Perhaps because of their forbidden fruit qualities where I grew up, I’ve always been fascinated by Eastern Bloc cars. Ladas, Wartburgs, Trabants, Zaporozets, Polski Fiats, Skodas, Syrenas, GAZes, Volgas, Velorexen, whatever, park some dumpy little possibly two-stroke socialismobile near me, and I’ll be drawn to it like a moth to a sexy other moth wearing a delicious and flaming sweater. I think it’s the presence of so many Eastern Block cars that is my primary interest in the 2017 movie Atomic Blonde, at least if we don’t count Charlize Theron kicking the crap out of dozens of grunting men and kissing that other spy woman. Mostly the cars, though.
The movie is unusual for an American movie in that it has a long, extended, extremely involved car chase that involves almost exclusively Eastern Bloc cars, as it takes place in East Germany, right before (or maybe during?) the wall fell. I happened to see this scene earlier tonight and was struck by the unhinged madness of it all, the violence and velocity and vehemence that all combine to make a really compelling and unsettling car chase.
Have you seen it before? Here, you can watch it now, my treat!
I know it says “one shot car chase” on that video, and while it looks like it was all shot in one take, sources note it was actually multiple takes cleverly stitched together to feel like one contiguous shot, which it definitely does. At least I think it does. There’s so much going on you kind of lose track.
Anyway, let’s just take a look at some of the more bonkers parts of this motorized, speeding brawl.
The most dramatic crash, I think, has to be the one that involves this Lada Niva there. A few Nivas are pursuing our bloodied protagonists in the scene, but things go spectacularly badly for one in particular. It starts here:
That truck isn’t parked. It’s in motion. A lot of motion. And it transfers that motion, brutally, to the Niva:
I’ve rarely seen a car chase where a crashed car spends so much time and covers such ground in a vertical orientation. Also, what is that bit that’s pumping out all that smoke? It seems to be under the driver’s side floor, well behind the engine and axle? Is that some smoke effect thing installed on the car, or does a Niva have something prone to smoking there?
Hey mate, you can’t park there! Get off that Trabant!
The axles seemed very willing to part company with that Niva, which kind of looks like a lowrider in mid-jump in this shot.
The hero car of this chase is an East Berlin police car, a Lada 1600. It takes a hell of a lot of abuse in this chase scene and manages to hold together pretty well! Maybe the cops got the especially good ones.
It looks kind of good whipping around the corners, with a certain boxy handsomeness and those big round driving lights. There’s a nice green Wartburg back there, too, and a fetching blue VAZ 2101/Lada 1200.
There’s a nice Polski Fiat 126, too! I would have liked if one of those was involved in the chase, too, but seeing how destructive it all was, perhaps it’s better that it wasn’t.
The chase doesn’t really end up all that great for everyone involved, who probably all would agree afterwards that it was a pretty lousy way to spend 10 minutes or so.
The car chase involves a lot of guns and dramatic crashes and is wildly violent. I suppose that’s just something inherent to all car chases, but this one does make others look more tame, like this one from the 1980 Soviet cop movie Petrovka 38, which has been called the “Soviet Equivalent of the Car Chase from ‘Bullitt'” by some dork who wrote for Jalopnik back in 2019.
Who was that goofball, anyway? Look at that goofy name! What a numbnuts that dude must be!
Anyway, let’s watch this genuinely Eastern Bloc car chase:
That’s a solid car chase! It feels a bit more controlled than the Atomic Blonde one, but I think that’s more due to Atomic Blonde‘s overthetopitude than anything else. This one has a lot of the hallmarks of a good car chase, including the venerable Drive Through a Column Holding Up A Precarious Roof of Sorts:
… and also the classic Otherwise Uninvolved Vehicles Panics and Drives Into Something:
In this case, that vehicle was a very VW Type 2-looking RAF 977 Latvia.
The hero car here, a GAZ 24 Volga, is, unusually, the same car as the car being chased, so they’re evenly matched.
It does get some good jumps in there, so I have to give it credit for that.
These are two different approaches to the car chase concept, and I think maybe Atomic Blonde is a bit too divergent to really compare the approaches. Here’s the car chase from Bullitt, which I think is more comparable to the Soviet one:
That does feel closer in tone and execution. Really, I think my big takeaway here is less about the differences than it is about the similarities; perhaps the most effective common language across cultures, languages, economic systems, and geography is the humble car chase?
It’s worth looking into, at least. In the interests of global understanding.
Top graphic image: Focus Features/YouTube
The Man from Uncle’s Trabant/Wartburg chase comes to mind, but when we covered that on Reels and Wheels (with Robert Dunn as the guest!), it was pretty clear those cars were quite modified.
I prefer my eastern bloc chases with a little more T-55 tank action courtesy of 007 like in GoldenEye.
Ronin’s chase scene was fantastic too.
Atomic Blonde is great! Almost literally a cold war John Wick (direction and stunt work are about the same teams in both films). Very good car chase, although all the camera movement and stitching to make a single take kind of distracts from it. Shout out to Andrew Comrie-Picard’s stunt driving as well.
Aaah… Atomic Blonde… That beautiful, beloved paragon of improbabilities, the best musical playlist ever, disguised as a movie…
Can a trained 110lb Charlize chain-beat the crap out of a series of equally trained 200lb professionals, over and over and over, without catching her breath…Did the 1300cc 1993 Mini Cooper with the 13inch Maglite-like wheels (one of the last and cutest minis) exist in the late 80s…But mostly – the complete misunderstanding of the East German automotive market. It’s cute, because whoever was responsible of the props in that movie just stacked together Eastern Block cars and called it a day. So let’s set that straight:
East Germany (DDR) was overwhelmingly (maybe 80%) Wartburg and Trabant-filled. Plus some Polish and Czechoslovakian production, but mostly IFA (Wartburg/Trabant/Barkas & MZ and Simson for two wheels)Ladas must have made about 10%. The Samara seen in the pics was sold drop by drop – it appeared in 1987, was released in very small quantities, and by the time it became fully available the DDR folded. The odds of seeing one were quite slim. When it was released in the DDR, it was not available to regular buyers. It had to be bought in foreign currency.I absolutely love Atomic Blonde, but an automotive reference it is not.
As for car chases in Eastern movies – movies were made in studios, studios were dipping in a park of X amount of cars, which were reused between movies. Crashing or destroying them was very uncommon.
Here’s a big-production car chase from the movie Maria Medicii’s casket, which shows in equal parts how cute a Buhanka (UAZ-452) is, and how fun it is to run from the cops with.
I was hoping to see the Bourne Supremacy chase in the Moscow taxi here; for my money one of the best car chases ever filmed.
Hadn’t seen this before. My prior standard E Bloc car chase was one of the Bourne films, with a similarly grey and depressing Moscow, and a Lada taxi taking a Herculean amount of damage before ramming the bad assassin’s G Wagen sideways into a concrete pole.
It’s all fun and games until someone’s Lada gets hurt, people.
That “smoke” from the Niva is probably the vapor from a compressed air rollover cannon. I’m pretty sure without that the Niva wouldn’t have left the ground.
PS: I think that, oddly enough, the way “Cold Start” was integrated into the topshot confirms it. That big piece of “Debris” under the “T” in “START”? That is about the right size and shape for a rollover cannon “ram” which usually is shot out of the vehicle after it starts to roll. That’s not just a smoking gun, that’s the bullet!
Ah Bullitt. The car chase with a 2hr movie tacked on.
See, I’d disagree – take away the car chase (which is admittedly a bad idea), and you’ve still got a tight neo-noir that could hold its own against others of the time period. The pacing is well done, the initially confusing setup tracks with vintage noirs, and it’s fairly character-driven. The chase makes the movie for sure – in part b/c of the juxtaposition with the rest of it – but by augmenting a good structure. Peter Yates deserves more credit than he usually gets IMO.
See, I’d disagree — take away the car chase and the movie doesn’t have much going for it. It’s fine, but is kind of slow, and mostly held together by Steve McQueen’s undeniable charisma.
What also helps is the San Francisco setting, which is almost like a character in the movie. I love how it works for the Dirty Harry movies too. Pretty much anything filmed there looks really cool.
For sure on SF. It’s awesome how plenty of the background from the chase is still there/looks the same today.
In defense of my view, I’d offer that the non-car chase parts of Bullitt aren’t that dissimilar in quality from the whole of Point Blank, which came out around the same time and is also set there. Lee Marvin plays more sinister, uncharismatic lead, but it has a similar feel.
See, I’d agree with you. 😉