Greatest Car Chases in Movies

John Connor (Edward Furlong), pursued by T-1000 (Robert Patrick) and the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), takes off on his motorbike, with T-1000 in hot pursuit in a truck.

British actor Tom Hardy took over the eponymous role in the reboot of the dystopian “Mad Max: Fury Road.” The antagonist drives the predatory-looking gigahorse, a fusion of two 1959 Cadillac DeVilles placed on top of each other atop a truck chassis powered by two Chevy large block V-8 engines.

Ryan Gosling stars as a stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. Nicholas Winding Refn won for Best Director at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

The quintessential James Bond film, in which 007 has to thwart a plot to contaminate the gold at Fort Knox. The movie is famous for Bond’s gadget-heavy Aston Martin DB5, complete with twin Browning machine guns and dispensers for oil slicks and a smokescreen – which made life difficult for the villains chasing him..

The first of the long-running franchise introduces viewers to Los Angeles police officer Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) who’s tasked with stopping street racing but becomes enamored with the street-racing culture and befriends the people in it (including Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez). The movie features a 1970 Dodge Charger.

Whiteknuckle car chases are the order of the day in this thriller starring Matt Damon. He’s a licensed-to-kill U.S. agent blamed for a disastrous CIA operation who uses his assassin skills to survive. The film was the second of five in the series.

Besides a skydiving stunt, and jumping across rooftops, Tom Cruise is behind the wheel in a high-speed chase on a motorcycle through Paris. “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” is the latest of the six films in the series, which began in 1996 (another installment is due next year).

Two brothers in west Texas try to rescue the family ranch from foreclosure by robbing local banks and evading the law in car chases across the unforgiving landscape. Oscar winner Jeff Bridges plays the relentless Texas Ranger in pursuit of the brothers.

The heist film directed by Edgar Wright opens with a high-octane and virtually wordless scene of bank robbers spirited away by a young driver, Ansel Elgort, who pairs his speed-demon skills with the music he’s listening to.

One of cinema’s archetypical chase scenes featuring the king of cool, Steve McQueen, outdueling organized crime hitmen on the streets of San Francisco. The film made the Mustang GT Fastback one of filmdom’s iconic automobiles.

This is a remake of the 1974 original. Nicolas Cage stars as a retired master car thief forced to use his skills and those of his crew to steal 50 cars in one night to save his brother’s life. The remake features a 1967 Shelby GT500.

A fearless and thrill-seeking Secret Service agent, Richard Chance (William Petersen), is out to get the counterfeiter who killed his partner. One of the film’s highlights is the chase scene in which Chance and his partner are pursued by gangsters and Chance drives through parking lots filled with semi-trucks and across flood-control channels to try to lose the mobsters.

A 1960s’ era caper movie stars Michael Caine as the leader of a gang trying to steal gold in Italy. Driving Cooper Minis, they lead Italian law authorities on an epic, zany car chase through the streets, the sidewalks, and the church steps of Turin. The movie was scored by Quincy Jones.

“Vanishing Point” is about a Medal of Honor winner and ex-cop dishonorably discharged from the force who bets he can drive from Denver to San Francisco in fewer than 15 hours. To do that would mean he would have to average speeds of more than 80 miles an hour, and that runs him afoul with the police. Many of the stunts in the movie involved people who worked on “Bullitt” with Steve McQueen.

Director John Frankenheimer, a former amateur race driver, used his love of fast cars in this caper flick to create numerous chase scenes that are often compared to those in “The French Connection.

Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-Anne Moss returned for “The Matrix Reloaded,” and though the movie isn’t as well received as the first “Matrix,” it does have a memorable highway chase sequence, with evil agents replacing drivers, lots of gunshots and shot-up cars, and slow-motion martial-arts action.

We don’t associate Ryan O’Neal with car-chase films, but he appeared in one as an unnamed getaway driver who has a talent for getting out of tight spots. One such situation comes in the middle of the movie when O’Neal, in a red Chevy pickup truck, has to evade pursuers in a Pontiac Trans-Am.

H.B. Halicki wrote, produced, directed and stars in this film – later remade with Nicolas Cage in his role – about a professional car thief, Maindrian Pace, who is offered $400,000 by a drug lord to steal 48 cars in five days. Things go wrong when Pace is sold out, and after he steals a car known as “Eleanor,” the police chase him across Southern California.

Quentin Tarantino directed this grindhouse homage, starring Kurt Russell as a misogynistic stuntman who takes unsuspecting women for drives that end in car wrecks that kill the women but spare his life. When he goes after one group of women including a stuntwoman (Zoë Bell), he gets more than he bargained for.

Audiences reveled in the sleek 1977 Pontiac Trans-Am driven by Burt Reynolds as he evades a good-ole-boy sheriff played by Jackie Gleason. After the movie opened, sales for the Trans-Am shot up by about 30,000 cars over the following year. The motion picture was directed by stunt driver Hal Needham.

This sequel to “The French Connection” stars Roy Scheider leading a team of ethically challenged cops fighting crime in New York City in the 1970s. The film is remembered for a chase scene in which Scheider’s character is nearly killed crashing into a truck on Taconic Parkway in upstate New York.

The dystopian classic that made Mel Gibson a star also featured a third-generation Ford Falcon. Already juiced with a V-8 engine, the filmmakers converted the Falcon into an “Interceptor,” affixing a new nose to the front end, adding flares, and attaching a switch-activated supercharger booster (it’s not real) on the hood for when Max needs to flee.

There have been plenty of car chases in the James Bond franchise, but one that stands out is when Bond (Roger Moore) performs a corkscrew jump with an AMC Hornet X – immortalized in Guinness World Records as the world’s first cinematic “astro spiral.” Elsewhere in the film, the villain Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) takes off in an AMC Matador Brougham Coupe that suddenly sprouts wings.

Steve Spielberg’s first feature film, “The Sugarland Express” is based on a true story about a couple (portrayed by Goldie Hawn and William Atherton) who lose custody of their baby to the state of Texas and will do anything, including evading the police in highway chases, to get the child back. In doing so, they become folk heroes.

Angelina Jolie recruits an office worker (James McAvoy) into her fraternity of assassins in “Wanted.” During a scene in which she and McAvoy are being chased, Jolie fights off the bad guys by hanging out of the windshield and shooting while she’s steering the car with her foot.

Counterculture icon Peter Fonda plays a character at the wheel of a 1966 Chevy Impala, hoping to compete in NASCAR races, who pulls off a supermarket heist to finance his racing ambitions. He’s joined by Susan George, a one-night stand, and both are chased by the police in cars and in helicopters.

This Michael Bay-directed nailbiter stars Sean Connery as an ex-British spy and Nicolas Cage as an FBI chemical warfare expert tasked with stopping a rogue general (Ed Harris) from launching chemical weapons from Alcatraz Island into San Francisco unless $100 million in reparations is paid to the families of slain servicemen who died on covert operations. At the beginning of the film, Connery’s character commandeers a Hummer and leads the police on a chase through the streets of San Francisco.

This remake of the sometimes zany 1969 film features custom-made Mini Coopers driven by Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, and Jason Statham as they race through underground Los Angeles. The cars had to be outfitted with electric motors, because combustible engines aren’t allowed in the subway tunnels where the scenes were shot.

A BMW 3 Series E46 and a vintage Porsche 911 Carrera RS are featured in this film about a getaway driver (Frank Grillo) in a race to save himself and his family after a bank robbery goes wrong and he’s betrayed.

This campy dystopian sci-fi flick, produced by schlock king Roger Corman, stars David Carradine and a pre-“Rocky” Sylvester Stallone as competitors in a transcontinental race in a totalitarian America in 2000. The rivals earn points for posting the fastest time and for mowing down the most pedestrians.

A disparate group of people participate in an illegal car race. The big cast includes Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Dom Deluise, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Jackie Chan, and Terry Bradshaw. The plot and the large cast strongly suggested the earlier, manic car-chase film “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” Reynolds’ stuntman Hal Needham, who directed Reynolds in the wildly successful “Smokey and the Bandit,” also helmed this film.

Fresh off his triumph in “Star Wars,” Mark Hamill plays a high school student who customizes a Corvette Stingray, only to have it pilfered by thieves, spurring him to go to Las Vegas to retrieve it.

The Blues Brothers, musicians played by “Saturday Night Live” alums John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, have to outrun the police, the National Guard, Nazis, and others in Chicago to save the Catholic home where they were raised in this wild farce. Among the musical greats in this film are Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway, James Brown, and Ray Charles.

Directed by William Friedkin, “The French Connection” featured one of cinema’s greatest car-chase scenes. Gene Hackman’s character – the relentless, cynical cop Popeye Doyle – chases drug dealers in cars and on board subways through New York City (if you watch carefully, you can see the World Trade Center under construction). Hackman won the first of his two Oscars for the film.

The first of the three-film series (a fourth is due out in 2023) is about an ex-hit-man (Keanu Reeves – a car fanatic in real life) who comes out of retirement to seek the mobsters who killed his dog and stole his vintage Mustang.