It’s February, which means you finally have your winter tires on, the Leafs are officially (if not mathematically) eliminated from the playoff picture and awards show season is upon us.
Since you don’t care about 99 percent of the movies out there, we thought we’d look back at the few movies you might actually care about: the ones with car chases! Some of these feature multiple and massive multi-car demolition derby chases, while others have just one intense, hyper-realistic automotive scramble, but we gave them all fair consideration. Except for Pixels, which despite the Minis playing the ghostly heroes, was universally panned and so none of us actually watched it.
Without further ado, the nominees:
Furious 7, Benjamin Hunting
It's the natural order of things for gearheads: as you age, you trade in your under-car neons and Apexi stickers on your Honda Civic for big rims on higher-end rides. So it goes for the Fast and Furious film franchise and its latest effort, Furious 7, where the characters we know and love have evolved from lowly Los Angeles street racers having backyard barbecues to international superheroes who parachute vintage muscle cars out of airplanes while fighting the threat of global terrorism.
As a premise, it's absurd, but the fact remains that Furious 7 was our best bet to see exotic metal and high-horsepower shenanigans on the big screen in 2015 – even if the cars did have to share the spotlight with gratuitous explosions, flexing biceps, and half-baked satellite-based tracking systems that threaten to destroy our way of life.
Want to see a head-on collision between two Dodge Chargers, one 40 years older than the other, and then witness their drivers emerge unscathed to pummel each other half to death? Furious 7's got it. Wonder what a supercar you've never heard of (Lykan HyperSport) looks like jumping from one skyscraper to another in Abu Dhabi while Ronda Rousey looks on? It's all there. Want to revel in our heroes destroying a parking garage with a helicopter, grenades, and sheer testosterone, only to discover that this is the miracle cure for one of the main characters' amnesia? You've come to the right multiplex.
The Fast and the Furious franchise stopped being about car culture a long time ago, and given the studio realization that a series of heist flicks that happen to also feature the occasional chase scene will generate billions at the box office, we're unlikely to see a return to the less-profitable enthusiast roots that grounded the first three flicks in reality. Still, Furious 7 was the best Hollywood could do in 2015 for car fans looking for their high-octane summertime blockbuster flick, so I guess we should be grateful.
Or something.
Mad Max: Fury Road, Brendan McAleer
Arguing over the best chase sequence when an entire movie is a chase sequence seems like a puny plan. Witness the flame-broiled fever pitch of Mad Max: Fury Road, an oil-well fire fitted with wheels and fired off into the desert to explode.
The original Mad Max had some basis in reality, set at the fringes of a fraying civilization. By the second movie, Max went full road warrior. Here in the reboot he's a wandering nomad who can't help but find trouble.
The tone is set in the opening chase, where Max's iconic Ford Falcon rolls to wreckage – this is a wiping clean of the slate, effectively abandoning of any pretense to a solid plot. It's also a change of Australian lead, with Tom Hardy taking up the reins where Mel Gibson left off.
In the new age of madness, we have water as a rarity, a war-like tribe of disciples and a dictator in a fright mask. An enslaved harem makes a break for freedom, led by a shaven-headed Charlize Theron, playing the strong-willed Furiosa.
Meanwhile, Max finds himself drained of blood and stuck to the front of a tetanus nightmare of a desert-running hot rod. The bad guys give chase. The good flee before them. There are monster trucks, spears, a guy in a sling playing a giant guitar with a flamethrower attached to it. There are many, many explosions.
For the viewer, as for the pursued, there's hardly time to catch your breath. “Oh, what a lovely day!” cries one nutcase ‘Warboy’ as whirling sands descend and the carnage increases. Loud, fast, all-consuming: Fury Road is like being inside a combustion chamber at high revs. There's little nuance, but it sure is fun.
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Jonathan Yarkony
With all the hype of the Jag and Aston Martin creations for the latest Bond flick, I had far higher hopes for SPECTRE’s chase scenes than Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, which flew under the radar to some degree. With just a few small tidbits about BMW M3’s being brutalized during production, and debadged BMW bikes screaming around the trailer, I should have been more prepared for the intense automotive and two-wheeled action in Ethan Hunt’s latest adventure.
Perhaps because I hadn’t pored over all the pre-release hype, MI-5 was a pleasant surprise of well-executed, realistic driving stunts and production. In fact, Tom Cruise actually did his own driving stunts, riding stunts, and even the hanging-off-the-back-of-an-airplane-taking-off stunt. While this installment didn’t have the eye candy of the BMW i8 seen in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, seeing the BMW M3 in action to its fullest hypothetical potential in the narrow streets of Marrakech, Morrocco is tantalizing enough for any gearhead and driving enthusiast. What made the MI-5 chase scenes so memorable for me was the combination of intensity, believable yet extraordinary stunts, and how well the scene interlaced humour (thank you, Simon Pegg!) back and forth with the armrest-clenching and imaginary-object-dodging action.
After just a few brief minutes of glorious cars vs bikes action in the city, Hunt (Tom Cruise, a serious motorcycle aficionado in real life) jumps on the BMW S1000RR and chases down his nemesis/ally/love interest Ilsa Faust (wait, Faust, seriously? How Mephistophelian…) while eliminating the anonymous but insidious helmeted villains. As to the motorcycle stunt work, resident motorcycle expert, had this to say about the two-wheeled action: “This is shockingly realistic (especially given previous MI movies) and riveting to watch. The visor reflection shot is brilliant, though the two clutch shots are a bit confusing – do they not know that the BMW S1000RR has a quick shifter? The hip-check crash is a little cheesy, but Cruise’s lowside is a decent representation. Nice job MI-5!”
The other two hours of the movie fly by as well, for the most part, with the usual clichéd yet semi-surprising twists and turns of a typical Mission: Impossible episode, and a nice little ensemble of a cast that seems natural in their roles and banter.
SPECTRE, Dan Heyman
The cars in SPECTRE’s showcase chase are nothing short of spectacular: Bond drives (and wrecks) an Aston Martin DB10, one of just ten ever made. That’s almost as good as destroying a Lykan HyperSport. The pursuit car? A bloody Jaguar C-X75, driven by one of the gooniest goons to ever take the wheel.
By chase end, though, I was left wanting more. Not in the good way; not the “I can’t believe they’re stopping this NOW!” way, but more in the “What? That’s it?” way.
There’s some cool Bond-esque campiness, though; being a Q-branch car, machine guns protrude from the rear deck. Too bad they’re empty, Bond having absconded with a car that was not quite finished. The flamethrower works, though.
The old-school graphics employed to aim said ordinance, meanwhile, are a good callback to Bonds of old. An “altercation” with a Fiat 500 is funny and a bit of an homage to the original Italian Job, when original Cinquecentos littered Turin’s streets.
There’s even some none-too-bad driving, which can’t always be said for these; a nice drift here, cool J-turn there and even a quick-cut gearchange or two. Not bad.
The first few minutes of the chase, though, are so clearly an exercise in product placement that you can’t ignore it: a helicopter shot rotating around a fancy car in Europe? Puh-LEEZE.
It’s all shot at night, too, a big no-no when it comes to car chases. There’s a reason why the all-time greatest chases – Bullitt, Vanishing Point, Ronin, The Bourne Identity – are set in daylight.
The one, big overriding feeling I had, though, is that things just don’t seem to be moving that fast. The chases in both F7 and MI:5 seem like F1 races; SPECTRE’s effort? O.J. Simpson on the freeway.
And the finale? Bond ejecting himself? Why couldn’t he have just done that thirty seconds in? Another allusion to Bonds of old, I suppose.
In the end, I realize that Bond has never been about the car chases to me. Yes, they’re necessary – it’s a superhero spy franchise, and superhero spies chase supervillains in fast cars (or tanks or underwater vehicles or airplanes, etc.) – but you don’t come for that. You come for the one-liners, the gadgets, and the political intrigue.
And Christoph Waltz, of course.
Transporter Refueled, Jacob Black
Look, let’s be honest. This movie is complete and utter rubbish. It’s terrible. It’s worse than Pixels. Probably. We would never actually watch Pixels.
I had to buy headphones and hide in the bathroom for two hours to watch this movie, because I didn’t want my wife to know I was watching it. In it, Frank, played by some nameless newbie in this edition, is not yet the Transporter we know and love from the first Transporter movies – well, the first one. The next two were a bit rubbish too. I’d tell you the name of the actor in this edition, but I think he’d rather I didn’t.
Point is, this one has “not Jason Statham” doing none of his own stunts in a heavily CGI’d set of chase scenes that seemed to be more a celebration of rampant misogyny than of actual cars/car performance/adrenalin. As for the bit where he knocks the three taps off the fire hydrants (why are there three hydrants on the outside of a roundabout anyway?) to create a motorcycle cop booby trap, well that’s just cruel.
Not only cruel, but a bit silly. No dent, no change of trajectory for the car – at all? At least in the first Transporter movie Jason Statham’s car bears obvious battle wounds.
The car, an Audi S8, deserves better than the film gave.
The Winner!
After much intense debate and recreating chase scenes in the office on our Christmas gift hoverboards, the votes were tallied from voting members of The Academy of autoTRADER.ca Contributors Who Like Movies, and the winner is:
Mad Max: Fury Road
Because (to channel Max himself) of course it bloody well is!
From the opening scene to the last, Mad Max is all about heart-racing, breath-taking, rapture. It has every single type of vehicle and every style of chase you can imagine. From the frantic and rapid (a la Fast and Furious), to the slow, intense and ominous (a la Duel), Mad Max packs some serious variety into an already-intense couple hours of movie magic.
Car spotter? Spend hours trying to identify what car sacrificed itself for the glory of Mad Max. Like trucks? There’s a monster truck doing rock crawling. Like motorbikes? Some of them do jumps over the monster truck doing rock crawling. Like trucks? Der. Truck. Like superchargers? Heck, there are two of them on most cars here. If you’re a gear head, there are literally hundreds of cars for you to drool over and pick apart.
It helps that the plot is elegantly simple yet compelling, it helps that the characters are subtle yet developed. It really helps that the editing, cinematography and sound engineering are all spectacular.
This is a purist’s movie, with purist’s chases and plenty of light and shade. It’s just that it’s still 40 degrees in the shade is all… Mad Max is phenomenal, probably the best of the whole franchise. Scratch that. It is. It erases the disgrace that was “Thunder Dome” and restores Mad Max to the highest echelons of cinematic brilliance.
Bravo Max. Bravo.
