The 19 best movie car chases, ranked
With Fast X racing into theaters, let's put the pedal to the metal and see which big-screen car chase takes the checkered flag
Film Features Thelma & Louise
With the Fast & Furious franchise taking its latest lap—Fast X arrives in theaters Friday—we’re reminded just how much we love a great car chase. Well maybe not the one with Tej (Ludacris) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson) in space in F9, we’re still trying to figure that one out. We mean chases with as little CGI as possible, the kind that pin us to our seat because we know there’s a real person in that car barreling down the freeway (props to the tank chase in Fast & Furious 6, among many other franchise favorites). We love old school car chases so much that only six of the 19 stunt sequences in our ranking were from films released since the turn of the century, when production and post-production technology made it easier to fool us into thinking we were seeing something 100 percent real. And one of those six features the amazing Zoë Bell, who said of her wild ride in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, “There’s no double, there’s no CGI, it’s all practical.” Music to our ears.
So buckle up and hang on tight as we rank the 19 best car chases in movies. Some of these films are not memorable but they contain a memorable chase scene, while others are great films made even better with a jaw-dropping, death-defying, rubber-burning, metal-crunching thrill ride down big city streets. And yes, we know there are many more great ones–we’re looking at you The Rhythm Section, John Wick, Wanted, and The Bourne Supremacy—but we’ve only got so much room in the trunk!
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Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines’ car chase from Running Scared on the Chicago El deserves an honorable mention:
Come on, the climactic tanker chase at the end of the Road Warrior is an all-timer. That’s where George Miller really established his signature ability to meld chase sequence with battle sequence and ratchet up the standard car case to a whole other level.
The interns who made this list weren’t allowed to see the movie, ‘cause mom was being mean.
Intern or AI? The new fox game show written by an AI because the intern is on strike
Yeah, the Fury Road chases had More of Everything but the hand to hand combat and cross-vehicle weaponry battles from Road Warrior that put you right in the middle and ratcheted the tension until the very end can’t be topped. Max has a Freddy Krueger knife glove dug into his shoulder, shotgun shells are bouncing around on the hood, Papagallo just had a trident buried in his back, the gyrocopter has been shot down…you’re dealing with a lot of shit all at once.
Seriously, the chase from RW was so verite and immediate that I had to keep closing my eyes.
I would like to add the chases that book end the original Mad Max movie.
And even that that doesn’t top the first car chase from the original Mad Max.
Maybe a little obscure, but the chase in “The Seven-ups” should be included.
Bill Hickman is the stuntman who drove the Charger in Bullitt (playing tall hitman in glasses), the LeMans in The French Connection, and the Pontiac land yacht (maybe a Bonneville) in The Seven-Ups (playing the tall hitman in glasses). Back in the day, Hickman was the guy to hire if you wanted to film a car doing something crazy.
was gonna come here to add that. maybe one of my favorite ever car chases.
The ending of that chase alone should have gotten it onto the list.
Explain to me why ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ is missing.
It’s the signature action set-piece in the signature film of the franchise.
Yes!
Thank you!
> Before it all went CGIUh, where did you get this snark from? F&F as a franchise uses very little CGI, mostly to erase wires. They’re masters of practical effects, so where are you getting your information? I think in the 7th one only 10% was CGI (again, mostly to erase wires or clean up scenes after the fact) and they wrecked something like 250 cars and almost all the stunts were practical.
I mean, they’ve been doing literally impossible stuff on the regular for a fair few movies now. Jumping between skyscrapers, driving on a collapsing rope bridge (then swinging across on the single rope left behind), going into space. It’s all well and good that they crash a bunch of cars into each other for real, but when the key moment of one sequence after the next involves something so ridiculous that there’s no way it could be achieved practically, then it’s fair to accuse it of all going CGI.
I’d like to throw in Fletch’s running from crooked cops in, well, Fletch. Chevy is at his peak, here. “HEY FRED! HOW’S THE HERPES? DOES IT HURT?”
I don’t rate Baby Driver or The Matrix Reloaded’s chases. There are some cool ideas in each of them, but I found both of them to be oddly uninvolving and lacking in visceral thrills.And The Rock shouldn’t be anywhere near this list. It’s awful, with Bay’s usual manic editing attempting to disguise that there’s almost no shot-to-shot continuity, just a lot of things being randomly smashed into.I’m surprised no Bourne film made it. The Paris chase in Identity was damn good… …but the Moscow chase in Supremacy was incredible…
Supremacy….a chef’s kiss!Ultimatum…in NYC….Homer Simpson drooling!How in the world does this list not have any of the Bourne movies?
Agreed, that The Rock and Fast and Furious were included is a complete joke over the Bourne chases. The Bourne Identity car chase not being included while The Italian Job was is pretty egregious as well.
Plus The Italian Job was barely a chase. A couple of motorcycles? It was a getaway.
Right? The Italian Job isn’t a bad movie but as far as car chases it’s pretty generic for it’s time. Not to be a snob, but you can tell when a car chase took a director and crew days to figure out the logistics compared to something like the Italian Job where half of it is driving through empty tunnels and streets with no other cars.A helicopter chasing a car is just not impressive when you compare it to something like Ronin driving against traffic or the car cornering 2 feet from the camera on the ground in 1999 without CGI.
I feel like Drive had a better car chase than most of the movies on this list. And I definitely agree about the Bourne movies.
What took me out of Drive was the suggestion that his go-to move would be to drop into reverse, which has one gear, and be able to keep pace with a 300.
Yeah I forget how fast they got going there, but I was able to suspend disbelief by telling myself that reverse has a hell of a lot more torque than the forward gears…which I don’t know if that’s true but I heard it somewhere. So for short distances reverse is actually better than a forward gear…or at least that was the ol’ wives tale I heard.
Honorable mentions to the police chase scene in The Driver (1978) and that rather brief but incredibly tense and well-done chase scene in Nightcrawler (2014). For Nightcrawler, the build-up to that sequence and the aftermath are key context that make the whole chase scene work, but damn was that whole segment of the film some of the most edge-of-your-seat stuff I’d seen in a while.
I still can’t understand the lack of recognition that movie got, or that Gyllenhaal wasn’t even nominated for his mesmerizing (and sickening) performance.
one of the most real monsters I’ve seen on film in years
This is one ridiculous list. how in the heck is Gone in 60 Seconds (‘74) not on this list as it should be No.1.
What about the chase scene from Mitchell? With the “hot merging action”?
With self-healing headlights!
Makes Driving Miss Daisy look like Bullitt!
Shouldn’t we exchange information?!
GET OUTTA HERE, KID!!!
I feel like you would appreciate this…
Ma-ma-ma-MY GOD!!!
“Wokka-chikka-wokka-chikka…”
No Raiders truck chase?!
Egregious oversight – it’s one of the main action sequences of the whole movie.
The Blues Brothers cost $30 million and came out not long after Ordinary People ($6 million) and Breaking Away ($2 million). When I saw all those piles of crashed cop cars I wondered, Couldn’t they have made this for $28 million? Then we could have had another Breaking Away.
No.
Hey, when you trash 200 Dodge Monacos, you’re going to ring up quite a tab.
Sad to see Mr and Mrs Smith’s minivan shoot out wasn’t included. The banter between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie makes it really fun.
where is god’s name is the chase from The Raid 2
Thank you
Opening scene from Quantum of Solace a glaring omission.
Horribly edited
Honorable mention:1. The final stunt scene in Burt Reynolds’ Hooper.2. The aerial chase in Spielberg’s 1941.3. The chase scene in Running Scared.4. The slow burn chase scene in Sicario.5. The cat and mouse game between submarines in The Hunt For Red October.6. The chase scene through the asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back.7. The final chase scene in Road Warrior (Mad Max II)8. Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom.
I think you’d be hard-pressed to call prop planes, submarines, and TIE fighters cars, though.
The chase it the thing.
The crappy remake of Gone in 60 Seconds was at least good for reminding people about a kickass car movie that was verging on being completely forgotten.
It boggles the mind that the remake’s final chase scene isn’t on here. Yeah, the rest of the movie is trash, but the chase with Eleanor is better than half this list.
But Nicholas Cage! Before his dark entry into every single B movie on Netflix. Also sidenote, apparently Oldsmobiles sold well in the Matrix.
No Bourne Supremacy chase is a crime. That’s some truly visceral filmmaking right there. The ending shocks me every time
Does T2 not count because its truck vs bike?Also Blues Brothers?
Breathe easy, friend – Blues Brothers is on the list, as well it should be.
As for T2, I have to say the truck/bike chase doesn’t belong on this list – it doesn’t actually involve any particularly impressive driving. I’d rather see the tanker/pickup chase that kicks off the third act.
I must have missed Blue Brothers. Its Monday, I am tired
It should have been higher on the list, so it’s not really your fault.
I’ve always loved you.
That chase scene is veeerrry long, as in take a bathroom break long.
T2 is obviously the better movie, but if we’re picking car chases, I’d go with the crane chase in Terminator 3.
Disappointed not to see Terminator.
I was sure T2 would have been on this list.
That this list leaves out the entirety of Mad Max: Fury Road disappoints me greatly.
Also apparently I’m grey here! Wild.
The thing that gets me is that they not only leave out the most iconic chase in the franchise (“The Road Warrior”), but they don’t include the best chase in *this movie*. Because you know what the early chase in “Fury Road” doesn’t have? STUNT PEOPLE ON POLES. A car chase that includes stunt performers on swaying poles 20 feet in the air > nearly any other chase.
007 should get more than just the one mention. The corkscrew is more fascinating in a “making of” featurette, but on screen it’s kind of faint-praiseworthy. Like: “Oh. Cool.”The tank-chase in Goldeneye and the “down-hill no-gas mini-yellow car chase” from For Your Eyes Only, jump to mind.
Also QoS’s opening chase and No Time to Die’s SUV chase in the forest.
Recency bias, I suppose, but No Time To Die’s DB5 wheel spinning, donut, machine-gunning sequence was good too.
The SUV chase was interesting cause they made them creepy. It was shot like a horror movie, almost.
Bullit & The French Connection also because you can’t get cooler than Steve McQueen or Gene Hackman.
For the latter, Landis dropped a Pinto 1,200 feet from a helicopter!
Which was, somehow, not the most dangerous thing he did with a helicopter during his career.
Too soon!
The Bullitt chase is more famous than it is good at this point
I love the Bullitt car chase. I do like that the car loses I believe 6 hubcaps during the chase
I love when the Charger first takes off and the music stops.
I love the bad guys putting on their seat belts at the beginning of the chase
Safety first. I’m an old, and I’ve been a passenger in those types of cars. You will get tossed around if the driver decides to drive…spiritedly.
My parents didn’t think we needed seatbelts in the backseat (this was in the 80s). We lived on a curvy country road and she’d play a game called “swoosh” where she’d whip around the curves so we’d go flying around the backseat. And at one point there’s this hump, and she’d fly over it and our bodies would briefly go airborne.It was good times. Good, somehow not deadly times.
The primary cause of “swooshing” is that old cars had a hell of a lot more interior room than the cars of today, and most were equipped with bench seating. Add a big-ass V8 and you’ll feel like a lottery machine ping-pong ball.I had a ‘74 Chevy Malibu, and I could sit inside it with perfect posture and still had room to spare, and I’m 6′ 4″.
Yep it was a Ford LTD, so the backseat was basically the size of a living room.
Jean Reno muttering “merde,” while putting on his seatbelt in the Ronin scene always brings a smile.
I was waiting for this. Apparently there’s not much Jalopnik-AV Club crossover otherwise they’d be on here screaming about what an awful movie Bullitt is.
Agreed. I was underwhelmed when I watch the movie.
Dirty Mary/Crazy Larry: 90 minutes of live action car chase culminating in a 69 Charger vs Bell helicopter.
ultimately train
During the filming of Ronin, Frankenheimer famously told actor/stunt driver Skip Sudduth, “I don’t wanna see any brake lights.”I was delighted to see the opening scene of Baby Driver here. Beautifully choreographed and synced to the music.
Came to confirm Ronin was in its rightful place atop the list, wasn’t disappointed.Honorable mentions (but not enough to bump anything off the list): – War Of the Worlds: Tom Cruise & the kids fleeing town in the one working car for miles. It shouldn’t be tense, because there’s literally one car that’s not stationary, but it’s Spielberg, so of course it’s astounding.- I surprise myself, but I, Robot: Will Smith is beset by truckloads of robots killing themselves to kill him. I was this close to clicking Publish, then I remembered these are both CGI galore, which disqualifies them.
Absolutely agree. I was getting concerned when I hadn’t seen Ronin scrolling through the top 5 and then saw it #1 and was like “I was about to get upset”.
I feel like the Ronin chase has gradually climbed the public consciousness. As has the movie itself as a thriller / heist flick made for adults.
When it came out it was celebrated for the car chase, but for whatever reason (maybe it never got a good blu ray transfer until recently maybe?) the movie sort of disappeared from public consciousness for years
I think it didn’t stick more because it’s a serious and methodical heist movie without either the zippy/comedic feel or heavy-duty action that most crime movies featured at the time. That didn’t make it a suitable staple for weekend basic cable like the Oceans movies, for example. You had to watch and pay attention beginning to end.
Lol, I know, right? You perfectly described my experience.
Neither of those are car chases.
Agree about I, Robot. Not many chase scenes are actually spooky.
Both the car chases in Ronin should have been on this list.
How in the name of all that is Holy do you choose the car chase from the remake of the Italian Job ahead of the one from the original?
To me, the best chase scene in “Freebie and the Bean” is the one where the titular characters wind up crashing into the old couple’s bedroom…on the third floor.
I believe in Death Proof, Zoe Bell is playing a character named Zoe Bell who is a stuntwoman, but not really “herself”
I know it looks pretty generic by today’s standards but I really enjoyed that car chase in the first Bourne film with the mini cooper.
Nah it’s not generic at all it’s really well done and thought out. Half of these on this list are mindless car action scenes that took 20 minutes of logistical work.
An old one- the last scene in W.C. Fields’ “The Bank Dick”, including the fire engine bit, and the part where Fields hands the bank robber the wheel when he complains about his driving. Now THAT is classic!
Smokey and the Bandit needs to be on here. The whole movie is a car chase.
No Wallace and Gromit?
I like Bullitt because they used two V8-powered stick-shifts.
Fernando Rey’s character is not who Popeye is chasing in The French Connection; it’s his enforcer.
I believe the Dodge Challenger in Death Proof is QT’s tribute to Vanishing Point (the previous entry on the slide show), not The Vanishing. Also, while I love the Ronin car chase and the movie as a whole, if you pay attention to De Niro and Reno’s hands and movements, you can see that many of the shots/edits are sped up considerably during the chase sequence. It’s actually quite funny.
The Island, a mostly forgettable movie, has a pretty amazing chase scene:
A personal niche favourite one: the car chase in D.A.R.Y.L.
DaVinci Code? Anyone? No?
Short Time is a movie about a cop that gets news from the hospital that he’s terminally ill and has weeks to live but that the only way for his insurance to pay his family is for him to die on the job. There’s a crazy as hell chase scene there that folks may like to see.
This was probably the highlight of the movie but the opening of Quantum Of Solace should be on this list
The car chase in the Raid 2 is #1 with a bullet in my book
I never liked the Ronin chase scene as it feels fun and all, but logically always seemed sloppy to me, to many variables not under their control. The objective of a chase isn’t always speed, sometimes it’s just control. So I’d like to submit an oddball choice: The Way of the Gun. Very different, objective based decisions and the movie builds tension throughout really well.
Ronin is correctly on top of the list. All other mistakes and missteps will be politely overlooked.
Yeah, it’s the only entry that really matters in such a discussion.
What hater of cinema thinks that To Live And Die In L.A. is just okay? It might be one of the best films of 1985. It sure as hell isn’t the movie about a DeLorean DMC-12 time machine.
I clicked through this furiously to make sure it ended correctly. It did.
another good, kind of obscure one, is the car/foot chase from Night Of The Juggler with James Brolin and Mandy Patinkin playing a Puerto Rican cabbie
The opening chase from The Transporter walked so Baby Driver could run.
Not technically a chase scene, but a great real life wake-up ride through Paris:
19 seems a weird number. 20’s a nice round one, and there are plenty of suggestions here in the comments for chases that could have topped off the list.
What truly makes Death Proof’s car chase scene a masterpiece is Tarantino’s nod to the cinematic history behind them. He takes all those car chase films and cranks the absurdity dial to 11. It’s like watching the entire history of car chases collide in a glorious homage and I’m here for it.
*looks for Short Time*Hmm…
I”m not the biggest fan of car chases (way too long) but what about the Terminator films? That won over this doubter. And The French Connection has one of the wildest chases ever filmed too.
it might not be #1, but the chase at the end of What’s Up, Doc? deserves a spot somewhere.
100%. It’s so well-choreographed…and hilarious. What other film on this list includes a Chinese dragon?
Sorry to be that guy who nitpicks. It was not Charnier whom Doyle was chasing in The French Connection, it was Charnier’s henchman Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi)
The Seven Ups without a doubt contains one of the three or four greatest car chases in movie history, and I knew full fucking well you guys were going to have no idea the movie even exists- the chase was even designed by Bill Hickman, the same guy who did the chase scenes for Bullitt and The French Connection. I’ve been trying and trying, but I’m really on the verge of leaving this site for good. I see ridiculous factual errors and writers who quite obviously don’t know enough to be writing about the subjects they’ve been assigned here, over and over again. It’s really sad, because I used to enjoy it so much.
So glad to see Ronin get its due – my blood pressure was rising as I got closer and closer to the end with no mention of it, but lo and behold, it (deservedly) occupies the #1 spot!
Bullitt is the standard and none of these others have come close. Pacing, sound, scenery, ending…had it all!
Honestly, Lethal Weapon 4 should have been on this list
The Dukes of Hazzard car chase in Atlanta deserves to be on this list.
I legit love deathproof