Via MovieStillsDB
Published Jul 21, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT
Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.
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The Fast & Furious franchise is the first name in car-based action movies. Whether they’re jumping a sports car from one skyscraper into an adjacent skyscraper or flying a muscle car into space, whatever Dom Toretto’s crew is doing often overshadows the rest of the subgenre.
But, while they’re a lot of fun, those Fast & Furious films are far from the best car action movies out there. Bullitt contributed more to car chase cinema with one scene than Fast & Furious has done with a dozen movies.
The Transporter
Long before Jason Statham joined the Fast & Furious franchise as villain-turned-antihero Deckard Shaw, he had his own car movie franchise: The Transporter. The Transporter sequels would reach a Fast & Furious-level cartoonish absurdity, with Statham jumping his car into the air, flipping it upside down, and using a crane to scrape off a bomb attached to his axel, but the first film was relatively grounded.
Statham had been around for a little while when The Transporter came out, mostly starring in Guy Ritchie’s quirky crime capers. But The Transporter defined Stath’s action-hero image as we know and love him today.
Vanishing Point
Vanishing Point is one of the original car chase movies. It helped to define the very specific subgenre of action cinema that Fast & Furious belongs to. But Vanishing Point isn’t a flashy, rambunctious action film; it’s a pared-back, stripped-down, minimalistic New Hollywood inversion of the typical action film.
It tells a very simple tale: a disillusioned ex-cop and race car driver drives a muscle car across the country while high on speed. America produced a lot of these bleak, disaffected, anti-establishment movies during the Nixon administration, and Vanishing Point is one of the most exciting.
Drive
Nicolas Winding Refn’s slick neo-noir Drive was the subject of a lawsuit for false advertising when it was first released. The plaintiffs alleged that the trailers had misrepresented Drive as a Fast & Furious-style action-packed car chase movie, when it’s actually a solemn, somber character study more in line with Michael Mann’s Thief or Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
But honestly, it still delivers the goods as a car chase movie. All the chases in the trailer are in the movie, and although they’re brief, they’re exhilarating. Drive achieves more white-knuckle thrills in a brutally intense, bracingly realistic two-minute police chase than the average Fast & Furious movie does with a massive 20-minute set-piece that costs the GDP of a small country to produce.
Ryan Gosling (in one of his best performances) plays an unnamed getaway driver who falls in love with his married neighbor, then gets into some serious trouble as her husband’s partner-in-crime. Drive is the cool, subversive, ‘70s/‘80s version of a Fast & Furious movie. It flips the Fast & Furious formula on its head; instead of glorifying Dom Toretto’s reckless driving and casual acts of violence, it presents the Driver as the callous, hammer-wielding sociopath he really is.
Gone In 60 Seconds (1974)
Nicolas Cage’s Gone in 60 Seconds remake is a solid actioner, but nothing beats the 1974 original. Stunt driver H.B. Halicki wrote, directed, produced, and starred in this movie purely as a vehicle (pardon the pun) for gnarly, dangerous, bumper-shattering driving sequences. His Ford Mustang, Eleanor, is as much a character in the movie as he is.
The entire second half of Gone in 60 Seconds is one long car chase. Halicki strings along a loose plot in the first half, but he knows what you’re here for. Fast & Furious plots often get way too complicated, but Gone in 60 Seconds’ plot is gone in 60 seconds once Halicki gets behind the wheel of Eleanor at the midpoint and stays there until the climactic stunt carries us into the end credits. Gone in 60 Seconds might not be a perfectly crafted film, but it perfectly embodies the spirit of action cinema.
Baby Driver
At the height of the Fast & Furious franchise’s popularity, but at the nadir of its actual quality (they should’ve quit while they were ahead with Furious 7), Edgar Wright came along to show them how it’s done. Whereas the entire concept of Fast & Furious is just fast cars and loud noises, Baby Driver has a very specific conceit that Wright had been workshopping in other projects for years: car chases synchronized to pop needle-drops.
Wright had choreographed action around music to terrific effect before — Shaun of the Dead’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” sequence springs to mind — but Baby Driver is an entire movie built around the rhythm of its soundtrack. Ansel Elgort’s Baby is a getaway driver with tinnitus, who needs to listen to his iPod playlists to get in the right zone to get heist crews away from the scene of the crime. Any given action sequence in Baby Driver is guaranteed to be more visually and musically inventive than anything in any Fast & Furious film.
Duel
Before Steven Spielberg was called up to the majors to direct Jaws, he turned what could’ve been an easy one-for-them paycheck — a run-of-the-mill made-for-TV thriller — into a timeless cinematic masterpiece worthy of the big screen. A movie-of-the-week, by its very nature, is designed to be disposable: we’ll show it this week, then we’ll show something else next week, and it’ll be forgotten about. But Duel, the film that put Spielberg on Universal’s radar and earned him the gig directing Jaws (which not only changed his life, but changed cinema), still holds up today.
Duel tells a really simple story with Hitchcockian precision. It’s a cat-and-mouse thriller about an everyman getting terrorized by an unseen truck driver on a road trip through the desert. Spielberg tried out all the suspense-building techniques he would perfect on Jaws when he directed Duel. It’s an early prototype of Jaws, with the small-town police chief swapped out for a commuter on a business trip, and the shark swapped out for a terrifying, seemingly unstoppable truck.
It’s a thrilling spectacle, but it touches on something deeper, too (and not just by saying a word over and over again, like how Fast & Furious is “about” family). Duel deals with heavy themes of violence and masculinity, as this timid, non-confrontational man is pushed to his breaking point and forced to confront his aggressor. It’s an untouchable masterpiece, directed by a young, hungry master in his prime.
Mad Max: Fury Road
Image via Warner Bros. PicturesGeorge Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road is not just the best car chase movie ever made; it might be the single greatest action movie ever made. It’s certainly up there with Die Hard and The Raid and Enter the Dragon. Miller’s original Mad Max movie had introduced his gonzo, dystopian vision of explosive, gas-guzzling action filmmaking, then when he got a proper budget to make the sequel, The Road Warrior, he could fully realize that vision. Fury Road takes that vision a step further, with modern filming technologies and cutting-edge visual effects, so it feels like The Road Warrior on steroids.
Much like Hitchcock, Miller tells his stories entirely through the visuals — the colors, the framing, the sequencing of the shots — so that an audience anywhere in the world could watch it without subtitles and still understand what’s going on. None of Miller’s movies have achieved that quite as magnificently as Fury Road. This is old-school filmmaking with modern flash. It’s Stagecoach on wheels. It’s The General in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s Fast & Furious on acid.
Video Game(s) The Fast and the Furious (2004), The Fast and the Furious (2006), Fast & Furious: SuperCars, Fast & Furious: Showdown, Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious, Fast & Furious Crossroads
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