17 Crazy Facts You Just Have To Accept To Enjoy The Fast & Furious Franchise

15. CGI Car Chases Are Total Garbage

The above image is taken from an HD clip of 2 Fast 2 Furious and has not been manipulated in any way. Yep, while it's fair to expect that CGI from 2003 isn't going to look particularly great in 2014, perhaps director John Singleton should have stopped to consider whether CGI car chases were a particularly good idea in the first place. With its ridiculously elaborate shots which fleet between the various drivers in their cars, the car chases have no visceral impact whatsoever, because it's clear as day that the actors are just sitting in a stationary car on a studio lot, and the background has been crudely pasted in after the fact. The cars themselves look like they're from a poor PS2 game, for Christ's sake! This was an intermittent problem in the first few movies in particular: to convey the feeling of speed, especially when a Nitrous Oxide boost had been deployed, the exterior environment was often blurred with corny CGI, a strangely surreal effect that is quite laughable and garish in retrospect. After Justin Lin took the helm and focused more on practical car chases in the later films, these earlier effects-assisted chases became embarrassingly dated.