The most important ingredient in any car chase, of course, is a copious amount of vehicular destruction. Add to that a bad guy and a good guy in any number of high horsepower, high priced exotica and you get cinematic gold. But just having expensive vehicles in your movie does not guarantee success. Just look at last summer’s cinematic and automotive catastrophe, "Redline".
If you don’t recognize the title, that is because Redline was in the theatres for about thirty seconds and grossed about enough to cover the costs for the craft services table. The movie was unique in that Newport Beach mortgage banking mogul Daniel Sadek used his personal fleet of exotica for all of the driving sequences. Apparently he burned out so many clutches in his Porsche Carrera GT during production that he used up all of the spares in North America. Alas, for all that effort the movie still stunk.
So what films have managed that elusive cocktail of excitement and adrenaline so vital to a good car chase? Here in no particular order are five of the best car chase scenes of the past ten years.
1.) I Am Legend – Will Smith gunning a Ford Mustang GT 500 at full speed down the empty streets of a post-apocalyptic New York City is a visually stunning testament to the age old question, “How did they do that?”
2.) The Transporter – Jason Statham drives a custom Audi A8 through the narrow streets of Nice, France with such skill and precision that even Steve McQueen would be impressed.
3.) The Bourne Identity – One could argue that the car chases in any of the three Bourne films should make this list. We only single out this particular film because of the improbable number of narrow stairs that Bourne’s 1960’s MINI Cooper manages to drive down while being chased by the entire Berlin Police force.
4.) The Matrix Reloaded –This film was a horrible sequel in most every respect, but the freeway car chase managed to redeem at least twenty minutes of celluloid. While the scene may actually look like it was shot on a real freeway, filmmakers actually built a three mile stretch of “fake” freeway in Northern California for filming.
5.) Casino Royale – Daniel Craig proved he was the greatest James Bond since Sean Connery with this incredible action sequence featuring an Aston Martin DBS. We don’t know how many times the Aston flipped over when Bond lost control of the vehicle in the movie, but it looked like a lot. Of course he survived, though, he is James Bond! He has to so that we can see his next death defying driving sequence…in the sequel!