In this case, the idea to create a zombie army of cars likely originated from a 2015 story by Wired’s Andy Greenberg in which security researchers used something called a zero-day exploit to cut the transmission of his Jeep as he was driving it on the highway. And who can blame them? They’re the only operations with obscene enough budgets to act out our most gruesome collective anxieties about the future. Action franchises like the Fast & Furious or Bourne movies are in the business of lifting scary headlines from tech news and extrapolating their application to the most horrifying apex.

Bluetooth still sucks and Beats headphones are not that good at noise cancellation.) Even so, it’s clear this car-hacking scene didn’t come out of nowhere. (Especially the scene where Deckard Shaw seamlessly pairs his smartphone to some wireless Beats headphones so that Dom’s baby can’t hear him kill a bunch of people. No part of The Fate of the Furious should be considered even remotely realistic. In the hackers’ final push, some cars are even taken over in skyscraper parking garages and ordered to shoot out of openings and onto the minister’s security detail until Cipher finally gets those precious codes. From what seems like a calm and comfortable war room, Cipher’s crew directs them to smash together on the road like a herd of wildebeests, barricading the minister’s escape route. The fleet is a potpourri of makes and models, some with terrified drivers still inside. So she instructs a few hacker underlings to type on their keyboards for approximately 30 seconds until they’ve casually commandeered a fleet of zombie cars. For some reason, she decides the best way to do this is by cornering his motorcade as it drives through Times Square. By now you may have been privileged to witness one of the most bombastic scenes in Fast & Furious franchise history, what I have been referring to as 'The Revenge of the Camrys.' To summarize: International hacker/villain Cipher (Charlize Theron) needs to get a briefcase containing nuclear codes from a foreign minister.

The Fate of the Furious instaling