Most of the Top 10 car chases are from the the era before the introduction of special digital effects but, all the Top 10 personally involve you in the chase and use imaginative locations
Click on the Titles to see the car chase clips from each movie!
1: Bullitt
Undeniably the ultimate car chase. Bullitt got everything right: It had Lalo Schifrin’s score, by turns haunting, cool, and heat-pumping. It had an inspired choice of location, which allowed suspension-punishing jumps as well as tight cornering and raw speed. Most of all though, it had Steve McQueen, quite evidently driving the car in even the most dangerous shots and projecting an icy determination to get the job done, no matter how many Kwik-Fit Fitters would have to pick up the pieces afterwards.
The Italian Job is a catalogue of everything that is great about Britain, from Noël Coward and gay gangsters to Benny Hill and CCTV. The centerpiece of the film is the exuberantly silly pursuit out of Turin, featuring plucky British Minis demonstrating their essential superiority over laughable Italian cars. The car chase might traditionally be seen as an American innovation, but Michael Caine shows that when we Brits want to drive like maniacs though a sewer system, we can.
A career-defining role for Gene Hackman who might otherwise be remembered as the comedy villain in the Superman movies, The French Connection improved on its true life source material with the addition of a high speed car-versus-train chase though the streets of Brooklyn. Combining big studio production values with guerilla film-making sensibilities (at least one of the car crashes filmed was a genuine accident) The French Connection is a true one-off.
Not just the most deadly assassin ever to have been trained by America’s espionage agencies, Jason Bourne is also that car-crazy country’s most skilled defensive (and occasionally offensive) driver. The Bourne series features more than one breathtaking ‘passenger’s eye view’ race though busy city traffic, but the amnesiac killing machine’s deliciously irresponsible employment of a Mini Cooper in The Bourne Identity is probably his most memorable.
5: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
Mad Max was a hugely influential movie, spawning an entire post-apocalyptic aesthetic that still crops up in movies, pop videos and fetish clubs today. The climactic chase – where a motley army of biker crazies pursue Max across the featureless Australian desert in order to obtain some of the last petrol left on Earth – is indisputably one of the great set pieces of action cinema.
6: Ronin
Combining dauntless seat-of-the pants driving with an omniscient computer controller and some neat bazooka sunroof work, Ronin has one of the most admired movie car chases of the modern era. It manages to incorporate genuinely high speeds unadulterated by camera trickery, some classic market stall destruction and a devil-may-care approach to roadworks that is the envy of every British road user.
Featuring what must surely be the first indoor car chase, The Blues Brothers is one long destruction derby interrupted by a few classic Stax tunes. The movie is distinguished also by some of the most comical in-car bickering in car chase history.
Part of the ‘car as the extension of the man’ aesthetic that reached its apotheosis in Steven Spielberg’s Duel. A slight plot involving a hopped-up car delivery driver and a reckless bet supports a manic chase from Denver to San Francisco. Like its close relative Two Lane Blacktop the movie hasn’t dated well but traces of its nihilistic destructive glee can be detected in modern genre movies such as Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof.
9: Terminator 2
Not strictly a car chase, it’s true, a movie that was essentially one long chase from start to finish, employing trucks, motorcycles, cars and plain old fashioned running. It all climaxed with this sequence, where a helicopter chases a van underneath a flyover before all the principals change vehicles and start again. Could not be ignored.
The Man With the Golden Gun and Thunderball were both considered for this list but variety is the spice of life, so we elected for just one example from the rich Bond heritage: The adrenalin-soaked opening sequence of Quantum of Solace features Daniel Craig’s Bond transporting a captured criminal mastermind from Lake Garda to Siena while pursued by agents of the shadowy Quantum organization. It’s a thrilling object lesson in how to capture the sheer danger of high speed driving and show it to people who are far too sensible to ever do it themselves. Apart from the destruction on camera one unlucky Aston Martin employee wrote off a £160,000 DBS while delivering it to the set, driving it into Lake Garda in poor weather conditions. To add insult to injury he was also fined £400 for dangerous driving.
H/T Times Online
1 response so far ↓
horold // June 27, 2009 at 11:20 pm |
what about that amazing chase scene in The Island??? awesome!!!