10 Best Highway Action Scenes In Cinema History
For those who decided that a straightforward car chase simply wasn't enough for them.
Action movies will always endure as one of cinema's popular genres and will never go out of fashion, because they offer a type of escapism that can't be found anywhere else.
Audiences continue to lap up shootouts, fist-fights and car chases regardless of whether it takes place in a superhero blockbuster, a Western, sci-fi, spy thrillers or Asian-inspired wuxia. There are a certain number of requirements that action movies are required to meet, meaning that very few of them are ever 100% original, but nobody seems to mind in the slightest if they're handled well.
Anyone can stage a car chase, and history is littered with countless show-stoppers in everything from Bullitt to The Blues Brothers, but it takes a special kind of filmmaker to look at the bigger picture and incorporate their vision for vehicular madness into something much bigger than the standard 'catch me if you can' format.
Highways have often proven to be fertile ground for the imagination of directors that want to blow sh*t up as spectacularly as possible, given how the setting lends itself to so many variables when it comes to expanding the potential scale and scope of the action, with the best examples often ending with nothing but twisted and burnt-out wreckage for as far as the eye can see.
10. Deadpool
The opening scene of Deadpool isn't particularly groundbreaking in terms of how the action is staged and executed, but what it did do was fully establish in the space of a brief few minutes that this was an entirely different type of comic book movie from the ones that audiences had grown accustomed to.
With the tongue-in-cheek opening credits setting the tone, we get our first proper introduction to Ryan Reynolds' Merc with a Mouth as he drops into a moving vehicle from above, before going on to dismantle a raft of interchangeable goons with ease.
Right off the bat, the scene fully conveys the title character's self-aware, fourth wall-breaking sense of meta humor while also setting up the driving force for the entire plot, all peppered with gratuitous R-rate violence and no shortage of quips for good measure.