Vehicles: A Chevy Malibu, a Mercury Grand Marquis, a freight train, a Peterbilt 352 semi
Custom features: Someone yelling, “You’re going the wrong way!”
With his career in free fall, onetime wunderkind William Friedkin (The Exorcist) decided the only option was reverse for the centerpiece chase scene in his superb L.A. noir. Friedkin topped the automotive thrills and spills of his Oscar-winning The French Connection by forcing star William Petersen to drive headlong into L.A. freeway traffic for a full six minutes. Reckless, gleefully irresponsible and totally off the hook.
Car chases are simple, right? There’s one car in front, another behind, they speed along, and bingo: blockbuster gold. That may be true if all you’re after is yet another unmemorable action scene. But if you want something that will go down in movie history, you have to try a little harder. From car-versus-plane smackdowns to psycho robots in semis, these are 10 of some of the wildest, most destructive scenes of automotive mayhem in cinema history.
RECOMMENDED: Our list of the 100 best action movies ever made
We polled over 50 experts in the field, from essential directors like Die Hard’s John McTiernan to the actual folks in the line of fire, such as Tarantino favorite Zoë Bell (the fearless stuntwoman behind Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movies). The result: The 100 best action movies, a definitive look at the genre from the earliest silent classic short film of 1896's “Arrival of Train at La Ciotat” to Marvel's big-screen fighting force of 2012's The Avengers.
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