Like anything in movies, car chases get overused, and lazy filmmakers fall into tired old tropes. It defies explanation why whenever a there is a police pursuit, there’s always a fruit cart waiting to get smashed on every corner. Or the statistical improbability that just when the bad guy makes a break for it, a couple of window replacement guys happen to be carrying a large pane of glass across the street. The worst is when a young child chases a loose ball right into the path of a car chase, because audiences know the movie makers aren’t going to mow down a kid in the name of entertainment.

Good car chases push the envelope with dangerous stunts, massive destruction of property, and mountains of mangled vehicles. It’s okay to accept that a car’s suspension would survive a 75-foot jump because movies are make-believe, and it would be lame for every chase to end with realistic mechanical failure. The best movie car chases have over-the-top action that audiences have never seen before, and of course, lots of twisted metal.

10 Gone In 60 Seconds (1974)

For the pure epic nature of the scene, the car chase from the original Gone In 60 Seconds ranks as one of the truly greatest. Clocking in at over 40 minutes long, the thrilling sequence takes up nearly half of the film’s 105-minute running time. The premise is quite simple: a group of car thieves has five days to steal 48 specific vehicles for a South American drug lord in order to score a huge payday.

• 98 cars were destroyed during the car chase
• 127 cars were destroyed or damaged in the entire film
• The “Elanor” Mustang is actually a 1971, disguised as a ’73

They wouldn’t have made the story into a movie if everything was so simple and there’s one car on the list that seems impossible to get: a yellow 1973 Ford Mustang, codenamed “Elanor.” After two attempts to boost an Elanor car failed, a third is found, but that leads to the lengthy car chase in which the car is effectively destroyed. They don’t make movies with sad endings, so a fourth Elanor is found just before the deadline.

9 The Italian Job (1969)

While there’s nothing particularly cool about a Mini Cooper, putting a bunch of them in crazy chase scenes ups their cool factor substantially. The original 1969 British comedy caper, The Italian Job, took the movie car chase to a choreographed art form. With 3 Mini Coopers (red, white, and blue) the good guys transport stolen gold bullion through the streets of Turin, Italy on a route better suited for pedestrians.

• Paramount wanted Robert Redford instead of Michael Caine in the lead
• The movie has been remade twice, one in Hollywood and one in Bollywood
• To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the film, the chase was recreated on the streets of Turin

Jardine Motors Group commissioned a survey of the greatest cinema car chases of all time and respondents overwhelmingly picked the Mini Cooper scene from The Italian Job. Weirdly enough, many of the other favorites on the list involve flying cars like Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Grease, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Still, this classic Mini Cooper run, with tires on the ground, except for that cool triple-jump, is one of the most fun scenes in any movie.

8 Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E38vnuYMaWo
One of the coolest car chases scenes of all time doesn’t even involve cars. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, John Conner started off on his Honda XR dirt bike but ended up on the T-800’s Harley-Davidson Softail Fatboy. Behind them was the T-1000, liquid-metal Terminator, in a massive Freightliner FLA 8664 S tow truck. Normally a bike could outmaneuver a truck like that, but T-1000s don’t obey the rules of the road.

• That cement aqueduct is what they call a river in Los Angeles
• While filming the chase, Arnold Schwarzenegger tore the skin off his hand firing the shotgun
• T2 is the highest-grossing film in the Terminator franchise, earning $204,843,345

What makes this chase so amazing is the fact that the liquid-metal Terminator was seemingly unstoppable in the truck. It smashed through vehicles like they were made of cardboard and jumped it into the aqueducts to keep the pursuit going. Even when a bridge sheered off the roof, it still kept coming. The sheer insanity and absurdity of it all made for a very memorable chase.

7 Death Proof (2007)

Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof crawls along at a snail’s pace for most of its 113 minutes but redeems itself at the end with a battle of the Mopar titans. The movie is about a washed-up stuntman who kills unsecured victims by crashing his modified stunt car. A group of women he is stalking figure out what he’s up to and turn the tables and RPMs on him, taking him out.

• “Death proofing” is a stuntman term to make a crash vehicle survivable
• Tarantino was paying tribute to
  Vanishing Point
  with the white Challenger 440
• Most of the Challengers in the movie had 383s

In the final chase, the stuntman, played by Kurt Russel, had to abandon his tricked-out 1970 Chevy Nova, but that was okay because he got behind the wheel of a matte black ’69 Dodge Charger. When the women, who refused to be victims, caught up to him in a white 1970 Challenger 440, we got the E-body vs. B-body duel we deserve. It turns out the Challenger was up to the challenge and incinerated the Charger.

6 The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

James Bond has had some memorable chase scenes including the incredible corkscrew jump in The Man with the Golden Gun, but the one from The Spy Who Loved Me is hands down the best. It’s tempting to give it to this film for the sheer coolness of the 1976 Lotus Esprit, but the truth of the matter is the chase scene is one the greatest ever filmed.

• The film was based on Ian Flemming’s novel but used none of the key plot elements
• The Spy Who Loved Me is Roger Moore’s favorite Bond Movie
• Elon Musk owns a Lotus Esprit used in the film

Starting out with Jaws in pursuit, 007 and his beautiful KGB agent companion, XXX, soon find themselves chased by baddies on motorcycles and in helicopters. One of these bikes even launches an explosive homing sidecar, but it’s no match for the Lotus. With all avenues cut off, Bond jumps the car into the sea, where it transforms into a submarine. The chase doesn’t even end there because the bad guys in scuba gear keep coming. It is hard to beat the scope of a chase like that.

5 Ronin (1998)

Director John Frankenheimer knows a little something about filming cars as he was behind the camera for the classic 1966 film Grand Prix. That movie even won several Academy Awards in technical categories for capturing the speed of the racers. He took that technical expertise and used it to film the amazing chase scene in the espionage thriller Ronin.

• 80 cars were destroyed in the chase scene
• 300 stunt drivers were needed to pull the scene off
• Former Formula 1 driver Jean-Pierre Jarier was one of the drivers

Unlike a lot of car chases on this list, the one in Ronin is fairly realistic, but that doesn’t mean it’s boring. There aren’t any people hanging on the roof of a car going 100 mph or radical jumps through flaming wreckage, but it is no less tense. Speeding through the streets of Paris, mostly going the wrong way, and car-to-car gunfire make for an incredibly tense chase. Hagerty considers the scene, “car-chase royalty” in the same regal court as Bullitt and The French Connection.

4 Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Mad Max movies, at their core, have always been car chases. In the first one, Max Rockatansky was literally the Main Force Patrol’s top pursuit man. In The Road Warrior, most of the film involves Max being chased down by the Lord Humongous and his wasteland scumbags. Even Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome had chases, though it involved an escape train. With the 2015 reboot, Mad Max: Fury Road, they took all the car chases from the previous three films and multiplied them.

• Hugh Keays-Byrne who played Immortan Joe was also Toecutter in Mad Max
• George Miller came up with Fury Road in 1987 but it took 25 years to get it made
• Mad Max’s V-8 Interceptor had a cameo in Fury Road

Choosing the best chase scene from Fury Road is as impossible as answering a trick question. After about five minutes of the story at the beginning, the entire rest of the movie is one long and seriously badass chase. Director George Miller wanted to do all the action and stunts old school style, without relying on CGI, which makes it even more awesome. The radical vehicles and danger were all real, making it one of the best.

3 The Blues Brothers (1980)

The Blues Brothers is another movie where it’s hard to choose the best chase scene because they are all so good. It’s hard not to love the brothers when they ran a bunch of Neo-Nazis off a bridge and the final chase is one of the most epic ever conceived. The movie is however a comedy, so the funniest chase scene has to rank first and that’s when the boys took the police for a destructive tour of a mall.

• Aykroyd’s first draft was 324 pages long, while a normal movie script is under 120
• The chase scene was filmed at the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois
• 13 Bluesmobiles and 60 police cars perished during filming

With as much destruction as one would expect from a car chase inside a shopping mall, the scene was incredibly effective because stars Dan Aykroyd and John Belsuhi played it straight. As they smashed their way through the mall, they delivered so many deadpan observations about sales and new products that it made it completely hilarious. Obviously, since they were on “a mission from God” the cops never caught them.

2 The Fate Of The Furious (2017)

Identifying the best car chase from the Fast & Furious franchise is like picking the coolest car from the series, there are too many worthy candidates to choose from. The dragging the bank vault finale from Fast Five is just as worthy as the crew chasing down a military transport plane in Furious 6, While the films have always tried to top the previous entry with vehicular combat mayhem, it may have peaked with The Fate of the Furious when the street racers took on a nuclear sub.

• Over 1,880 cars have been destroyed in the 10 Fast & Furious films
• The Fate of the Furious grossed $1.24 billion at the box office
• F8 was the first film in the series in which Paul Walker did not appear

There aren’t enough words in the English language to describe the awesome action of the eighth installment in this series finale. It was cars on ice with gunfire, missiles, and Dominick Toretto’s Charger flying through the air to save the day. This list is about the most over-the-top car chases and when hot rides are taking on a nuclear-powered submarine, there is no more room to beat that

1 Bullitt (1968)

The Steve McQueen classic, Bullitt invented the modern car chase scene, taking them from comical to kickass. It also made an icon out of the Highland Green 1968 Ford Mustang GT390, which McQueen’s character drove, as well as putting the pursuing black 1970 Dodge Charger R/Ton on the map. Seeing these two awesome muscle cars tear up the streets of San Francisco is something that never gets old.

According to Deadline, Stephen Spielberg is directing a film starring Bradly Cooper as Frank Bullitt, that he insists is not a remake of the original film. While there is never any solid reason to remake a classic, abandoning that which made the film so great in the first place is the pinnacle of pointlessness. Bullitt is one of the greatest movies of all time because it has one of the greatest car chases of all time.