Summer of Vroooom

By Richard Corliss Sunday, June 08, 2003
    • JOHN BRAMLEY/COLUMBIA PICTURES

    A car explodes during a chase in this summer's Bad Boys II

    The automobile and the motion-picture camera: these are the two machines that most influenced the shape and speed of 20th century culture. Both were transporting devices. One got Americans out of their neighborhoods; the other, out of themselves. At the dawn of the 21st century, what miracle have these machines combined to bring the world? Car-chase movies.

    Prime example: 2 Fast 2 Furious , sequel to the 2001 hit. It puts the viewer behind the wheel of souped-up cars like a Nissan Skyline and a Yenko Camaro, both juiced with NOS — a nitrous oxide injection system — that instantly multiplies their speed as if they're toddlers on sugar. These cars seem to double as aircraft. When goosed by an ace driver, the Skyline vaults across a yawning drawbridge, and the Yenko flies across the water to crash-land on the upper deck of the bad guy's yacht. 2F2F has a bit of plot about an ex-cop (Paul Walker) enlisting an old pal (Tyrese) to foil a drug lord. But it pays off as a thrill-delivery system, a convoy of road rage and car-nage. It reminds you of what movies are: motion pictures. Speed is of the essence.

    Studios are speeding to build more car movies and inject car chases into other action films. It's more than a trend; it seems to be a rule. Says Ron Shelton, director and a co-writer of the new Harrison Ford-Josh Hartnett action comedy, Hollywood Homicide : "Car chases have become an obligatory part of the genre for summer movies or cop movies."

    No fewer than eight big-budget action films opening between May Day and Labor Day boast smashing, auto-dynamic set pieces. The multiplex traffic jam started last month with the freeway fracas in The Matrix Reloaded and the Hollywood-and-Vine destruction derby in The Italian Job . This week 2F2F is joined by Hollywood Homicide , with a careering, nonstop trip through Beverly Hills and other L.A. tourist spots. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle will show how car stunts can outdo kung fu. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines , mankind's savior will try to keep his Toyota Tundra out of the clutches of a 160-ton crane. The summer keeps on truckin' with Bad Boys II (Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in a Ferrari and a Hummer) and the freewheelers of S.W.A.T. Fasten your seat belts and renew your auto insurance, film lovers; it'll be a bumpy, rambunctious ride.

    Why this rush of car-thrill movies? First, because they can make money. The 2001 Fast and the Furious, in which Walker teamed with Vin Diesel, earned $144 million at the domestic box office on a $38 million budget. Second, because they're enjoyable to assemble. Says John Singleton, director of 2F2F : "Early in my career, I said I would never do a car-chase movie because I wanted to be taken seriously as a filmmaker. Now that I'm in my early 30s, I figured I've done that. I just wanted to have fun." Car movies also touch the infantile urge to go fast and break things. "I love to see things get smashed," says Jesse James, the Long Beach, Calif., custom-motorcycle builder who hosts the Discovery Channel's Monster Garage. "It's as simple as that."

    From the medium's infancy, when the Keystone Kops commandeered the streets of Los Angeles, car chases provided the purest vicarious thrill. Silent stars Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd raised vehicular mayhem to comic art. Alfred Hitchcock fashioned suspenseful laughs by letting an inebriated Cary Grant try driving down a windy road in North by Northwest — and predatory poignancy when James Stewart obsessively tails Kim Novak in Vertigo .

    The new cars-gone-wild movies don't aim for art. They showcase technology. But they fill potholes left in the vanishing of once popular genres. Consider:

    Car movies are the new Westerns . "There were a million westerns with chases on horseback," says Shelton. "In our iconography, cars have replaced horses." There are a few differences: a city street holds more concentrated peril than the open prairie, and drivers can go way faster than cowboys. The horsepower under John Wayne was 1.

    Car movies are the new epics . The side-by-side race in The Fast and the Furious is a modern Ben-Hur chariot race. Instead of re-creating ancient Rome and bossing around thousands of extras in togas, directors get to re-create a strip of the San Diego Freeway and wreck lots of cars. That's the majesty of being in charge of an action film. In Hollywood you're not a true creator unless you can destroy stuff.

    Car movies are today's war movies . In real life, a driver is the lone G.I. in enemy territory, and his car is his trusty tank. But that driver feels more like a doughboy stuck in a bunker. The traffic won't budge; his car can't fly over the ones in front of him or scoot under a 24-wheeler. In movies, says Donald De Line, producer of The Italian Job , "we get to watch these characters get up on sidewalks and beat traffic and go down staircases. When it works, a movie car chase is a satisfying experience." It's what the movies do: make fantasy real.

    The auto-motion pictures also reflect newer media. Car films are today's video games. And vice versa. Virtual rides like the Grand Theft Auto games (including Vice City ) and the Gran Turismo series have sat on best-of lists. They're also helpful aids to directorial research. John Singleton says he played hours of Turismo while preparing 2 Fast 2 Furious . He put the Nissan Skyline (which isn't sold in the U.S. and had to be imported from Japan) and the Mitsubishi Evo VII in the movie because they're in Turismo. "We wanted to get the cars that kids play with in the video games," he says.

    In 2F2F Singleton makes some nifty use of computer-generated (CG) wizardry, as when the camera zips at Mach speed through the workings of a chromed-up engine. But he insists on the visual veracity of real stuntmen putting their pride and lives on the line. "You want to keep a sense of danger," he says. "If you don't have that, there's no point in doing it." Director F. Gary Gray, whose Italian Job is an update of a 1969 caper, says he strove for "a retro, fresh approach. I wanted to be able to communicate the danger, and that meant I had to do it the old-fashioned way." He's proud that "virtually every stunt we did could have been done in the original Italian Job ." Some flightier, more fantastic movies go heavy on the CG. Director Joseph McGinty Nichol, known as McG, lays out a bit of his new Charlie's Angels action: "The girls drive an Army truck off a dam, and while falling to their death, they climb into a helicopter on the back of the truck and fly away." Send in the computer nerds! Still, McG stresses, "Pure CG can be cartoonish. You lose the stakes. There's no jeopardy. Audiences have a built-in CG detector. So you need to be slippery. You use a lot of real elements so you can get away with the CG."

    That's why those fearless — or foolhardy — stunt folk aren't likely to be replaced by machines. "Stuntmen are more vital than ever to provide the impetus for the CG work," says McG. "In The Matrix Reloaded there's a lot of CG in the freeway chase, but that scene probably employed more stuntmen for a longer period than any action sequence in the history of cinema." Besides, CG is expensive. "Given the amount of time and money that it takes to get it right in the computer," says Jonathan Mostow, director of Terminator 3 , "you might as well have done it for real."

    For real, directors also want stars to do some of their own stunt work. A few old icons did. Steve McQueen, a true car nut, often took the wheel in Bullitt and Le Mans. But most actors have taken more lessons at the Pasadena Playhouse than at the Richard Petty Driving Experience. On the Hollywood Homicide shoot, Hartnett fouled up a chase by crashing into a fake police car. Mos Def, a Brooklyn native who co-stars in The Italian Job , didn't even have a driver's license. Mark Wahlberg, the film's lead, threw up five minutes into driving class. The only racing demon in the cast was Charlize Theron. "My parents were both mechanics," she says. "I grew up with engines and cars. It's under my skin." Theron loved the stunt aspect of her role. "To have downtown L.A. as your playground—driving fast and doing 360s—is like being a kid and getting away with murder."

    Yet the qualities associated with great driving — steely concentration, hand-eye coordination, a killer instinct — fairly stink of machismo. Think of a film about women and cars, and you get Thelma & Louise, in which the leads' big act of defiance is to drive off a cliff to their deaths. Actresses do show up in the car-chase genre, but they are essentially decals, irrelevant to the movies' obsessions. (The only genuinely sexual moment in 2F2F is when two new cars are unveiled for Walker and Tyrese. Their eyes bug out as if Britney and Halle had just stripped for them.) Car-movie heroes are slaves of auto eroticism, guys playing with their stick shifts. Behind the wheel, man is again the primal hunter, pursuing the woolly mammoth 50 yards ahead, fulfilling his destiny.

    So it will be guys — and their little brothers — who will be lining up on Friday nights all summer, stoking the grosses of the car-chase films and guaranteeing that next year there will be even more. Now if only they'd bring back the drive-in movie theater.

    — Reported by Desa Philadelphia/ Los Angeles