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Emilio Estevez talks smack to Mick Jagger and manages to dodge 10,000 futuristic dune-buggies at the same time, in this huge car-chase from the movie Freejack. Car chases are a huge part of sci-fi movies. And with Knight Rider coming back next month, we want to pay tribute. After all, no matter how high-concept your plot may be (like time travel and brain-transplants) it always comes down to a bunch of cars zooming around trying to smush each other. Here's part one of our favorites, with clips.
Car chases are woven deep into the DNA of movies, says crime writer Elmore Leonard. We invented cars and movies at around the same time, and both experiences are about speed, exhilaration and technophilia. And you can't write a good car chase — you have to film it. With explosions and crazy weird vehicles. So here are our favorites:
Freejack (1992). Emilio Estevez is a racecar driver, who dies in a car crash. But he doesn't really die, he's kidnapped into the future so Anthony Hopkins can steal his body. Or something. It's all just a set-up for a giant car chase. You can tell it's the distant future because everybody has laptops with video-chat clients in their cars. How else could Estevez tell Jagger he couldn't catch the clap in a whorehouse? CB radio? I also love Jagger giving him driving tips via vid-chat. I want a video Mick Jagger critiquing my driving to be a standard feature in my next car.
Andy Gill, the stunt driver for Freejack also did all the driving for the original Knight Rider, and here are a couple of his favorite stunts:
Death Race 2000 (1975). David Carradine is a super-driver created by the world's greatest surgeons to drive the world's fastest car, which just happens to have jaggedy fake teeth. He's up against Sylvester Stallone in the world's most vicious race, where you win or die. Here's the trailer:
Mad Max: Road Warrior (1981). Mel Gibson is escorting a hella giant oil tanker across the wasteland of post-apocalyptic Australia. But a whole gang of New Wave savages with mohawks and spikes sticking out of their vehicles want to jack him. Crossbows, flaming projectiles, funny helmets and weird-looking machine guns are just some of the weapons they use to try and put Mel off his game, while he gets his swerve on.
Cyber Tracker (1994). Someone in law enforcement took RoboCop a little too seriously, and now all the cops are mean cyborgs. Plus an evil corporation wants to replace political leaders with bots. It's up to Don "The Dragon" Wilson to stop this mess, the only way he knows how... with car chases. Cyborgs are crazy driving fiends in this movie. At one point, a van hits Wilson's car, flips over in mid-air, soars about twenty feet up and then crashes and explodes. Wilson, of course, is unharmed. Cyber-crashes are just better than regular crashes. The shot is so awesome, it appears three different times in the movie's trailer:
Looker (1981). Michael Crichton directed his own weird story about an evil company that scans models and creates perfect computerized facsimiles of them... then disposes of the originals. The company also comes up with a weird hypno raygun that works like roofies... it temporarily blanks out your mind and makes you unable to remember your assailant afterwards. At one point, Albert Finney and a hit-man drive around chasing each other and trying to shoot each other with hypno-rays. D00d, it's drive-by hypno!
Total Recall (1991). This one is more comedy than anything else. Arnie is on the run, with a wet towel around his head to block the tracking device in his skull and a suitcase containing an important secret from Mars. To get way from the spooks chasing him, he steals a JohnnyCab, but first he has to disable the chirpy auto-driver and take control of the joystick steering. Here's the video:
Tomorrow, we'll have the greatest car chases of science fiction from the mid-90s onward. What are your favorites?
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