Fast & Furious 6

The back half of this film crosses from physical production into the impossible, and the crossing point is easy to name. The tank sequence was genuinely shot: roughly five kilometres of Tenerife motorway were closed and the tank drove over about two hundred and fifty real cars. The runway finale cannot exist. Measured against the scene’s duration and the vehicle speeds, the runway would have to be at least twenty nine and a half kilometres long, while the longest paved runway in the world at the time, at Qamdo Bamda, ran five and a half. More than three hundred and fifty effects artists worked that sequence and individual shots ran past a hundred man days. The second practical point concerns viewing order. The mid credits scene is not a teaser but a timeline correction: Deckard Shaw, played by Jason Statham, is shown as the driver who killed Han, which relocates the 2006 Tokyo Drift to a point after this film. Watch the series by release date and you will see the third instalment in the wrong place entirely. Spain was chosen by arithmetic, not scenery: a thirty eight per cent rebate cut roughly twenty million dollars from the budget. Not for: viewers who want physics respected in the final half hour.