Best Car Chases in Movies

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The 17 most amazing sequences of high-octane cinematic automobile action.

It's time to celebrate the best car chases in movie history! In order to make the cut, these chases had to involve a lot more than just tire-screeches around sharp turns.

From Bullitt to Bad Boys II, from the Fast and Furious films to The French Connection ^[2], we left no action movie unturned in our search for chase scene royalty. Here are the 17 very best.

(And we're sure you have some favorites absent from this list, so feel free to rattle them off in the comments section below!)

17. The Italian Job

While the 2003 remake was not without its charms and sweet car chase action, the original 1969 film still has the better chase sequence, as Michael Caine and his team make their well-planned escape through the city of Torino, Italy with $4 million in stolen gold.

In a movie that features plenty of sexy, stylish European sports cars – including Lamborghinis, Fiats, Jaguars and Aston Martins – the real stars of the show are a trio of Mini Coopers; small and maneuverable enough to navigate the traffic-clogged streets of the Italian city. It's a brilliant plan, and a brilliantly executed chase highlighted by a trip down the famous steps of the Gran Madre di Dio church. It turns out, practical can also be pretty damn cool.

16. Fast & Furious

In the fourth Fast and the Furious film, Vin Diesel and Paul Walker finally reunited to take the series to ever greater heights. Here we find Diesel's Dom engaged in one of the increasingly spectacular heists that would come to define the more recent entries in the series, as he and Letty (Michelle Rodríguez) are introduced hijacking oil tankers in the Dominican Republic.

But this particular heist goes wrong, and suddenly Dom finds himself trying to outrun an out of control tanker on a treacherous mountain road while Letty hangs onto the hood of his car. Also, he's doing this while driving, um, backwards. It all culminates in a perfectly timed move by Dom as he speeds under the tumbling, exploding tanker. Aside from the pure thrill of the scene, this opening moment from Fast & Furious also proved that the series was now a full-on action franchise and not just about fast cars anymore. And it hasn't looked back since.

15. Wanted

Nevermind the physics! Director Timur Bekmambetov's adaptation of the Mark Millar graphic novel may be light on realism, but this approach sure does make for some memorable action scenes. Case in point: the sequence where Angelina Jolie speeds in her red Dodge Viper towards a startled James McAvoy, spinning with the door open and scooping the guy right up into the passenger seat.

As McAvoy begs Jolie to just drop him off, the chase kicks into high gear (and it could only get cooler if Jolie was actually driving the Viper from NBC's Viper). An assassin and police cruisers pursue the pair as Jolie crawls out onto the hood of the car, firing at her would-be assailant, steering with her foot when needed, and jumping onto the side of a flipped-over bus to launch her car like a rocket. At one point, as the Viper flies upside down over an array of cop cars, McAvoy yells, "I'm sorry!" to the officers. Hilarious and exciting.

14. The Bourne Supremacy

In what can only be described as a tribute to the endurance and reliability of foreign-made vehicles, The Bourne Supremacy ^[3] features a sprawling chase through the streets of Moscow as Bourne pursues an assassin named Krill, who killed his lover Marie at the very beginning of the film. Driving a small yellow car which, on the surface, looks vulnerable to a light autumn breeze and yet miraculously proves to still be running even after countless collisions, Bourne somehow manages to hit (and to get hit) by almost every single car he encounters along the way. Where many chases define themselves by the grace with which its drivers avoid impact after impact, director Paul Greengrass seems content to accept that even the most accomplished motorist couldn't navigate the alleyways and tunnels of Moscow without seriously slamming into some sh*t.

Considering that most L.A. drivers can't get into a bumper-to-bumper, drivetime fender-bender without claiming whip-lash, Bourne should no doubt be blowing his way through The Bourne Paralysis in the very latest of espionage wheelchair technology. But no. Jason Bourne is a bad-ass killing machine – who, come to think of it, really doesn't kill a whole lot of people – but who is absolutely trained to withstand the crushing force of a full-on collision in the Russian equivalent of a Fiat. Which is all so surprising given the effectiveness and force with which Greengrass has crafted this hard-hitting and riveting sequence.

13. The Spy Who Loved Me

We've seen James Bond commandeer a tank to chase down Russians. We've seen Bond outrun baddies behind the wheel of a hovercraft gondola; we've even seen the venerable spy summersault down a Greek hillside behind the wheel of a Volkswagen! But we've never seen him reinvent the wheel on a very tried-and-true action set piece the way he did with The Spy Who Loved Me. Roger Moore's best Bond outing takes 007's typical car vs. car-ness to a new level – Sea level!

Here, Bond pretends to be a Marine Biologist by the name of Mr. Sterling, who drives a white Lotus super sports car. Yeah, it doesn't take the bad guys very long to see that none of that really adds up before they sic the motorcycle with sidecar torpedo after Bond. When the bike fails, the bad guys send in a helicopter. So what does Bond do, after dodging weapons fire and hay trucks? He asks his Russian spy friend and passenger if she can swim before diving into the ocean. With his car.

The car transforms into a submarine – on the inside and outside – targets the helicopter hovering above the waves and fires a missile at it. The flying machine goes boom and crashes into the water… its burning occupants wishing they had a Red October car instead of a very flammable, very sinking chopper.

12. Death Proof

Hell hath no fury like a stuntwoman scorned at 80 miles-per-hour! For a serial-killer/car chase film, Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse contribution was a bit of a talk-fest right up until the end of the first and second halves. That'd be the point when Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) either gives or receives a good deal of automotive bloodletting on behalf of his death-proof, jet-black car with the skull and cross-bones painted across the hood. But what begins as a deconstruction of the slasher genre – with the car substituting for the weapon – quickly becomes Tarantino's self-described homage to Vanishing Point ^[4] (see below). When three female friends decide to play a game of "ship's mast" on an old 1970 Dodge Challenger (a direct reference to the car in that classic chase film), Stuntman Mike arrives to make the game that much more interesting.

While the first portion of the sequence involves some close quarters, high-speed contact between the two cars, one of the trio clinging desperately to the hood of the car by nothing more than belt strap, the beginning is more suspense oriented than an outright chase. But when the ladies flip the switch and gain the upper-hand, a pursuit across the highways and brush ensues, whipping in and out of traffic, over ditches and hills while crashing through billboards and leaping from high-up ledges. The sequence is refreshingly devoid of the CG seen in most car chases and was filmed practically, a decision that lends a greater air of authenticity to the scene. That, combined with the aged filmstock and added scratchmarks of a fine grindhouse film, makes Death Proof perhaps the most direct and effective homage to Bullitt ^[5] anywhere on this list.

11. Vanishing Point

The entire movie is practically one long highway chase, but we're partial to the final, fatal minutes. The iconic image of a 1970 Dodge Challenger racing across a desert highway is the lasting legacy of this enigmatic cult classic. We never do find out what propels the film's anti-hero, known only as Kowalski (Barry Newman), to drive that supercharged muscle car cross country from Denver to San Francisco, but it hardly matters.

The fun of the film is tagging along on this road trip to nowhere, and watching Kowalski evade the fuzz in an amphetamine-fueled pursuit across four states, inspiring counter-culture figures (and the audience) to cheer him on along the way. And when it comes to the final moments, even a couple of bulldozers in the middle of the road won't slow this bad boy down.

10. Bad Boys II

Taking place on what must be the world's longest bridge and destroying what must undoubtedly be a record number of cars, the mind-blowing chase sequence toward the beginning of Bad Boys II ^[6] is among the fastest, most exciting and well-shot car-vs.-car moments in quite some time. Say what you will about the movies themselves, but director Michael Bay knows how to shoot an action scene, whether it's an in-door gunfight or an outdoor, four-wheel battle-royale between a sports car and a small army onboard a truck full of luxury vehicles. The gimmick here, of course, is that the bad guys, in between bursts of small arms fire, let loose the secured cars from the bi-level truck, spilling out onto the dual-lane highway for police and passers-by to crash hopelessly into.

But what really gives the scene its visceral impact is Bay's masterful placement of cameras alongside the cars as they swerve at 90 miles per hour just inches away from wreckage and debris as it rolls flaming down the street. The famous coups-de-grace to the chase has since been replicated in a number of more recent pursuits, but the image of a burning luxury car bouncing in the air overhead as Will Smith and Martin Lawrence speed recklessly beneath it is, even to this day, an epic moment in car chase history. The only bad thing about the scene is just how many cars – vehicles which most of us could never afford in our lives – were so casually and carelessly destroyed. And we wonder why the auto industry is in trouble.

Read on to find out what our number one movie car chase of all time is...

Continues ^[7]