While the Fast and Furious movies are known for their ridiculous stunts, there are some that are more realistic than you might think. Though the Fast and Furious‘ street racing origins made for a fairly modest movie that kickstarted the series, it gradually grew into the over-the-top international action franchise it is today.

The Fast and Furious movies continued to strive for a higher level in terms of the action set pieces, with things sometimes getting too outrageous for fans to accept. The F9 space sequence may have been a bridge too far, but there are a lot of stunts that stretch the bounds of reality. However, not all of them are unrealistic.

Furious 7 Has A 10/10 Realistic Stunt According To Physicist

Furious 7 was one of the movies that really exemplified how the franchise was embracing the ridiculousness. With sequences of a car jumping from one skyscraper to another and cars parachuting from planes, it is a surprise that an expert in physics actually deemed one of the stunts realistic.

The sequence comes when the heroes are taking on the bad guys in Azerbaijan. Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner is on top of a tactical bus, which suddenly goes off the cliff. Brian runs up the bus as it falls off the cliff, jumping at the last moment and grabbing onto the back of Letty’s (Michelle Rodriguez) car.

While the sequence looks a little unrealistic at first glance, physicist Diandra Leslie-Pelecky actually felt there was nothing wrong with what was depicted on screen. She even applauded the movie for understanding the physics enough to include some smaller details (via Insider):

“I mean, we’ve all tried to go up a down escalator, right? That’s all he’s doing there. TWhen he’s holding the bar and she stops suddenly, you get this really great example of Newton’s law of motion where an object in motion will keep moving, because she stops the car, and he keeps going flying around. I would give this one a 10 for running up the bus. I thought that was really creative and totally possible.”

Hearing an expert’s take on the sequence is a nice reminder that, while there are some admittedly silly sequences in the Fast and Furious movies, they don’t all need to be dismissed as cartoonish. Perhaps audiences are so used to rolling their eyes in amusement at the over-the-top moments that they just ᴀssume every stunt is physically impossible.

Physicist Says This Fast & Furious 6 Scene Is A 1/10 In Realism

As fun as it is to see the Fast and Furious franchise get some recognition for its realism when it is earned, that doesn’t mean all the movies have secretly been scientifically accurate this whole time. In fact, while Diandra Leslie-Pelecky gave a perfect score to Furious 7, she gave her lowest score to Fast and Furious 6.

While Leslie-Pelecky was also skeptical about the famous moment Dom catches Letty in midair, her main criticism was levied against the movie’s infamous climax as the heroes try to take down the villain’s cargo plane as it attempts to take off. Much has been said about the impossible length of the runway in this sequence, and Leslie-Pelecky agrees.

Calculating the speed the cars are traveling, the length of the sequence, and the fact that the longest runway in the world is less than three and a half miles, Leslie-Pelecky contends that all of this “would result in just this unfathomably long runway.” Along with the fact that Dom drives a car out of the crashing plane, Leslie-Pelecky says:

I think I have to give a one. Just because here, they stretched my ability to ignore reality just a little further than I’m capable of doing.

The runway sequence is indeed clearly impossible, but it is also one of the best climaxes in the entire Fast and Furious franchise. Leslie-Pelecky freely admits that “Hollywood has its own physics“. The Fast and Furious movies simply understand that delivering a good time is always going to come before realism.