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Drive It Like You Stole It: The most ridiculous car chases in cinema history

Bullitt.

The French Connection.

Ronin.

All classic car chases, sure to fill out every single list ranking those scenes on the internet. This list doesn’t have a single one of those movies on it. Why? Because they’re not ridiculous enough. Sure, they’re great and all, but this is the week The Fate of the Furious hits theaters, and you mean to tell us that people go and see those movies because the car chases are great? Well, sure, they are, but they’re also absolutely stone-cold crazy (that bank robbery in Fast Five would have made this list if we weren’t banning all of those movies from it because it would be nothing but clips from that franchise), and last we checked, people weren’t writing about how well-shot the Siberian sequence in F8 is, they were writing about it because The Rock punches a goddamn torpedo out of his car’s way. So here’s a list of eight incredibly ludicrous and fun chase/car scenes for your entertainment.

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C’etait Un Rendez-Vous (1976)

Forget The French Connection’s traffic law-breaking car chase: This infamous short film isn’t ridiculous in its content so much as it is in its making. Director Claude Lelouch shot the entire eight minute movie in one take, blasting as fast as his Mercedes could take him through a route full of Paris’ most famous landmarks. Lelouch claims he went almost 150 miles an hour in the Benz, running red lights and screaming through turns with the camera mounted on the front of his car. Lelouch tried to prepare for this by setting the filming in the middle of August, when Paris isn’t very crowded, and by doing so in the early morning, but you can see how fucking scary it would be to watch that car speed past. It’s a brilliant little short, one full of ethical concerns, but it gets that need-for-speed thrill across to the viewer nearly better than every other film on this list.

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