Fast and Furious is the franchise that took a car into space. These movies might have once been about street racing and petty theft, but now they’re globe-trotting action epics featuring some of the maddest stunts outside of Tom Cruise’s ongoing death wish. The Rock has been at the center of a lot of that mayhem, including the scene in which he redirected a speeding torpedo with his bare hands.
The lion’s share of Fast and Furious viewers, ourselves included, would assume that this moment had no basis in reality. We’ve watched the Fast and Furious movies in order enough times to know that physics doesn’t matter to the people behind the best movies in the franchise. But as for Dwayne Johnson throwing torpedoes at people? That’s completely logical, apparently.
When The Wrap asked MythBusters duo Brian Louden and Jon Lung to fact-check the antics of the strongest Fast and Furious characters, they were prepared to give Hobbs a pass for the torpedo-throwing scene in The Fate of the Furious. “It could be possible, but it would be a heroic feat,” they said.
The scene sees Hobbs intervene when things seem hopeless for the gang, taking a torpedo fired from a nuclear submarine and redirecting it to hit one of their pursuers. Hilariously, he’d said “sorry guys, I got no tricks left” just a few minutes earlier. What a liar!
Based on the distances in question and the weight and speed of a standard torpedo of this kind, Louden and Lung worked out that Hobbs needed to produce 450 foot-pounds of force to move the torpedo in the explosive way that he does. That’s similar to the bite strength of a nine-foot bull shark.
The MythBusters said: “We are making this assumption based on the screenshots from the trailer and guessing things, but I would say The Rock is a pretty strong dude. It being on ice and given that it’s The Rock, I am going to give it to him.”
So there we have it. According to the experts, the Fast and Furious cast could pass torpedoes around an icy landscape like playing cards – as long as they’re as strong as Dwayne Johnson. One day we’ll get a version of the Mjolnir scene from Age of Ultron, in which various bald men try as hard as they can to move a torpedo. Everything in the Fast franchise is more explosive.
The man himself waded into the torpedo debate with a tweet back in 2017, in which Johnson pointed out that redirecting a mid-flight torpedo in the way Hobbs does is actually even more impressive than simply moving a deactivated missile. Like we said, the force of a bull shark’s bite.
On the more chilling side of things, the MythBusters also revealed that it would be theoretically possible for someone to hack all of the self-driving cars in New York City, like Cipher does in the movie. Louden said: “If you plan it, if you put some work into it, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have an army of Tesla cars taking over Manhattan.”
That doesn’t bear thinking about. We’d like the destruction of the various Fast and Furious cars to stay in the realms of fiction, thank you very much. So if they want to top that stunt on the Fast and Furious 11 release date, we’re more than keen for it, as long as nobody gets any real-life ideas.
For the latest on this franchise, read our Fast X review and find out about everyone who dies in Fast and Furious 10. There are also revelations around new movies because Vin Diesel might not have told the whole truth about Fast and Furious 11.