30. “Quantum of Solace” (2008)
There are a lot of things wrong with Marc Forster‘s go-round at the Bond franchise, but the pre-credits action sequence is not one of them. After the bare minimum of establishing shots–speeding over blue waters toward a picturesque location on the Italian coast–we’re dropped in media res into a gunfight and a car chase, with Daniel Craig‘s Bond promptly losing the driver-side door but none of his sangfroid. A passing carabiniere helpfully radios in that it’s an Aston Martin followed by an Alfa Romeo, and, presumably with that nod to product placement done, Forster can get on with destroying the cars in progressively more dramatic fashion. All except the Aston, of course which arrives in burnt-sienna-colored Siena still functional, if not exactly showroom-ready. Great opening, shame about the film.
29. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981)
Still one of the most inventive and entertaining car chases ever–maybe because it starts on a horse–by the time Spielberg was making his first “Indiana Jones” movie, he had learned a thing or two about chases, momentum and humor since the days of “Duel.” The stunts here are great, the fights in, on and all over the truck are terrifically dirty and real-feeling, and the twist on the formula is that, once he’s in the truck with the Ark stowed in back, Indy is only chasing the Nazis in the open-top car in terms of spatial relations. Really, it is they who are trying to catch him and his precious cargo, but fat chance when Indiana Jones is in full, glorious, “making it up as I go along” mode. Marvel at just how much prep had to go into making this looks so improvisational.
28. “Matrix Reloaded” (2003)
The incredibly hyped but also deeply disappointing follow-up to the Wachowskis‘ era-defining “The Matrix” is one of the rare times that I’m breaking my own rules in regard to the chase “serving the story.” The freeway chase here is so much better than everything else in the movie, especially in terms of the polish of its effects which are downright ropey elsewhere, that it deserves inclusion, and anyway it hardly matters that it doesn’t do much to push the story forward since the story is such bobbins. The original’s film’s trademark effect, Bullet Time, revolutionized the way action movies would be shot, and it feels elsewhere like the Wachowskis were straining to replicate that success. But what’s great about the car chase is that here the effects feel less obvious, because they’re use in the context of a chase that is, transubstantiation and samurai moves aside, quite traditional–just bigger, speedier and more stylish.
27. “Bad Boys II” (2003)
So 2003 was quite the year for car chases on neverending freeways, right? Now, there is a school of thought that counts Michael Bay‘s frenetic overcutting as the hallmark of him being a “great action director.” It’s a school we didn’t go to, though–mostly we find his brash, garish, rapid fire style simply exhausting, when it’s not actively confusing us as to where everything is. But the exception that proves the rule, apart from “The Rock” above, is this famously OTT scene from a film that is much less good overall, but attains a kind of Platonic ideal of Bay-ness in this sequence, in which cars are thrown at cars, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence whoop and bellow and trade incoherent “thass what I’m talking about!”-style dialogue, and somehow a boat gets involved.
26. “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977)
Erm, not sure what else I need to tell you other than “the car turns into a submarine” here, but sure, the stuff leading up to that is pretty great too. Roger Moore‘s Bond, at near-peak smarmy condescension with regards to the wide-eyed damsel at his side, is pursued by a sidecar torpedo (what, you don’t have one of those?), then a motorbike, then a car driven by Jaws (don’t worry! he lives to fight another day) and finally a helicopter, being piloted by rando hot girl baddie. His method of dispatch for each is increasingly dubious, but really, having his Lotus not only convert into a submersible but also be equipped with a laser-guided missile thingie that explodes the helicopter hovering rather smugly above, feels even more like cheating than Q’s gadgets usually do. Which is also what makes it barefacedly brilliant and the stuff of a thousand kid fantasies.
25. “Toy Story” (1995)
The animation may feel a little cruder than we’re used to now, but Pixar‘s “Toy Story,” the brainchild of the great John Lasseter, is still an absolute delight that should be, and probably is, taught in storycraft courses. One of the great things that Pixar did, of course, was create movies that the watching adults could get with as well as the kids, and one of the ways they did that was by co-opting elements of grown-up cinema and incorporating them beautifully, with heart and humor and a cinephile’s eye, into their endlessly reworked and refined story framework. And so of course their first flagship film should have a car chase in it, and not only a car chase, but one of the most inventive uses of remote control up to and including that bit in “Tomorrow Never Dies” where Bond pilots his BMW from the backseat.
24. “John Wick” (2014)
A lot was made of Chad Stahelski and David Leitch‘s reinvention of “gun-fu” in this fabulously slick, lean, cool-as-fuck Keanu Reeves neo-noir. But as stunt co-ordinators themselves, of course they were not going to be content merely recreating weaponised, hand-to-hand combat; they also tackled the Great American Action Trope that is the car chase, and turned in one of the most characterful and enjoyably destructive in recent memory. Playing to their strengths in terms of establishing physical geography and giving everything a sense of heft and impact that so much in today’s over CG-ed world fails to display, here the climax of the films sees Wick pursuing the fleeing baddies, with everyone inflicting maximum blunt, vehicular trauma on each other, all while bullets continue to fly.
23. “We Own the Night” (2007)
It’s already one of our favorite James Gray movies, but how “We Own the Night” tackles the cinematic staple of the car chase is among the best examples of why we like Gray at all. Only very rarely leaving the interior of the car to give us a bare-bones sense of outside spatial geography, mostly he traps us in the car with Joaquin Phoenix, Eva Mendes and the suddenly not-alive driver, as terror and confusion and torrential rain hammer away at them. It’s claustrophobic, seat-of-your-pants stuff, but what’s brilliant is that it’s also somehow weirdly banal — the way the car just pulls alongside them out of nowhere, and the way Phoenix’s character, like any normal human, scrabbles frantically to work out what to do, when he has no idea.
22. “The Bourne Supremacy” (2004)
Paul Greengrass may have only taken over the Bourne franchise from Doug Liman, but his his fingerprints (quite literally–handheld, see?) can be found on half the action movies that have followed, especially those with a spy at their center. Arguably, his style actually lends itself even better to the foot chases (we’ll do a list of those one day and he might very well be at the top), but proving he’s no slouch in the car department either, there’s this pretty stunning sequence set in Moscow, where Bourne (Matt Damon) outpaces his pursuing would-be assassin Kirill (Karl Urban), in an increasingly battered but surprisingly durable stolen taxicab. Almost invariably in these films, the cars tell the stories of their drivers, and
21. “Gone in 60 Seconds” (1974)
This movie–be warned–is z-grade drivel that’s badly acted, completely unscripted and so amateurishly put together that it’s borderline unwatchable. Except, that is, for its raison d’etre, the absolutely incredible 40-minute long (yes, the timeclock on the below clip is correct) car chase. It is more than anything a tribute to one man’s determination to shoot a car chase: Director/producer/writer/star and stunt driver H.B. Halicki essentially summoned this film through sheer force of will, culminating in the destruction of 93 cars in total, and entire sections where it is very obvious, from the reactions of passersby and other vehicles, that nobody but him knew what was going on. It’s another bending of the “story first” rule, because the story is terrible (it makes the Nicolas Cage/Angelina Jolie remake seem decent by comparison), but here the lengthy chase really does become the whole film, complete with an almost docudrama level of balls-to-the-wall reality about it.