Carrion Luggage

Cut to the Chase

I don't believe in the concept of "guilty pleasures." Enjoy something, or don't; talk about it, or don't. If you like something, revel in it.

This is about as close as I get. From GQ:

    The greatest movie car chases, ranked  

I'm an educated man, an intellectual, a reader, and a writer. I started reading (or at least trying to read) Shakespeare at a very early age. I appreciate nuance and subtlety in books, movies, and shows, and I don't engage in macho, "he-man" behavior.

And yet, cinematic car chases are like candy to me.

Actually, that's not a bad analogy. Candy is simple, generally unsubtle, and not really good for you. But it's tasty and makes you feel good in the moment.

Sometimes, even I get tired of thinking, so I search my ever-contracting list of streaming services for movie or show candy, ones that promise fight scenes, good guys vs. bad guys (they don't have to be "guys"), and, of course, car chases.

Hence this article, which I only found yesterday, but the random numbers pulled it right up.

Paul Thomas Anderson's latest movie, One Battle After Another, features one of the best car chases in recent movie memory.

Dammit, now I'm going to have to go see that.

But which are the others?

As with most "best of" lists, this is very subjective. So I'm not going to highlight all of them.

The chase scene has been a staple of action movies for as long as they have existed, so there are plenty of options to pick from.

And, really, movies (and to a lesser extent, TV) are a perfect vehicle (pun absolutely intended) for the chase scene. You can write about them, sure, but even the most well-crafted prose is two-dimensional compared to the raw, visceral spectacle of watching cars hurtling across the screen, leaving chaos and destruction in their wake.

It's also almost exclusively a "car" thing—I'll include other highway vehicles in the category, though. You can involve horses, as many Westerns have, but, in general, horse chases don't involve one of the quadrupeds spinning off a cliff and exploding into a very satisfying fireball (besides, that would be cruel). There are foot chases, of course, but again: explosions are rare, and there's only so much damage a runner can do.

You can even go the SF route and do a starship chase scene, but the vast emptiness of space doesn't provide that sense of immediacy or relatability. The few really good ones usually involve very unrealistic dense asteroid fields, which... well, we don't know everything about outer space, but our own asteroid belt is so diffuse that you won't even see another asteroid from the one you're standing on. Besides, you can count the number of people who've been in space on your fingers (assuming you know the binary finger-counting code), but almost all of us have seen cars and streets and highways.

Real car chases, though, are most often anticlimactic, like when a bunch of cops chased a low-speed white Ford Bronco on live TV way back in the 90s. The cinematic version is, like most of cinema, exaggerated and choreographed for effect. It's art. Not high art, mind you. But art.

9. The tiny Fiat chase in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One

Okay, so, one of my other almost-guilty-pleasures? I really like the M:I movies, and I don't much care what anyone else thinks about them. Nor do I give a shit about Tom Cruise's personal life, extravehicular activities, or religious shenanigans. I will say that I was disappointed with Final Reckoning (aka Dead Reckoning Part Two), mostly because, spoiler, about 1/3 of the movie was a solo underwater fetch quest that, while cinematically impressive, dragged on way too long in my view.

In other words, they should have stuck to car chases.

Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed the mentioned chase scene, though mostly for the interaction between Cruise and Atwell. But there are better ones in that franchise than the Fiat one. Especially if one includes "motorcycles" in the list of chase vehicles.

It does have the bonus of including Hayley Atwell (name misspelled in the link article), whose roles are always awesome, and listen very, very, closely, Paramount: you need to make her the lead in future M:I installments.

8. The cop chase (and pile ups) in The Blues Brothers

This is an important scene in movie history, not least because it's in a low-budget comedy film about music, not a high-dollar action flick like M:I.

4. The tank chase in GoldenEye

Like I said, we can't limit these things to "cars."

There was one particularly memorable chase scene in a Jackie Chan movie that involved a hovercraft (yes, a fucking hovercraft, on land). So memorable, in fact, that all I can remember about the movie was Jackie Chan and the hovercraft, and I'm not 100% sure about the Jackie Chan part.

There are, as you might tell by the Cracked-style countdown numbers, several more at the link. But, like I said, these things are subjective, so I'm just going to add a couple of my personal favorites that didn't make the list:

The Mini Cooper scenes in The Italian Job (2003). I don't know if it truly qualifies as a "chase" scene, but it has many of the same tropes and, well, that's one of my favorite movies, period.

In Captain America: Civil War, there's a relatively short but impressive chase scene that, while starting out as a foot pursuit, evolves into an action-packed car chase. Mostly in a tunnel. Unlike these other movies, super-powered individuals are involved, but to me that makes it all the more fascinating. It's here,   if you missed it or want to be reminded.

The amount of work, skill, art, and planning that goes into some of these scenes is truly staggering, and the best ones have the ability to make me forget, for a moment, that it's all meticulous choreography and stunt work.