the heroes drag a bank vault around the streets of Rio de Janeiro, is so jaw-dropping that the series has been chasing the same high ever since.

It goes without saying that the franchise has gotten even crazier in recent years, what with F9 taking the series into space for a brief foray, but Fast Five marks the point at which it categorically said "farewell" to the faintest semblance of physical plausibility.