Picking Nits
MythBusters on 90 seconds of free fall and mid-air conversation; pulling the chute 30 feet from the ground; the surfers recognizing Johnny Utah; Keanu handcuffing Swayze in the water; Utah sent alone to an international criminal; the length of the beach football field; spotting surfers by tan lines on black-and-white cameras; Utah never fixing his knee; Keanu and Busey as bad police; the unacknowledged body count; Bodhi's 200-person party; Bodhi never standing up on the last wave
In the discussion (10)
Approx. transcript time · 00:41:46Read transcript
- MythBusters on the Discovery Channel found that the pair could not have free-fallen for 90 straight seconds and could not have held an intelligible conversation while falling together.
- One host disagrees about conversation, recalling a tandem skydive where the instructor on the jumper's back screamed in the jumper's ear and could be heard; a joke asks whether that was God.
- MythBusters also found it realistic to jump out of the plane and grab the other man as Keanu does, which shocks the hosts; they doubt pulling a parachute 30 feet from the ground and joke that being grabbed in free fall would feel like a Game of Thrones dragon.
- Further nits: none of the surfers recognizing Johnny Utah; Keanu somehow handcuffing Swayze in the water in the final fight; letting an American cop go alone to talk to an international criminal while backup hangs two miles back; a beach football field almost as long as the Fast Six runway.
- Utah spotting that the robbers might be surfers from tan lines on black-and-white bank security cameras is doubted, though he also had the sand, and a parent of beach-going boys concedes a distinct tan line.
- Why didn't Keanu just get his knee fixed, with Dr. James Andrews around in the early nineties? The injury, bent back 90 degrees with two years of surgery, is likened to Marcus Lattimore or Willis McGahee.
- The main issue after 25 viewings: Keanu and Gary Busey are terrible police who miss everything, the bank is robbed while they read a comic and buy sandwiches, and Keanu gets beaten by everyone he fights, including the naked woman, before tackling a man out of a window.
- Everybody dies and nobody talks about it: Bodhi causes at least ten deaths yet the hosts still root for him to surf the last wave, and it is a flaw that Utah gets out of robbing a bank that left four people dead; a host also doubts Bodhi knows enough people to throw a 200-person party, though as a bank robber he is also the life of the party.
- Earlier, during the beach football scene, a host was dubious that surfers on the beach every day would know who Johnny Utah was.
- Going back to nits during unanswerable questions: Bodhi never gets up on the surfboard at the end; a host wanted him to ride it for a few seconds before crashing, which would have been a better and more symbolic ending, perhaps a deleted scene.