The best film car chases ever

Questions such as: ‘Did he just catch a car?’, ‘Did a plane just catch a car?’, ‘Did that truck just do a handstand?’ and ‘Is that really Helen Mirren?’

Despite having a four-minute long trailer we couldn’t tell you what the plot of Fast & Furious 9 is. Although since Vin Diesel’s character, Dominic Toretto, appears to live on a farm he now presumably lives his life a quarter acre at a time.

The trailer did prompt one more question in the GRR office however; ‘Which movies have the best non-CGI car chases?’ This completely unscientific survey came up with the following choices, one from each of the last five decades. We realise we could have started a decade earlier and include Bullitt but we just think it’s a bit overrated.

Baby Driver (2017)

This Edgar Wright penned effort starts with a superb six-minute demonstration of car control from the titular character at the wheel of a Subaru WRX. The film’s concept is pretty old school; the talented wheelman forced into getaway driver duty to look after his family and the stunt work was performed using suitably traditional methods. No CGI was used and in order to make it look as much as possible that actors were driving the stunt cars used a so called ‘pod’ system.

This mounted a racing seat, harness and full set of controls on the roof from where a stunt driver would perform the stunts while interior cameras captured the actors’ actions and reactions. The WRX was even converted to rear-wheel-drive to slide better. The result was fast paced, authentic-looking fun.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1982)

Things definitely escalated between the first Mad Max – essentially a revenge movie set in rural Australia – and its sequel, which takes place in a ravaged post-apocalyptic wasteland terrorised by masked biker gangs. That did give director George Miller a reason to ramp up the action to surreal levels.

The final chase scene truly does deserve the epithet epic, featuring stuntmen leaping between moving vehicles, cartwheeling motorcycles and a tanker trailer battering its way through moving roadblocks. The chase ends with the tanker barrel-rolling spectacularly in the desert, a stunt that was decided to be so dangerous that the stunt driver was told not to eat or drink in the preceding 12 hours in case he had to be rushed into emergency surgery. And for fans of Fury Road, sorry, but amazing as that was, it did use CGI.

The French Connection (1971)

Car chases are only supposed to look dangerous. Based on a true story of NYC cops battling heroin dealers, the French Connection chase scene could have gone fatally wrong. The chase route wasn’t given permits because the city of New York deemed it too dangerous so director William Friedkin went ahead regardless, using off duty NYPD traffic cops to close roads.

Friedkin himself filmed from the back seat as he was the only unmarried camera operator and had no children. Given the recklessness – including an entirely unscripted crash into a member of the public’s parked car – we were in a bit of a quandary over including it in our list, but it made it for its raw fear factor.

Ronin (1998)

Car chases usually involve some rather special machines and exotic locations (although The Rock’s pitting of a Hummer against a Ferrari F355 in San Francisco takes this to absurd extremes) but one of the reasons the climactic chase scene in Ronin is so compelling is that it takes place in a grey Paris between two family saloons.

Directed by John Frankenheimer, famous for 1966’s Grand Prix, the battle features a BMW 535i driven by Natasha McElhone’s IRA operative Deirdre go head-to-head with a Peugeot 406 piloted by ex-CIA agent Sam, played by Robert DeNiro. Beautifully planned and perfectly executed, close calls in the race elicits looks of terror from the actors. These are totally genuine – Frankenheimer used right-hand-drive cars with dummy steering wheels in front of DeNiro and McElhone as stuntmen hurtled them through the streets and underpasses of Paris.

The Bourne Identity (2002)

A chase through city streets with a Mini that isn’t the Italian Job? Sorry but the Michael Caine classic doesn’t really pass the realism test for this list. Having taken out a would-be assassin with a pen and leapt out of a window Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne finds that a battered Mini Cooper is his only means of escape from the police.

Created by the same stunt team that worked on Ronin, the chase is every bit as nail-biting as Bourne makes full use of the Mini’s diminutive size to scatter pedestrians from pavements, race down narrow alleyways, drive head on into traffic and careen down stairs.