There's a hilariously bad scene from the Fast & Furious saga that is currently going viral, but just what happened to make The Rock and Vin Diesel look so weird in it? Fast 6 was released in cinemas six years ago, and since then Fast & Furious has continued to reach new heights as a franchise, but you'd never guess the sequence in question came from a movie with a budget of $160 million that went on to gross $788m at the box office.
Starring Vin Diesel as Dominic Toretto, Paul Walker as Brian O'Conner, and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson as Luke Hobbs, Fast & Furious 6 finds Dominic and Brian enjoying retirement, before being brought back into the fold by Hobbs to take on a group of mercenaries. At the close of the movie, with the mission over, Dom and Brian have a family gathering, but just before that is where the scene in question comes in. Hobbs pays a visit to Dom, with the pair showing some begrudging mutual respect for one another. As noted by Jenna Stoeber on Twitter, however, the shooting of the scene...well, it needs to be seen to be believed.
At first, it appears as though they're supposed to be having a face-to-face conversation, but it's just terribly staged. However, it is actually deliberate that the Fast & Furious actors are standing side by side, neither looking at the other one, which is to play to the hyper-masculinity of both characters. This way, they don't have to look into each other's eyes, thus making for an uneasy truce. That itself is a peculiar choice, but it's the way the scene is blocked and filmed that really makes this stand out. The Rock starts off lower down and much smaller than Vin Diesel, and then becomes giant when the camera zooms in, and then becomes small again when it cuts back.
There's a good chance that it's attempting to use some forced perspective to make Vin Diesel look bigger. He's not exactly small, but few people can match The Rock in terms of size, so by shooting it this way they can, in theory, make them more equal, which again fits with the idea around the scene as a whole. The problem is they really screwed the pooch on it, but how did it go so magnificently wrong?
There have been rumors of a feud between Vin Diesel and The Rock for years now, with reports of the rivalry really starting on The Fate of the Furious, but it is possible that it stretched back to Fast 6 and they weren't on set together. Of course, it could've simply been scheduling issues that prevented the scene from being shot with both actors in it. It certainly looks as though they've filmed separately and then it's been composited together in post-production, albeit with some astonishingly bad blocking that's led to it looking like this. The process should've considered where each actor was going to be standing and moving to, and where the camera was going too, but apparently zero thought was given to eyeline, perspective, or, well, anything really.
At this point, though, Fast & Furious is a franchise that completely owns its ridiculousness. This shot of Vin Diesel and the Rock may be hilariously, brilliantly bad, but it somehow also works in the context of these movies.
