Cars are indispensable tools (or weapons) for spies. Perhaps James Bond was the first or one of the first to show this to be so. Often, in Bond movies, gadgeted cars were used to chase or get away from bad guys. And the scenes were spectacular, complete with explosions and impossible (implausible) getaway.
Years after Bond debutted in the big screen, Burn Notice in one of the cable channels portrayed the life and times of Michael Westen as an ex-CIA spy in Florida. Michael got around town in his all-black 1973 Dodge Charger. It had no gadgets unlike James Bond's Aston Martin. But it's cool nevertheless. Michael was an American spy (ex-spy) and he drove an American muscle car. Fitting.
The black Charger had shown resilience as it was blown up and still managed to make a come back after presumably some downtime at a repair shop.
It was blown up a second time. As far as I know, it might be for good. Though I don't follow the show closely.
See a couple of pictures of the Burn Notice Charger taken by fans and put on Flickr:
There are a lot of scenes with cars in action sequences. Typically, these scenes involve car chases where there are crashes, jumps over obstacles, gunfire, flips, etc. Authorities be damned. In many movies, police or other law enforcement officials are casualties in typical onscreen car crashes. Lots of property damage. Plenty of high-end cars destroyed. It can be spectacular. Just watch the Eleanor chase of Gone in 60 Seconds.
But one of the most unique scenes I recall is in the Russian supernatural action film, Day Watch.
In the particular scene, a woman driving a red MazdaRX-8 was determined to get an audience from some head honcho who did not want to speak to her. So she drove up an embankment to go airborn straight onto the wall of the head honcho's office building. Somehow, she flipped the Mazda while in the air and made it land on its wheels against the building wall.
She proceeded to drive vertically on the wall (and its windows) until she reached the closest hallway leading directly to the head honcho's office. She then busted through the hallway's window, entered it, and proceeded onto her destined office. What a grand entrance.
The scene is awesome and purely mindblowing. I've never seen anything like it. Imagine how your insurance agent will react after they find out that you did something like this. It's certainly not drifting, like how Neela does with her RX8 in Tokyo Drift.
After seeing that a new James Bond movies is about to be released this year, Skyfall, I realized that I have not blogged about a single James Bond car. A discussion about cars and movies without James Bond? That cannot be!
So I'm posting the first of many more James Bond entries.
Let's begin with the latest that's currently out, Quantum of Solace in 2008. In this movie, James Bond was chased in his Aston Martin DBS by bad guys driving Alfa Romeos. The scene was complete with high-speed driving under a hale of gun fire from automatic rifles, near misses, and spectacular crashes.
What I didn't see were gadgets that made prior James Bond cars mind-blowing. This Aston MartinDBS did not shoot any small arms missiles from beneath the fender or dispensed oil to impede the pursuers. Would we see any gadgets at all in future Bond movies?
I stumbled upon We Are The Night at a local dvd rental place last week. The German movie was about a group of female modern-day vampires who lived among humans in the city, partying the night away, while at the same time, maintaining a low profile of their kills so as not to receive attention from police and other authorites. Let's get the quick review out of the way. We Are The Night was a great movie if you like action and quasi-horror vampire flicks. It's like The Lost Boys, but with chick vampires.
One of the scenes I that I enjoyed had the vampire women driving wrecklessly in various cool cars. One drove a Lamborghini Gallardo and another a Porsche Panamera. The one that caught my eye was the 1971 Ford Mustang with fireball and firetrail painted through out its body. A muscle car with a license plate "FUCK1". How cool is that!
Among the exotic selection of cars, one of the vamps chose a FordMustang. And it didn't look out of place. In fact, it was driven by Nora, the wildest of the bunch. She's played by Anna Fischer. In that scene, she drove her Mustang faster than the others and outdistancing them many times. Recalling that scene, the '71 Mustang was the right fit for the carefree vixen of the night.
