In What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams is a doctor who is stopped in a rainstorm by a multi-car pileup at the entrance to a tunnel. There’s been an accident followed by a chain reaction collision. Nothing is on fire or exploding, just a bunch of mangled metal, just as in real life.
Dr. Williams gets out to come to the aide of a passenger in the front car, whom he’s trying to help when he’s killed by another car. Given how realistically staged the rest of the accident was, it’s almost a travesty to see the final car thrusting into the air and flipping, obviously coming off of a ramp behind the last car going way to fast for anything but a stunt crash.
It doesn’t bother me in the least when this happens in a standard action movie; it’s a standard part of the genre that I accept because I must in order to enjoy such a movie. But if you truly want to convey the horror that a really bad car crash can bring, it should be staged realistically, ie, let the car crash into the end of the accident and push the other cars into the victim, or have some idiot trying to swerve around the site lose control and hit the innocent bystander. Realistic is much scarier than a “movie” crash.
For a really fun non-car chase, check out Project A, which features a bicycle chase through a series of alleys.
According to the documentary on the DVD, the stuntman who designed the jump filed a patent or tradmark on the schematics he drew up for it. His contract forbid him from performing the stunt for the next few years (not sure how many, I’m working from memory here, but I think two or three), and after that was up he made a pretty good living performing the same jump for live audiences.
Since we’re allowing chases that don’t involve cars, I’ll nominate the toy train sequence in which Wallace & Gromit thwart the escape plans of the villainous penguin in The Wrong Trousers.
FAME: “Mad Max” Max in the police interceptor chases down the Toecutter on the bike, running him into the landtrain truck.
“The Road Warrior” Max is in the tanker truck being chased by The Humongous and his hoard.
SHAME: any chase scene where the bad guy gets away when a truck suddenly pulls out of an alley, blocking the road.
SHAME for The Bourne Supremacy. Unlike Bond, the Bourne films are supposed to be taking place in our real world. So when Bourne and the guy chasing him both commandeer ordinary cars and smash into other cars - the air bags should go off and end the chase right then and there.
This should be true in all modern car chases. You can’t have one anymore in the real world unless you avoid all crashes along the way. Which the one The Bourne Identity did, one of the reasons it was a far superior movie to the sequel.
One I have never heard mentioned in discussions of great car chases is Dirty Mary Crazy Larry which has some terrifically shot chase scenes in a rural rather than urban environment. It also has just about the most memorable end to a chase scene of any movie other than the original The Italian Job.
Minor highjack. If a car crashes, and the airbag is deployed, but the driver manages to deflate the airbag by cutting it with a knife or something, can he still drive off in the car or does the steering wheel lock or something?
Returning OP: I personally loved the Matrix: Reloaded, specifically for the highway chase and its deux ex machina ending with Neo’s perfectly timed save of Morpheus and the Keymaker. It was perfectly realistic by the Matrix’s rules and better still, a wide-screen fullfillment of a recurring fantasy I used to have back in the 80s after watching Road Warrior, right down to the scene where one of the Agents jumps on that moving car and crumples the front end. The last time anybody crawled in my head to dredge up a weird adolescent fantasy was when Neil Gaiman wrote that World’s End story in Sandman about the guy who was spirited into the dreams of a city and had daydreams about his subway car suddenly being transported to anther world.
But I digress. How do you people put up with my tangents?
I see a fundamental difference between a car chase scene as a thing unto itself, a set piece valued for nothing except its motion, and a car chase scene that is a meaningful part of the movie as a whole. In Bourne II, the car chase may be good in terms of the former but it was an insulting nose-thumbing of the world that the movie was trying (or should have been trying) to create.
Movies all too often want to have it both ways. You, the audience, are expected to care about the characters as “real” people and simultaneously not care when the characters are thrown into the world of movie magic.
The most egregious example of this in recent years was Matrix: Reloaded, in which we are supposed to thrill to a car chase scene taking place inside a computer featuring characters who can defy the laws of physics but keep forgetting that they can. So, among the movie’s million monstrosities, we get characters who can fly but are reduced to hanging precariously off the sides of trucks like, well, stunt men.
There’s a continuum here. Or several. Different people care differently about the “reality” of movies. And different movies set up differing levels of “reality” for us to care about. At some level you have to just accept that movie cars have miraculous suspension systems and that Russian cabs are more indestructible than Russian tanks. But at another level you should also be angry that moviemakers think so little of their audiences that they feel they can throw any crap into their faces and get away with it because it’s only a movie.
I don’t remember a car chase in In the Line of Fire (though there’s a terrific foot chase).
I have to say Ronin is probably the most overrated simply because it seems like it’s trying too hard to earn the Best Ever title. It’s well-executed but kinda boring (and enough with the European fruit stands being knocked over!)
I liked the recent Bourne chase quite a bit, though I think a lot of it was due to the excellent score John Powell score providing some excellent propulsion (though when you think about it, Bullitt and French Connection didn’t use music, which can be a bit of a cheat–they had their visuals and editing do all the heavy lifting).
One that hasn’t been mentioned that I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for: Foul Play.
One belonging in the Hall of Shame, is the car chase from the crapstacular movie Ablaze . They lifted it off from the movie Striking distance (not copied it, used the exact same footage).
To elaborate on what greenphan wrote, it is most definitely a “european thing”. In places like Germany, Italy, and France, unlike in the US, the “never pass on the right” rule is very well observed. So it is common to flash your lights (as easy as greenphan describes) to inform a driver in the left lane to get over to the right lane. It is not that they were being “safety conscious”, but merely utilizing this very common signalling technique to further clear their path.
I agree that the remade “Gone in 60 Seconds” is a piece of crap. But the original (Halicki) “Gone in 60 Seconds” has one of the best, most realistic (sort of) car chases of all time (it occupies the last 1/3 of the movie !). The only problem is that you have to endure the first 2/3 of the movie to get to it
In general, I think any car chase which contains a sequence where car A collides with car B, and car A not only vaults, but barrel-rolls or flips over car B, should be added to the “hall of shame”. I’m not sure, but I think “The Presidio” might have started this trend.
Agreed, i’m reasonably sure that show is a major reason that it’s so hard to find a '69 Charger, a detroit muscle car i’d love to own, but i can’t because them dang Duke boys wrecked 'em all…
i also nominate Knight Rider for a dishonorable mention
One of the good bits in Training Day, a movie with a dreadful third act but some very interesting pieces of realism in it (catch Ethan Hawke actually having trouble jumping from balcony to rooftop to balcony and holding onto his gun at the same time) - when they get into the cars and Ethan rear-ends Denzel pretty hard, Denzel gets knocked out for a few minutes - in other words, gee, it really does hurt to have somebody slam into your car! It wasn’t even going movie-fast and it didn’t jump into the air or something, just a nasty jar. I was impressed by the realism.
I see your Magnum P.I. and raise you C.H.I.P.S. Paunch and John were always outrun by guys in little econoboxes that had SMALLER engines than the bikes they were riding.
Excluding damange from the accident that caused the airbag to go off there is nothing in the system that prevents the car from steering. So if the damage to the car is not enough to disable it, the car should still be driveable. Also since the bag inflates / deflates in under 200 milliseconds, no knife is necessary.
