Published: August 31, 2018, 2:30 AM
Updated: August 17, 2019, 5:53 PM
Bullitt (1968)
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film Bullitt — widely acclaimed as having one of celluloid’s best ever car chases with Steve McQueen’s Ford Mustang GT Fastback chasing the bad-guys’ Dodge Charger through the streets of, and highways around, San Francisco, in a sequence acknowledge as geographically impossible in real time (10:53) — we’re presenting another 23 car chases, some outstanding and others mostly in tribute to what is film’s consistently great action sequence.
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The Rock (1996)
San Francisco turned out to be a favourite filming destination for car chase scenes, likely due to the city’s dramatic changes in elevation and vibrant culture. Not only is The Rock set in San Francisco, it also features a car chase early on between escaped fugitive Captain John Mason in an AM General Hummer being chased by FBI chemical weapons specialist, Dr. Stanley Goodspeed in a Ferrari F355 Spider. A lot of stuff gets destroyed, but then what would you expect from director Michael Bay?
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What’s Up Doc? (1972)
And it hasn’t been just thrillers that have taken advantage of the driving challenges in San Fran. The romantic comedy What’s Up Doc featured four vehicles chasing each other through most of the city (in tribute to Bullitt), including Lombard Street and the steps (now damaged, because of that scene) at Alta Plaza Park, on which the film production did not have permission to drive.
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The Keystone Kops
Myth has it that the first automobile race took place soon after the second car was built, and so also the first car chase captured on film didn’t wait too long after the car was introduced to the world. In the first decades of the 20th Century, the Keystone Kops were a silent-film slapstick comedy troupe of bumbling officers often involved in some sort of vehicle chase, rushing to a crime scene or pursuing a criminal.
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The Fast and the Furious franchise
Before we delve in too deeply, we should have an honourable mention to The Fast and The Furious, the media franchise that initially revolved around cars and the street-racing culture, but soon turned into a type of superhero action series. All eight films (and soon to be 10) have some sort of extended car-chase scene but to list them all would take up half our gallery, so we lump them all together.
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The Fast and the Furious (1955)
We will, however, acknowledge the 1955 film The Fast and the Furious, which involves not so much a chase as a race (which technically is a type of chase). It’s about wrongfully imprisoned Frank Webster, a truck driver, who escapes custody and takes Connie Adair and her Jaguar XK120 hostage. The latter is setting out to compete in a cross-border motor race (in which she is theoretically not allowed to participate because she’s a woman) and Webster ends up driving her car as a means of escaping to Mexico. Many of the scenes were shot around the area that would become Laguna Seca Raceway a couple years later.
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The Chase (1994)
What made the 1994-action-comedy The Chase memorable was that the chase scene involved the BMW of Natalie Voss (kidnapped by wrongfully-accused Jack Hammond), a couple police cars and a film crew, filming a Cops-style reality show. In a mild adaptation of the 1955 film The Fast and the Furious, the criminal and hostage hope to escape to Mexico and live happily ever after but along the way, there’s a mass destruction scene involving a truck full of cadavers, a good-Samaritan monster truck and an exploding semi.
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Bourne film franchise
Another honourable mention goes out to the Bourne series of films, which currently numbers five (four with Matt Damon) and may expand to six or seven, with possible sequels to the latest two films (the latest with Damon; the previous one with Jeremy Renner). No matter if they were driving the streets of Paris, India, New York City or Las Vegas, you knew there was going to be a car chase that would result in damage to vehicles and persons.
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James Bond franchise
James Bond films have never shied away from car chases and one of the classics is in 1971’s Diamonds are Forever, best remembered for the way in which Bond takes a Ford Mustang Fastback up on its passenger-side wheels to squeeze through a narrow alleyway, and then halfway through inexplicably reorients the car onto its driver-side wheels. The scene is set in Las Vegas, which is another favourite for car chases probably due to its abundance of people and glitzy electric signs to run into and explode.
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Wanted (2008)
Computer generated graphics have made chases more spectacular and theoretically less destructive in the real world. It also results in car stunts that rely more on imagination than execution, which is not a bad thing for stunt-people’s wellbeing. Wanted played fast and loose with the laws of driving physics, remembered for assassin Fox’s “picking up” accountant Wesley Gibson in a Viper, going on a cross-city high-speed shooting spree with a pet-supplies delivery van, and ending up avoiding a police blockade by flipping into, and then driving off, the side of a city bus.
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Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
The sequel to the widely acclaimed The Terminator set new benchmarks in the use of CGI, though the stunts were mostly performed in real life by stunt-people doubling as the billed starring actors, including the initial chase scene involving the Terminator and John Connor on motorcycles, being chased along the concrete Los Angeles River basin by a transport truck driven by the latest, liquid-metal, shape-shifting T-1000 terminator.
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The Italian Job (2003)
The Los Angeles River is another favourite for car chases because it can easily be used for high-speed chases without inconveniencing city dwellers and traffic. A remake of an earlier film of the same name, The Italian Job follows a planned gold heist in the Los Angeles subway, with the getaway vehicles being a trio of the then recently-released Mini Coopers racing out of the subway tunnels, along the concrete river basin and through traffic-congested city streets to Union Station.
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The Italian Job (1969)
Still, nothing beats the congested streets and wheel-like grid of European cities for all out car-chase-fun, as evidenced in the original Italian Job, in which the trio of Minis make their escape with their gold cargo through the streets of Turin and racing along an weir before eventually driving at highway speed into the back of a modified highway coach.
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Lucy (2014)
Paris is another favourite, again due to its abundance of traffic, many of which are smaller city cars, which means you can fit more of them into the same frame and they can all buzz around the mayhem. The sci-fi epic Lucy follows a genetically-engineered woman trying to find the person responsible for making her so and at one point she discovers she can track people through their mobile phones and pinpoints her tormentor, commandeering a police inspector’s compact to chase through the congested streets.
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Ronin (1998)
Whereas Lucy used a lot of CGI’d city cars to keep the pace of its Paris chase, Ronin took to the highways, tunnels, streets and sidewalks of the city with a lot of cars, hundreds of stunt-people and speeds reportedly approaching 200 km/h. The result is a 7-minute sequence that is widely regarded as one of the most realistic chases in film history (thanks to bumper-cameras to enhance speed, and cockpit cameras to show the actors’ anxiety), as mercenaries Sam and Vincent in a Peugeot pursue the bad guys’ BMW, leaving wrecked vehicles of all sizes and shapes along the way.
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The Seven-Ups (1973)
New York City was a lot more exciting as a location for car chases before they decided to turn Times Square into a pedestrian mall, as evidenced in the Bullitt-like chase halfway through the film The Seven-Ups (not surprising since both films involved producer Philip D’Antoni and stunt-driver Bill Hickman driving the bad guys’ car). The 9:10 scene involves detective Buddy Manucci in his Pontiac Ventura chasing the bad guys’ Pontiac Grand Ville through the streets of, and highways around, NYC. The difference is that it’s Manucci’s car that ends up destroyed.
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The French Connection (1971)
In between Bullitt and The Seven-Ups, Philip D’Antoni and Bill Hickman were also involved in what many credit as the greatest chase film sequence of all time in The French Connection, also set in New York City. The chase basically involves one car, a Pontiac Le Mans, which goes against everything a chase should really be. The chased in the scene is a New York subway train running along an elevated track, with detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in hot pursuit on the street below the tracks. The scene is highly regarded for its innovative camera use, most notably the bumper-mounted cam that enhances the sense of speed and danger.
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To Live and Die in LA (1985)
Director William Friedkin tried to outdo his NYC chase from The French Connection on the west coast, as secret service agents Richard Chance and John Vukovich, in their beige Chevrolet Impala (because what else would government employees be issued?) lead henchmen from a counterfeiting kingpin through the concrete canals, train yards and loading docks of Los Angeles, ending the 7-minute sequence with a 2-minute run on the wrong side of the freeway. Actor William Peterson (Chance) reportedly did a lot of driving himself while John Pankow’s (Vukovich) in-car reactions were authentic.
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The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
When it comes to intense highway chases, they don’t get more adrenaline-fuelled and destructive than the 8-minute scene in The Matrix Reloaded, as Morpheus’ and Trinity’s Cadillac CTS is pursued and shot at by The Twins in their Cadillac Escalade EXT and a host of Agents in dozens of cop cars. It finishes off with a 3-minute ride by Trinity and The Keymaker on a Ducati (half that time riding against traffic). It’s all done in CGI, so there’s no matching the lane swapping, shoulder passing, machinegunning, car flipping, barrier pounding, roof surfing and hood crunching.
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The Blues Brothers (1980)
There are few films that are basically one long car chase, and most of them are comedies. The Blues Brothers is one such film, and seems to have been made simply to see how much stuff could get destroyed (mostly police cars, but also the stores and kiosks inside a mall). The film revolves around musicians “Joliet” Jake Blues and his brother Elwood driving their former police service Dodge Monaco (which still has the police car markings) around the Chicago area to reunite their old band for a charity gig, while being chased by Chicago Police, Nazis and a country band whose gig they stole.
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Duel (1971)
One of the feature-long car chases that wasn’t comedic, and widely recognized as one of the most intense films in history, is Steven Spielberg’s Duel, about travelling salesman David Mann’s being terrorized by a tanker truck driver. Playing on many motorists’ fear of the highway behemoths, Mann passes a truck on a California mountain highway only to have the truck take issue and spend the rest of film trying to run the car off the road, rear-ending it, attempting to force a crash on passing manoeuvres, pushing it into passing trains and trying to run Mann over at service stations.
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Raising Arizona (1987)
One of the most memorable chases in film takes place following a convenience store hold-up in Raising Arizona, with H.I. “Hi” McDunnough on foot being chased by gun-happy policemen and store clerks, half a dozen dogs, and Hi’s wife Edwina “Ed,” who had abandoned him when she saw him robbing the store, in the family car. The chase runs through streets, backyards and alleys, home basements and a supermarket, all to a banjo and yodelling score from Carter Burwell. If this sounds amazingly bizarre, keep in mind it is from the Coen Brothers.
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Baby Driver (2017)
Set in Atlanta, Baby Driver is the typical story of a youngster with a knack for driving working as a getaway driver for criminals until he can quit his life of crime. The film opens with Baby waiting at a bank heist to make his getaway in a red Subaru WRX. Befitting the car being chased by a horde of police cruisers, the 3-minute chase consists of a series of drifting manoeuvres as Baby 180s, hand-brake-turns and power-slides his way to a parking garage where they dump the Subaru for a green Corolla.
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Mad Max franchise
And finally, one last honourable mention to the Mad Max films, which are set in a post-apocalyptic Australia where fuel is scarce and therefore roving gangs terrorize the countryside tracking down good people who shouldn’t be out driving anyway, given the state of fuel and anarchy. The latest of four films, Fury Road, is critically acclaimed as the best yet. However, the bar was set by the second one, The Road Warrior, which starts with former police officer Max Rockatansky’s Ford Interceptor being chased by a few punk outlaws, and ends in a spectacular desert chase involving Max driving a tanker truck with the entire gang attempting to pillage the fuel on board.
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