Car chases are fine and all, but the truly formidable movie hero isn't afraid to hoof it every once in a while.
449628526- Normally if you step out of a New York subway station at 3 A.M. greeted by someone in heavy face paint, you're either scoring ecstasy or a blow job (or both!). But if there's a gang of them—with baseball bats—it doesn't matter how tough you think you are in your leather vest, hightail it the fuck out of there, quick like.
449628543- Crank looks at every other movie on this list and says, "Pussies." Jason Statham runs from the second this movie opens to the minute it ends (with a brief stopover inside Amy Smart), making it the best combination of frantic running and cocaine since Lindsay Lohan's rehab stint—with a run time twice as long!
449628557- Think about all the influential kung fu movie icons: Bruce Lee. Jackie Chan. Bugs Bunny. Kung Fu Hustle's old lady pursuit is straight out of Looney Tunes, except for, you know, the knives sticking out of Stephen Chow's back. The chunky lady's somersault over a speeding truck is everything The Matrix Reloaded wishes it was.
449628572- With a partial automobile assist, H.I. McDunnough's quick Pampers run turns into a cluster fuck tour of his neighborhood's local supermarkets, convenience stores, and residences, all while armed with an unloaded gun and wearing a panty on his head. In the end, he emerges unscathed, Pampers in hand. Take that, motherscratcher.
449628592- A movie that literally hits the ground running. The opening features a frantic chase between smack addicts Renton and Spud and some department store security guards, made more pulse-pounding by Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life." Anyone who's seen an episode of Cops knows how this ends—the boys in blue get lucky when Renton accidentally runs into a car. Which he, of course, finds hilarious.
449628610- Rival skaters Will Ferrell and Will Arnett take their on-ice pursuit off-ice, carving up linoleum and discovering that bladed boots and escalators don't mix. With the two dressed in their finest skating costumes (or "Canadian couture"), the chase just compounds the ridiculousness and almost, almost, makes us like figure skating.
449628623- Why is the Keanu Reeves–Patrick Swayze chase so high on our list? Because nowhere else does the chasee slow down his pursuer by THROWING A DOG AT HIM. It also ends with that perfectly homoerotic "Do I want to kill him, or do I love him?" moment, parodied so well in Hot Fuzz. We're going to go outside, fire our gun into the air, and scream in this scene's honor.
449628633- With a deranged heroine junkie loose on the streets of Detroit, it takes an agile Sgt. Nick Tellis to bring him down. Hopping fences and sprinting down back alleys, Tellis' tracks with laser-like precision. So do his bullets, save the one that caps a pregnant broad in this opening scene's frantic conclusion.
449628652- In case you're still in the dark about what Parkour is (it's French for "the elevator, she no works today"), the opening sequence of Casino Royale should clear things up. James Bond tracks a bomb maker through the streets of Morocco…then several hundred feet up a crane. All without the benefit of rope ladders, wire-fu harnesses, or radioactive spider bites.
449628676- What Jason Bourne lacks in humor, interpersonal skills, and remembering stuffness, he makes up for in his ability to haul ass like Willie Mays Hayes. His rooftop chase in Tangiers was so intense and nail-bitingly realistic, you'd think someone was running behind Matt Damon with a script for Dogma 2.