Last week, Owen asked you all for the worst car movie ever made. Then he faded into the PTO breeze like a fine mist, leaving the rest of us to wonder if he had ever existed at all, or if we had all collectively hallucinated the same Brit with great hair. But, while we determine exactly what in the office water may have led to such visions, the question of the worst car movie can’t go unanswered. Luckily, you gave us hundreds of great answers. Here are the top ten.
Cannonball Run 2
The top comment on this YouTube video is all about how this, the sequel to Cannonball Run, was real cinema. The comment also talks about not being able to ever look forward to movies like Dune or Ghostbusters again, despite being posted immediately before the release of both Dune and Ghostbusters Afterlife. Are there really people who think this is where movies, as an art form, peaked? That they don’t get better than an eighties road trip Hijinks Movie?
Cars 2, do we really need more Larry the Cable Guy?
I’ll admit, I’ve never seen Cars 2. I spent its release cycle too worked up about the eyes being wrong to ever actually watch the movie itself. After seeing this clip collection, though, I think I made the right move — after 44 straight seconds of uninterrupted Larry The Cable Guy ad-libs, my coworkers had to physically restrain me from throwing my laptop out the office window.
Since no one else is brave enough to say it, I will. Bullitt. That movie was miserably boring. It’s 2 hours of a car handling badly around San Francisco.
Last time I talked about Bullitt on this fine website, I came to the same conclusion — it’s an incredibly boring movie, slightly elevated by one good-for-its-era car chase. And you know what? Drive did that same car chase better, and backwards.
Not a Car Movie. Torque, I want that two hours of my life back
Torque, in its entirety, has been available for free on YouTube for nearly two years. Just, the entire movie, in an unofficial upload that no one’s cared enough to take down. Of all the low-budget Fast and Furious ripoffs in the world, it really is the low-budgetiest.
Death Proof. There’s a car chase at the end of the movie, but first you have to sit through what seems like 14 hours of what Tarantino thinks is scintillating dialog, but is actually Tarantino dialog (fucking awful). Not worth it, play with Hot Wheels instead.
Tarantino has a few classic quirks that seem to show up every time he directs. Mostly they involve feet, but he’s also no stranger to having wild peaks and valleys of dialogue quality within the same movie. Pulp Fiction has some great, snappy talking scenes, and then it has the scene with Tarantino himself in it. Death Proof, judging by all your comments, veers toward the latter.
As the cohost of Reels & Wheels Podcast, I could probably fill this whole list for you, but I’ll stick to my top three worst car movies that I was forced to endure thanks to my co-host (Love ya, James. Really.):
3. Stroker Ace: Burt Reynolds is creepy and contemplates having his way with a sleeping Lonnie Anderson.
2. Knight Rider 2010: In yet another failed Knight Rider reboot, the consciousness of a man’s girlfriend gets embedded in a freakishly modified Ford Thunderbird. Hilarity ensues.
1. Overdrive: What if people who knew nothing about cars wrote a Fast & Furious Knock-off set in France? Who the *&%# asked that question and where do I go to slap him in the face?
If I’m allowed the shameless plug: https://reelsandwheels.libsyn.com
I’m not convinced that Scott Eastwood isn’t a lost Hemsworth brother. But while Overdrive may be a travesty of film, it brings to mind a similarly-titled masterpiece: Overdrift. Overdrift may be the perfect car movie, a classic hero’s journey wrapped up in street racing, family, and the D dimension. It could be the best five minutes of your life.
Smokey & the Bandit Part 3. Both Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham were done with the franchise by that point. This led to them coming up with the idea that Gleason’s Sheriff Justice would be both the Smokey and the Bandit in the film. Test audiences for the original version were very confused and displeased, so they hired Jerry Reed to come in for re-shoots. If you ever punish yourself by watching this movie, you’ll notice that the stunt driver for the Bandit is a much larger man that Reed. That’s because they’re using the footage shot from when it was supposed to be Justice as the Bandit. It also doesn’t help that they replace the iconic 70's Trans Am with the new generation that was already associated with Knight Rider by the time the film was actually released.
The original Smokey and the Bandit had a profound effect on a young Steve, who would go on to install a CB in his Wrangler and inadvertently treat all the truckers on his school commute to a daily broadcast of Evanescence. The later movies, however, never quite lived up. Losing Burt Reynolds from the starring role certainly didn’t make things better for Part 3.
The Fast and the Furious (2001). Sure, it is an over-the-top action franchise but being a movie about cars, it is pretty bad. I mean, “Danger to Manifold” Bad.
As a CAR movie, it would be akin to describing the NASA program in with Star War Legos.
Counterpoint: No. The Fast And The Furious (specifically the original 2001 movie) may not be the most technically accurate on every (any) topic, but it tries. It’s like a newborn puppy, who can’t quite ever catch a treat in its mouth but who’s really excited to participate and play. It just wants to be a part of things! You can’t get mad at that, can you?
My wife and I nominate DRIVE (2011)
I forget if it is 13 hours long, or if it just feels like it. But here’s a summary.
After an actually interesting “non-chase” where the Driver (Ryan Gosling) uses cleverness to blend in with a ton of traffic after a heist, Ryan Gosling decides to consider his poor life choices by driving around LA at night. He’s got a 2010 Malibu in Rental Silver to blend in, but somehow has a BBC with flowmasters under the hood (based on sound).
As he drives, he considers life while his car upshifts every 10 seconds while Ryan maintains a steady 35 mph and steady facial expression. After a 350 mile drive (all at night with no traffic), he decides to go shopping for an modified race car that also shifts 900 times in a single 1/4 lap. He decides to buy the car because he’s told that the tires have plenty of grooves left in them. Then he does another 350 mile night drive. Honestly I feel asleep somewhere along the way. I sort of remember him shooting up a strip club, but that might have been me dreaming of what it would take to break up a movie about a 30 hour drive.
(Somehow pulls in a 93% Rotten Tomato Rating. Maybe it has its points if you can stay away for 10 hour drives in abandoned LA streets.)
You know how everyone defends Bullitt by saying it’s “methodical” or “brooding” or “a slow burn” rather than “a bad movie?” This is a real methodical, brooding slow burn. Drive isn’t an action movie, but it’s an important milestone in the neon-noir genre. The soundtrack slaps, the casting is spot-on, and the movie as a whole rules. Just don’t try to be The Driver.
Corvette Summer.
That movie had the ugliest Corvette, a lousy script, and would’ve killed Mark Hamill”s career if he hadn’t been contracted to two other Star Wars films.
As a general rule, movies about known cars can be great. Movies named after known cars, besides those in the BMW Films series, are usually either thinly-veiled marketing or garbage. Corvette Summer was definitely at least one.