To be honest, I can’t think of many Hollywood car scenes that aren’t ridiculous. From the durability of the cars and the laws of physics under which they operate, to the performance capabilities depicted and the (lack of a) toll taken on the drivers, virtually every action scene that puts protagonist and antagonist on four wheels is likely to trip my baloneyometer to varying degrees.
Now, I’m not one to come out of a Star Wars showing and smugly decree, “There’s no sound in space,” and likewise, I am generally unbothered by some artistic automotive license in the interest of keeping the action and the cars moving even when a real-world car would have undoubtedly been immobilized. But there are limits!
One film in particular that irked me deeply was the 2000 remake of Gone In 60 Seconds, wherein Nic Cage plays car-thief extraordinaire “Memphis Raines” and mugs through 120 minutes of car-thieving action that I have entirely forgotten, with the exception of the final plot-capping stunt.
The whole movie builds to Cage making a spectacular leap in the famous Eleanor Mustang (a car I’ve always found it kinda meh, but whatever), and being made in the year 2000, the expectation is that an insane real-car stunt is about to explode across the screen, hopefully in a nice wide shot. But no! We get a quick-cut mess that makes it impossible to appreciate the death-defying action, and worse, everything between the Mustang hitting the ramp and nailing the landing is crappy CGI, completely removing any excitement the sequence could have delivered.
After two hours of slick junk-movie crap, being deprived of a real stunt genuinely pissed me off. Adding insult to injury was that the film expects the audience – many members of which have likely seen or experienced how much damage even a 20-mph crash can do – to accept that a 1967 Mustang can fly what appears to be 100 feet in the air, at least two stories high, then land and keep going. All four tires holding air, frame straight, hood unbuckled, nothing falling off. Speaking of unbuckled: “Memphis” is not wearing a seatbelt during all of this, and not only is his spine not crushed, but he remains squarely seated for the duration. Sure. I mean, this kind of nonsense with the Duke Boys leaping a pond is one thing, but a 100-foot sky-shot across the Brooklyn Bridge (I think)? Come on man.
I also have problems with Batmobiles. Not the 1966 Futura version, that one gets a pass as it existed in a completely unreal camp fantasy. No, it’s the Burton/Schumacher and Nolan Batmobiles that bug me. They’re cool and all, but when such a big hook for these films is (to varying degrees) “gritty, realistic Batman,” the impossibility and dumbness of the ‘mobiles bugs me.
As Batman and Vicky Vale scramble away from whatever, Bats whisper-shouts “shields!” and the Batmobile stop-motion deploys an armored shell. From nowhere. You can see it there above. Where are those panels coming from? Where do they go? Why does the Batmobile need them? Isn’t it bulletproof? Can’t Bruce – er, Batman – just lock it?
The Nolan “Tumbler” is much more plausible than 1989’s land-speed-record Batmobile, and the in-universe origin of the car is a scuttled Wayne Tech military vehicle project. OK, I buy that. What I don’t buy is the thing ejecting its front wheels and somehow configuring them as a motorcycle – a motorcycle that Bats mounts while still inside the Tumbler, somehow. Go ahead, just try and make the whole thing make sense as a military concept first, then try to imagine how it would work. Good luck.
Your turn:
Outside Of The Fast & Furious Films, What Hollywood Car Scene Was Just Too Ridiculous For You?
(Note, you can totally mention the F&F films. I just put that in there to let you off the hook if you wanted to set them aside, because they are wall-to-wall bananas.)
(Top Image: Bruce Wayne Estate (just kidding, it’s Warner Bros.)
I didn’t see it mentioned, but I could have missed it. The Car chase, wreck without fatalities or injury, and driveaway scene in Commando. Love it, but like the entire movie, completely absurd. Also, bonus points for Sunbeam and Porsche.
Chitty chitty bang bang
Herbie
Bond, especially submarine with vertical launch tube
I just thought of a general complaint: bullets simply sparking off unarmored cars—including glass!—and people successfully hiding behind doors from machine guns and shit. A shotgun filled with birdshot, maybe, but that doesn’t seem like badass shoot-it-out ammo. Even for armored cars, the sparking deflection isn’t right (and where do all those still potentially lethal deflected rounds go?), but I can accept it.
I think most car movies are terrible and frustrating.
Pacing aside, the original Gone in 60 Seconds is a much better film than the remake. The cars more interesting, Eleanor was far more sensible, it shows the carnage of such a chase with people being treated by ambulances, the protagonist is a POS car thief who isn’t framed as a good guy or meant to be likable through some dumb plot contrivance involving a kidnapped brother or whatever it was, and the ending was actually clever and kind of funny.
While I really liked the Tumbler, the motorcycle thing annoyed me as it made no sense either in how it would work (uh, just throw in some cgi whirring stuff and it’ll look fine) or in its very conception. Ignoring the near impossibility of it, WTF would that have ever been engineered into the design in the first place? While I generally enjoy Nolan’s movies, I think he’s really overrated in being often brought up as a great film maker—too many things that don’t really make sense in his movies for me to accept him as great. As for the ’90s Batmobiles, they didn’t bother me as much for the same reason you didn’t mind the ’60s one—while they may have been gritty, they were still very comic-booky and the later ones were so bad that any car goofiness didn’t even register (those whole movies didn’t even register as I can’t remember much about them at all besides Jim Carrey, Schwartzenegger, and Alicia Silverstone being in one or maybe that was two different ones).
movies getting car jargon wrong bothers me more than anything!!
I have never before heard anyone describe those movies in that way. The Schumacher ones in particular mostly get grief for being way too campy.
Lots of Roger Moore James Bond vehicles here already, but I’m thinking of the flying AMC Matador that Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) and Nick Nack (Hervé Villechaize) use to escape from Bond chasing them in an AMC Hornet. This flying car was based on the notorious flying Ford Pinto (AVE Mizar) that killed its creator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_their_own_invention
This list also features Francis Edgar Stanley who was killed while driving his Stanley Steamer automobile and Fred Duesenberg who was killed in a high-speed road accident in a Duesenberg automobile.
Surprised to not see Alfieri Maserati on that list.
The most ridiculous Bond car chase scene is likely the Iceland one in Die Another Day. The invisible Aston was a bit too much and heavy CGI use wrecked any suspension of disbelief.
In the beginning of “Baby Driver” where the entire escape hinges on two random people coincidentally driving two red cars that look like an Impreza exactly parallel one lane apart under an overpass and then successfully dodging his brake check into the exact positions needed to fake out the cops in the helicopter.
Drowning Mona, where everyone in town drives a Yugo, except for the police chief who drives a Horizon.
Really, a Horizon?
Well, it looks a lot like a Yugo, but has 4 doors.
I really enjoyed the movie, though.
It would be hard to transport prisoners in a Yugo, so there’s that.
Yes it’s a fun movie, the Yugos are just an extra treat.
I’ve gotta go with the big “demolition derby” scene toward the end of Smokey and the Bandit 2. Between the truckers lining up their trailers close enough for the Bandit to use as a bridge between two embankments to all of Buford’s cousins’ deputies driving into obvious traps, it somehow managed to detract from what was already an otherwise bad movie.
Also, came here to mention CHiPs. Especially those later seasons when it seemed they just didn’t care anymore and you could actually see the ramps they attached to the back of cars to get their jumps and rollovers. Oh, and all the recycled footage, like the time they lifted an entire chase featuring a beige Ford Granada from an earlier episode. At one point, you could see the interior color of the car in the chase and the car they stopped were different (one was red, the other tan). Pretty clear, that show was never intended to be watched on anything better than a 19″ Zenith.
Living close to San Francisco and visiting often enough to know the lay of the place, I just find it hilarious to watch the chase scene of Bullitt where they are teleporting all over the city from one take to the next.
It was an actual stunt, but the corkscrew jump on the Roger Moore 007 outing “The Man with the Golden Gun” mainly for the entire cheeseball setup for it, and the absurd slide whistle sound effect as it happened.
The Rodger Moore era of Bond was practically a ’66-Batmanesque camp fantasy in its own right. But that slide whistle was wholly unnecessary.
Came here to make this comment. Left happy that someone beat me to it.
Maybe mentioned before, but the CGI big jump in the Nicolas-Cagetastic Gone in 60 Seconds. If you don’t jump the car for real, don’t even do it.
It also kind of irks me when they show the people in the car just after landing (The Dukes of Hazzard was big on this) and they kind of move forward and backward like they just went over a speed bump. Nope.
Ii suspend disbelief a lot for that stuff because I am just a very large kid at heart.
They actually did jump the Mustang for real in Gone in 60 Seconds. It’s on the Blu_ray special features. Obviously it didn’t jump anywhere near as far or as high as depicted in the movie. They did some green screen closeups with Cage in the car, some green screen composite long shots, and tied it all together with the beginning of the physical jump and the physical landing footage.
Still, it looked lousy.
I much preferred the approach taken for the Dukes of Hazzard movie: go for real height/distance with no one in the car to get killed. Add Sean William Scott digitally in post.
I guess they didn’t want to risk the back injury that Halicki received doing actual serious stunts in the original.
IIRC, the stunt coordinator said flat out said that the jumps they were doing would kill the driver.
This makes me wonder how the drivers on the original show survived, or aren’t six inches shorter than when they went to work that day.
Halicki really screwed up his back and eventually died in a different stunt, though that was more of a freak thing.
I have no idea how many stunt people have died over the years, but I would bet some money that many of them lived with chronic conditions from injuries related to their work. I’m a big proponent of practical effects over CGI (CGI alone, that is), but if CGI means there’s less risk to stunt people, I’m all for it (as long as it doesn’t result in them losing their jobs).
I get the feeling Halicki didn’t have a lot of training. Maybe I am, wrong, but I haven’t come across anything saying he had it.
I think CGI is great, but too often it takes you out of the movie. The Eleanor jump is one of those times.
I’d much rather they do the crazy jumps without the driver though. It’s a movie and not important enough to take the biggest risks.
I don’t know, either. All I read was that he was a stunt man and he made the movie as a kind of showcase of driving stunts.
Yeah, we have the technology to do the more dangerous stunts with robotics and there seems little reason not to.
The handbrake back flip in The Blues Brothers always bothered me. Sure,the bridge jump is also implausible but not too bad. The back flip on the other hand is just an embarrassing sequence in a otherwise decent movie.
I think the Oldsmobiles getting in early that year had everybody in stunt planning a bit too excited.
I think Blues Brothers gets a pass since it comes off as a parody of a lot of other car-chase films of the time cranked up to 11, but with better music… the back-flip from reversing from a stand-still with the nose hanging off an unfinished ramp (and the car magically rotating 180 degrees so the nose is pointing the opposite way with the tire-side down) is completely in-theme for a comedy-police chase parody
Or maybe its just amazing what that cop motor (runs good on regular) & cop shocks can do!
As co-host of a podcast on movie cars I tend to be pretty forgiving if the stunt is cool, but one big standout for me is Timothy Dalton’s second Bond movie, License to Kill. There’s a scene towards the end where he drives a semi truck with two rear axles and makes it do a wheelie. Somehow all eight rear tires stay on the ground while the front of the truck is cocked up in the air. Kinda kills the illusion of doing a wheelie in a semi when it’s beyond clear that they hinged the frame.
That huge counter weight sticking out the back didn’t help either.
YES! This one entire scene killed the entire movie for me. The truck pops a wheelie and the Bond theme goes full send. It’s not a Q branch vehicle, WTF?
I never got that they were trying to portray a wheelie, I just thought it was bizarre—why would a semi be hinged like that? How would it balance the cab? Made no damn sense. Maybe if it made for a really great stunt or something, but it was goofy as hell, insultingly stupid, and completely unnecessary.
One that still sticks with me after all these years involved the bad guy (a race car driver) trying to make his getaway from the racetrack in a 962. The cops ran him down easily.
There’s just no way a standard issue police cruiser could keep up (much less overtake) a road course prepped race car driven by a skilled driver. Just, no. Either the writers were really stupid, or (more likely) the underwriters said “oh, hell no” and the planned scene had to cut for liability reasons.
I want to say it was an episode of Miami Vice, but it could have been CSI Miami.
I think it may have been CHIPs
It was Miami Vice, the episode guest starring Danny Sullivan.
Wow. I remember watching Sullivan spin at Indy and still win the race. Odd that I forgot that detail about the TV episode.
I guess “962 gets run down by cop cars” was more memorable than “Indy 500 winner guest stars on Miami Vice”!
Miami Vice. The 906 earlier in the show was sick, though. If that’s what you’re thinking of, only Crockett is sort of able to keep up in the “Daytona” and the guy drives into a wall or something when he encounters a roadblock.
If they showed movies with real life traffic, they definitely could have a fast car not completely run away from cops or if a race car is used on typical potholed roads in the Northeast, they could have the suspension break.
I can’t think of a particular movie vehicle that really bugs me, but I find blatant sponsorships to be jarring. The Transformers movies are loaded with GM vehicles, replacing diversity of the source characters. And while I love the movie “Batman Returns”, was there a Volkswagen sponsorship? 90% of the cars in Gotham are VW Foxes.
The Walking Dead, brought to you Hyundai.
That they still have usable gas a decade after the zombie apocalypse qualifies on its own as too ridiculous.
Yes, when I’m one of the remaining survivors in the zombie apocalypse, and thousands of abandoned vehicles are around, I’m grabbing a…..Hyundai Tuscon.
Especially jarring when the sponsoring brand doesn’t even make anything that fits the character or really wants to push a certain model.
Like the god awful 2nd gen prius placements that were in ton of TV shows
I do not think that VW sponsored the use of the Foxes in the movie, as they were chosen to visually represent the down trodden and poor conditions that the citizens of Gotham lived in everyday. Didn’t the first movie have many Aspens and K cars on the streets?
When Emma Stone unlocks her Prius in the beginning of Lala Land, it plays a generic movie “bloop bloop” unlocking sound instead of the sound that Toyotas actually make.
Immersion ruined, basically unwatchable.