Headscratchers / Fast Five

• When Dom says they're stealing $100 mil, Tej immediately calculates individual shares of $11 mil for each of 8 team members. Anyone who's ever owned his own business should be able to do basic arithmetic: 100/8=12.5 100/9=11. Why was he calculating for a ninth team member he had no way of knowing was going to be involved?
  • A simple case of doing the math wrong in his head or maybe he took into account various expenses that might come up during the planning?
    • And a room full of career criminals didn't question his numbers? You don't make that kind of book-keeping leap in logic without a little bit of explanation when you're talking in the millions, unless you want to be accused of skimming off the top. They used the same number throughout the whole movie even after some of it was burned and a new member added to the team and nobody said "Wait, how much do we get now?". Academically, I know that they just wanted to keep the numbers simple so as not to confuse the audience, but did they really have to assume that we can't multiply single-digit numbers by 11? I'm slightly offended.
      • And thus your lack of common sense obviously made by your pedantic nitpicking prevents you to realize that Dom's simply doing approximations at the top of his heads. When in real life even corporate executives and stock investors and Wall Street do use rough estimations when talking about money (and not just to the general public who are observing business trends but even among actual highly educated businessmen during meetings at business boards). On top are you forgetting that Dom and half the crew are long time friends and the rest who he just met are lifetime friends with Brian or Han? It never ceases to amaze me posters like you get so hung up on tiny details that even the highly educated working in the top echelons of white collar jobs wouldn't care about but lack the common sense to "speak English" and especially somehow magically overlook details like the cast are people who knew each other for over a decade and have done jobs before.
    • I think you are confusing gear heads for mafia types. Criminals yes, math wizards, maybe not. I am not saying any of them are stupid, I just don't think they were concentrating on the numbers. He could have just as easily said "Over ten million each" and we [the audience] would have got the point, though.
    • There are nine members however. Brian, Dom, Mia, Han, Roman, Tej, Gisele, Tego and Rico (the two guys who break into the police station). So Tej's calculations weren't wrong after all.
    • And as for them not questioning Vince's cut, I always just assumed that Dom was splitting his share with Vince.
• So, why does no one call attention to the fact they killed half of Rio with that safe?
  • Hobbs calls them out on it before he gives them the 24 hours.
    • Half of Rio is a bit of an exaggeration. It weren't that many people who got hit by the safe, and most of them were dirty cops.
    • Also, watching it back, you can see that only the front part of the cars get smashed; the roofs never cave in and they're never fully flattened. This way, it can technically be interpreted that the driver's survive. The same applies for 6.
• As Dom and Brian are driving across the highway and away from the cops, Brian says they won't make and that they should drop the safe to run. Dom disagrees, cuts Brian's line on the safe, and attempts to sacrifice himself so Brian can get away. Um...Why? Not five minutes later it is revealed that Dom (and Brian) knew that the safe they were carrying was empty. Why sacrifice himself if there was nothing to lose by dropping the safe, especially if (as Brian suggests) the safe was the only thing slowing them down enough to be caught?
  • It was more about taking out the drug lord that had just a few scenes ago killed Dom's childhood friend once the money was already secured.

• How exactly did Dom beat Hobbs in their fight at Dom's hideout? Dwayne Johnson looks to about 2 times Vin Diesel's size and even though that doesn't necessarily translate to more power, in-story Hobbs is a trained military agent when Dom is just a street thug. It doesn't make any sense.
  • Perhaps Hobbs was holding back. He did need Dom alive, after all.
  • There are some people who are just really good at fighting. It's not training, it's just natural talent. Combine that with Dom's physical power and the fact that he was on one hell of an adrenaline rush at the time and even a trained combatant is going to have difficulty with that fight. To be fair, it really could have gone either way.
    • WRT to this, training comes in many forms. Hobbs may be a trained agent, but Dom may have been in dozens or hundreds of street fights.
  • Simple: Dom's the protagonist
  • Endurance over power may explain it too, a tactical fighter may win a fight due to the sheer amount of moves they know, but a street fighter would learn how to tank blows and wear the other guy out, and learning to counter moves rather than outright beating someone senseless also Hobbs was angry at Dom, that would have made him sloppy.
• Why did the gang burn Reyes' money instead of taking it? They could accomplish the exact same end result (getting Reyes spooked enough to move all his money) and end up with an extra ten million or so.
  • Not necessarily. If they only took the money, then they're only thieves in Reyes' eyes. By burning the money, they're making a more direct (and personal) challenge, which makes Reyes that much more cautious.
  • This is actually really simple. It demonstrates to the enemy that they have a much bigger problem, and poses a huge challenge. A person who wants to steal your money is a rational actor whose motives you understand and whose actions you feel like you can predict. A person who just wants to *burn* your money is *crazy*, and you have little idea what they might be willing to do. If you want to steal my money and escape alive with the money intact, there are a lot of things I can do to stop you. If you want to *destroy* my money, and worse if you don’t care if you survive, there may be almost nothing I can do to prevent it. And once Reyes realizes they can so easily destroy his money, it is a short leap to realizing they can probably also destroy *him*. That’s what Dom was going for.

• How is the Rio police force able to afford all those Chargers? Reyes' money, maybe?
  • Chargers aren't really expensive cars, otherwise they wouldn't be commonly used by police in North America.
  • Whilst they aren't expensive to American police forces, in reality they use locally built Volkswagens instead to get around high import taxes for new cars. The reason they have Chargers in Fast Five is basically down to product placement, looking good on screen, and being a realistic enough vehicle to suit the plot.

• What was Dom's problem with Reyes' men at the beginning? They were hired to steal a bunch of impounded cars off a train. Reyes was really only interested in one of them, so the rest of the theft was to cover for that. Why would Dom care and subsequently risk angering their employer for something that really had nothing to do with him? Was he just that pissed because he was left out when Brian "made a call".
  • The lead henchman basically threatened Mia because she took the car he was interested in and they didn't want to risk anything happening to it.
    • It was more than just them getting threatened. Brian already realized something was off when he realized the cars had been impounded by the DEA, and Dom sensed something was up. He let Mia go in the car they wanted because it would be the next one off. Remember that the truck with the winch and ramp to pull and lower the cars was being driven by Reyes' men. They seemed particularly interested in that one car and once they got a hold of it, there was nothing stopping them from driving off and stranding Dom, Mia, and Brian, or worse, killing them so they wouldn't talk. Dom made Mia take the car so they wouldn't have it, and then when they got so worked up over the one car disappearing, Dom and Brian realized this job was for an ulterior motive that was bigger than either of them thought, and that the guys were likely to turn on them.

• Dom gives one of his speeches about family, but he'd literally just met Roman and Tej a few minutes ago. Even if Roman qualified as a sort of "in-law" as Brian's childhood friend, there's no indication he was that close to Tej.
  • 2F2F pretty clearly establishes that Brian is close to Tej, to the point that Tej will bunk up a stranger (Roman) at Brians request without hesitation, so both Roman and Tej are good in Doms' book due to Brian trusting them.