Hands gripping the steering wheel. The tires swerving and screeching all over the road. The engine roaring like a mighty beast on rampage. No, this isn’t an accurate description of my driving, but it is how I would describe a great movie car chase.
When a film kicks in gear with the start of a car chase sequence, there are certain expectations we as an audience place upon the film. We want speed, we want thrills, we want top-notch driving, and probably a wreck or two (of the bad guy’s cars, of course). We don’t just want to watch it, but we want to see it from every angle. We want to be put on the edge of our seat as we go along for the ride and not miss a single, adrenaline fueled moment.
But not every car chase delivers on these expectations. And sometimes that can be a good thing.
Getting exactly what we expect too often can become monotonous and even boring. Some car chases try to combat this by going bigger and louder. You only need to look at Mad Max: Fury Road to see how well this tactic can work, but you can also look at The Fast and the Furious series to see how quickly that strategy can let you down. But over the years there have been a handful of films that pulled a tight u-turn and put the pedal to the metal (sorry not sorry) to steer our expectations in the opposite direction.
These films explore how less can sometimes be more by shifting the focus away from the thrills of the car chase itself and preferring to place their emphasis on the characters doing the driving instead.
In this video essay, I highlight some of those films and their respective car chases, and examine how the filmmakers utilized those gripping sequences to reveal more about the characters that inhabit their films, or for short, the character driven car chase.
