QOTD: Which Film Understands Cars Best?

In the comments for yesterday’s review of Baby Driver, a few people took umbrage with the excessively stylized nature of the car chases. Although the director took specific pains to avoid the kind of CGI cheese that keeps marring, say, the Fast and Furious franchise, there’s still an obvious and deliberate departure from reality in pretty much all of the film’s action shots.

Reading that comment made me think of another TTAC comment posted recently in which somebody expressed disappointment in Ronin, claiming that the car chases were both too long and too boring. This surprised me because Ronin, to my mind, is the absolute gold standard in automotive action filmmaking. It’s the only movie of that type I’ve ever watched where I agreed with the plotline, the physics of the various vehicular interactions, and the way the cars behaved. My only complaint was that the Citroen XM driven by the fellows with the suitcase seemed to have a whole lot of motor in it.

That’s my feeling, anyway. What’s yours?

In that respect, it’s like fight scenes in movies. Most people need serious medical attention after just one solid hit to the face, and most people break their hands if they hit somebody in the head more than a few times. (Boxers wear gloves to protect their hands, not their opponents.) Yet it’s common in movies for people to endure the kind of punishment that would send 10 normal human beings to the hospital or the morgue and then jump right to the next action scene. So let’s not be too hard on filmmakers for not having the very first bump or scrape incapacitate a car the way it often does in real life.

I’m happy anytime I see cars driven in a realistic fashion that more or less obeys the laws of physics. I don’t want to see a lot of jumping, I don’t want to see cars up on two wheels or reversing at freeway speed. What will you accept? And what would you say is the greatest non-racing-related car movie of all time?

[Image: Ronin, United Artists via IMCDB]