If you happen to be a human being with a pulse, odds are you’ve seen “Mad Max: Fury Road” and think it’s one of the sickest movies ever — I know I do. Now, a scientific study conducted by Money.co.uk has come along to affirm that belief, as apparently “Fury Road” quite literally has some of the most heart-pounding car chases ever to grace the silver screen.
Get your heart thumping: Drive the GMC Sierra 1500
Quantifying excitement
In order to scientifically evaluate viewers’ level of excitement, the team at Money.co.uk sifted through the murky waters of Reddit, IMDB, and Rotten Tomatoes to find some of the most popular car chases committed to film. Once they compiled the list, they gathered a group of 100 volunteers, hooked them up to heart rate monitors, and sat them down to watch some flicks.
Each participant’s heartrate during chase scenes was then compiled into an average, which was compared against the group’s average resting BPM of 64. As an effort to make sure movies that aren’t wall-to-wall action spectacles had a fair shake, researchers “only counted the average BPM for the car pursuit scenes within a movie towards the film’s overall score, not the entire film,” according to money.co.uk’s Salman Haqqi.
The furious findings
When all was said and done, “Mad Max: Fury Road” emerged victorious, lifting the average viewer’s heart rate by 33 percent for an average BPM of 85. Considering the film is broken up into two extended car chases that make up the majority of its 120-minute runtime, it’s pretty telling that the film’s high-octane action kept people’s hearts thumping for such long stretches of time.
Second and third place went to “Fast & Furious 6” and “Furious 7,” respectively. Close on their heels were “Ronin,” “Baby Driver,” and, you guessed it, “The Fast & The Furious.” Not to be forgotten, “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior” managed to snag 13th place on the list, beating out “Fast Five.”
Impressive as that is, I can confirm that none of the runners-up prominently feature a masked man wearing what appears to be a red onesie, bungee-corded to a wall of amps on the front of a truck, whose only character trait is to mercilessly wail on an electric guitar that shoots flames.
Eat your heart out, Vin Diesel. You’ll never be the Doof Warrior.
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