Drives Like Crazy / Live-Action Films

Not pictured: the dog tied to the back.

Examples of Drives Like Crazy in live-action films.

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• Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. "Like a glove." In both movies, the driving is made even worse by cracked windshields that forces Ace to drive with his head out the window. Though he drives like that anyway even if the windshield isn't cracked. Especially if there's a dog in the car with him.
  "You might wanna think about getting this baby detailed."
• The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle: About halfway through the movie, Rocky and Bullwinkle are gifted a car by a pair of college students. Bullwinkle takes the wheel and promptly crashes. It only gets worse from there.
  College Student: You do know how to drive, right?
  Bullwinkle: Please. What moose can't drive an automobile?
  [Bullwinkle goes to back the car out of the parking space, but puts it in drive instead, crashing head-on into a brick wall]
  Bullwinkle: Never said I could drive it well.
  • In a later scene, he also has to take the controls of a plane. He flies about as well as he drives.
• In Ali G Indahouse, Sacha Cohen's character (Ali G)'s gang is outraged at the "crazy" driving of a rival gang that drove through a yellow light instead of stopping. This after a "street race" that consisted of both gangs going exactly the speed limit.
• Annie Hall. Her brother Dwayne isn't too good, either.
• Taken to extreme lengths in Avalanche. After the titular disaster strikes, a rescue crew races off to the scene and causes so much chaos trying to get there that they end up wrecking a store and killing a bystander. That's not counting the ambulance driver who ends up plunging his ambulance off into a ravine and causing it to explode with the leading male's mother in it!
• In Bandslam, when Charlotte pulls up with Will in the passenger seat, he timidly suggests she might want to use her turn signals. Her response? "They don't need to know my business!"
• W. C. Fields as The Bank Dick is made to drive a getaway car for a bank robber - this proves to be a bad idea. Knowing him, it's probably drunk driving...
• Batman Begins:
  • Batman's scene with the Batmobile, considering the chase that ensues. One officer radios in and is asked for a description of the car, and all he can come up with is "It's a black... tank."
  • "... on the roof."
  • Also, Jim Gordon, later in the movie. If he didn't have the excuse that he was driving the goddamn Batman's tumbler, he, as a police officer, would probably have been fired for gross incompetence.
• Elwood Blues from The Blues Brothers. From the bridge jump at the beginning to his awesome parking skills (he flips the car around instead of backing up), Elwood is simply awesome. But no mention of Elwood's driving would be complete without the mall scene. And if that's not enough, during the film's climactic ten-plus minute chase scene, he manages to reverse his car off an incomplete highway drop in a way that makes his car pull a backflip of all things over some Illinois Nazis who are chasing him, which only astounds them, and makes them completely miss the fact that they are running out of road, making them launch off the incomplete highway into the air, before plummeting from a height that rivals the height of the Chicago Sears Tower.
• A handful of racers in The Cannonball Run do some pretty crazy things before the race. The Sheik is notorious for hitting camels, Batman and Mad Dog don't mind driving their truck through things, Mel can't give Terry directions fast enough to warn him about a hotel pool, and the last two, along with Fenderbaum and Blake, are implied to drive drunk. The driving antics let up after the race starts because, well, they're in a hurry.
• Charlie's Angels: The first film opens with an Establishing Character Moment for each character; Natalie is shown to be this — as far back as when she still had braces.
• A Clockwork Orange: Alex and his droogs have a game they like to play, called "Hogs of the Road".
• In the Laurel and Hardy short County Hospital, Stanley drives patient Ollie home, having earlier sat on a hypodermic sedative - he's driving very recklessly to Ollie's horror, depicted by the most laughingly bad rear-projection effects ever.
• Cruella: In keeping with her animated incarnation, Cruella seems unable to drive at a safe speed or without crashing into things any time she gets behind the wheel. Possibly because she never learned how to drive.
• The title character of Dan in Real Life manages to get two tickets for the same stop sign and in an accident in 3 days, ultimately losing his license.
• Stuntman Mike in Death Proof, who drives "crazy" while trying to kill various women on the road.
• Corrando literally invites Death, in Death Takes a Holiday by his insanely dangerous driving.
• Dinner In America: When Simon and Patty go on their Roaring Rampage of Revenge and get into a borrowed truck, Simon shouts, "Buckle up! I drive fucking nuts!"
• Doctor... Series:
  • Whenever Sir Lancelot Spratt is shown driving, he speeds, hogs the road, and hurls abuse at anyone unlucky enough to be in his way:
    Sir Lancelot: Keep your ruddy Russian salad off the Queen's highway, you blasted oaf!
  • As shown in Doctor in Love, Lady Spratt (his wife) isn't much better. She gets distracted while driving Sir Lancelot to a lecture and nearly plows into the side of a double-decker bus:
    Sir Lancelot: Mind the damn bus, woman!
• This trope sets in motion the plot of Doctor Strange. The accident that wrecks Strange's hands is entirely his own fault, seeing as he was speeding while driving at night, in the rain, while passing in a no-pass zone on a blind curve and talking on the phone. The end credits include a warning about distracted driving.
• In the 1987 Dragnet film, Pep Streebek drives like this during a pursuit, much to the irritation of Joe Friday.
  Friday: [writing in his notebook] Reckless endangerment of human life, willful disregard for private property, failure to signal for a safe lane change...
  Streebek: Yeah, he's really racking up the violations, isn't he?
  Friday: Not him, YOU. This is your one-way ticket back to civilian life, Mr. I-Like-To-Throw-The-Book-Out-The-Window.
  Streebek: That sounds like a good idea. [throws notebook out the window]
• The basic premise of Steven Spielberg's Duel. The story consists of a man played by Dennis Weaver, being chased in his car by a Big Badass Rig. The rig goes from cutting him off repeatedly, to tormenting him, to trying to kill him, all the while their driving becomes ever more dangerous.
• Earth Girls Are Easy - alien Jim Carrey goes joy riding. As he's not familiar with Earth cars, maybe he thinks you're supposed to sit on the window sill and steer with your feet.
• Sean from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift moved across 4 different states and ended up in Japan because he just loves speeding through the road in his 1970 Chevy Monte Carlo.
• Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. "I've never missed a plane yet."
• Bruce Willis's character Korben Dallas in The Fifth Element is introduced as such even before he gets behind the wheel via a phone call with his mechanic. In his first scene. Fittingly, he's an ex-Starfighter pilot turned cab driver — in New York City. There is a Chase Scene that show cases his driving "skills". And, like the Star Wars example above, driving in the future is a 3D experience.
• A Fish Called Wanda: Otto West drives on the right side in London. And blames the other drivers for getting in his way.
• Freebie from Freebie and the Bean seems to go out of his way to slam into as many other cars as possible during chase scenes.
• The French film series Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez:
  • There is a recurring character (and running gag), Sister Clotilde (France Rumilly), a very enthusiastic nun who drives like crazy. By the way, she's myopic. Once a movie, the eponymous Gendarme, Cruchot (Louis de Funès), is forced (each time more reluctantly) to enlist her help for a Chase Scene, and then all bets are off. Thankfully, most of the time she's driving a 2CV, a not-too-powerful car... which certainly isn't supposed to do some of the things Sister Clotilde manages to do with it (car stunt specialist Rémy Julienne souped it up, of course).
  • In Le Gendarme en balade, it's a younger nun at the wheel... unfortunately:
    Sister Clotilde: I taught her everything!
  • Cruchot himself isn't the most prudent of drivers, especially when stressed (i.e. most of the time).
  • Josépha (Claude Gensac) during her arrival in Saint-Tropez (Le Gendarme se marie). Cruchot wants her arrested for this until he learns who she is, and before falling in love with her.
• In Get Smart, there is a scene in which Max drives through a golf course, entirely oblivious both to his surroundings and to the Chief's concern for his life.
• The Green Hornet Serials: Mike Axford. One of his police buddies once threatens to arrest him for "impersonating a motorist".
• Several in The Gumball Rally. Lapchick The Mad Hungarian. Franco, to a lesser extent. Also Ace "Mr. Guts" Preston in the Camaro Z-28, toward the end, as he tries to get through a traffic jam by going up on two wheels (while giving a rebel yell).
• The irreverent old Maude in Harold and Maude. Donuts in an intersection is the closest she comes to a stop, lanes (and indeed roads) are only a suggestion, and she has no compunction about stealing all her rides... and telling the cops!
• Beth Cooper from the movie of (almost) the same name and Kirby in Scream 4 both fit this trope like a glove, and they're mentioned together because both of them are played by Hayden Panettiere. So if there's ever a reboot of The Cannonball Run we know who'll be cast in the Adrienne Barbeau role (or the Tara Buckman role, if you go by hair colour rather than name recognition). See also her Star-Making Role in the Live-Action TV folder.
• The Kurgan has a scene like this in Highlander, where he terrorizes the Damsel in Distress by driving on the wrong side of the road. His immortality makes this much safer for him.
• Vince Ricardo (Peter Falk) in The In-Laws is a crazy driver in one scene during a chase; he actually backs down the wrong way on a highway. He doesn't think he's crazy:
  Vince Ricardo: You know, I'm such a great driver, it's incomprehensible that they took my license away.
• In The Incredible Hulk (2008), Bruce Banner and Dr. Betty Ross went to New York City, and decided on taking a taxi cab after deciding the subway would be too cramped for his comfort. It then cuts to them riding in a taxi with the taxi driver driving extremely recklessly, with Bruce Banner attempting to calm himself so he won't transform inside the cab, and just barely managed to keep calm when they arrived at the university. Upon arrival, Betty Ross also screamed at the driver at the top of her lungs about his recklessness.
• It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World - four parties of normal, law-abiding types get word of a buried fortune and promptly turn into a mass highway menace. Everyone else who gets involved later acts the same way.
• James Bond:
  • Bond does drive insanely once in a while. Usually justified by his needing to get somewhere in a really, really big hurry. Sometimes to get laid. Often it's both.
  • But the prize goes to Eve Moneypenny in Skyfall...
    [Eve cuts it a bit close and loses a side mirror]
    Bond: No problem, you weren't using it.
    [Eve deliberately wipes off the other one]
    Eve: Wasn't using that one, either.
• Detective Friedman makes an offhand comment about being a terrible driver early on in Judas Kiss. Turns into a Brick Joke much later when he crashes his car while trying to follow Rickles: breaking his ankle and Hawkins' nose.
• Alan Parrish in Jumanji. Justified (sort of) because he's been stuck inside a board game for about 26 years and never actually learned how to drive.
• Raphael Valdez Jr. in Kisses for My President is a Latin American dictator who, no matter if it's in a car or on a boat, drives like a maniac.
• In L.A. Story the main character once, because of traffic reasons, decides to take what is probably one of the most ridiculous shortcuts ever. Even more comic than that is the fact that everyone just waves to him as he passes by, as if he does this often. For a straighter example, Sara, who is from England, doesn't understand that you're supposed to drive on the right side of the road in the US.
• In Larger than Life, Jack rents a truck to transport Vera the elephant despite not knowing how to drive it. While going uphill, the truck slows to fifteen miles per hour until another trucker yells instructions for how to shift gears. Then while going downhill, the truck accelerates out of control.
• Love in the Villa: The man who drives Julie to the villa, Uberto, gleefully weaves in and out of lanes, barely avoiding hitting other drivers and pedestrians, and causing Julie to slam into the sides of the car multiple times.
• Lucy: In a chase scene, Lucy drives a one-way street the wrong way. On a police car. And that’s not the worst. She has never driven before.
• The first Mad Max movie was intended to demonstrate the dangers of reckless driving. The hoons and rev-heads who saw the movie left feeling that their lifestyles had been validated.
• Men in Black:
  • Agent Kay goes from point A to point B like he was in hot pursuit as a standard. When he is in an actual hurry to get get there, the LTD's "red button" mode means that he has no issues with driving on rooftops and nearly missing signs by inches.
  • The Taxi drivers in New York are also implied to be terrible drivers. When the ambassadors arrive at dinner for negotiations and what ultimately turned out to be their last meal, the short ambassador apologizes for his lateness and explains that the taxi drivers in the city are terrible.
• In Mr. Holland's Opus, Mr. Holland takes a summer job as an instructor of student drivers. Ironically, one scene has him doing the crazy driving with two of his visibly worried students as passengers. He ignores traffic signs and signals, passes other cars on the right side, and traverses a one-way street in the wrong direction, all while going well above the speed limit. The reason for this insane driving is revealed when Mr. Holland reaches his destination: it's the local hospital, where his wife had given birth to their son shortly before he got there.
• Another Leslie Nielsen flick, The Naked Gun, has Frank Drebin. He's competent behind the wheel, but he sucks at parking. At least until he decided to drive a tank. Drebin plows through a house, letting the bad guy he was trying to catch get away, breaks the controls, runs through a clothesline, catches a doghouse with the dog still in it dragging it behind him, and finally ramming into the City Zoo releasing several zoo animals by the time he finally manages to stop.
• Night Watch (Series):
  • Alisa in Day Watch. She even at one point drives along the side of a building (automotive Parkour), which is probably only possible because she's not exactly a normal human.
  • Semyon in Night Watch avoids running over Zavulon by somersaulting the truck over him.
• In Nightmare at Noon, Charley steals Sheriff Hanks' car and gleefully swerves all over the road, occasionally stopping to ram other people's cars or run people over.
• On the Buses films:
  • On the Buses: When trying to make a quick getaway from Betty's house after her husband comes home early, Stan starts the bus off and plows into an out-of-order telephone box. After doing so, he panics and reverses, only to take down a bus stop in the process.
  • Mutiny on the Buses:
    • A distracted Arthur plows his motorcycle into the back of Stan's bus during the opening credits.
    • When learning how to drive a bus, Arthur tears off down the road unable to stop with Stan clinging to the bus' door until he swerves into a farm and manages to brake before he can hit anything. During another one of his lessons, he backs into a bus stop.
    • Olive is learning how to drive a motorbike, but the very idea scares Jack. When she does start driving, he isn't wrong - she can't steer for love nor money and ends up swerving into the depot unable to stop:
      Jack: Well, I tell you what - if those two are gonna be on the roads, I'm takin' a job on the railways.
• Janet from Please Turn Over is still learning to drive, and leaves her instructor, Ian, a bundle of nerves at the end of each lesson:
  Ian: You must always get into neutral when the car's stationary.
  Janet: Ah, I see.
  Ian: Yeah. I have told you that before, Janet. Should be instinctive by now.
  Janet: Well, Ian, I've only had fifteen lessons. You can't expect me to have learnt everything yet.
• Police Academy:
  • Hightower, who admitted that he hadn't actually driven a car between graduating from school and enlisting in the academy (not implausible in a city with a good public transit system). Mahoney from the same movie parked a car in a two-foot space between two other cars, and taught Hightower a refresher course.
  • The Commandant always crashes his golf cart when parking.
• The Princess Diaries:
  • Mia Thermopolis does some reckless driving in her light blue Mustang up the hill as it rolls into a San Francisco trolley car (but luckily Queen Clarisse prevented the young princess from getting her driver's license suspended or revocated due to the Genovian Order of the Rose).
  • Subverted as Mia is getting away from her house in the same light blue Mustang but is unsuccessful (as Joe arrives). Next time, Mia, use Benny the Cab (from Who Framed Roger Rabbit) instead.
• In Raising Arizona, when she has to pick up H.I. following a robbery, Ed's police training kicks in, and she immediately turns into Bullitt.
• In Raising the Wind, Jill is in such a hurry to get to the London Academy of Music and the Arts and to get her harp out of her car that she accidentally backs into a cab.
• In The Replacements (2000) (the football movie, not the animated series), Annabelle does her share of crazy driving while taking Shane back to his house-boat.
• Royal Rendezvous: Edwina is introduced crashing her car at the manor's garden. Apparently, she's getting too old to drive by herself but doesn't want to admit it. It gets to the point that Rory resorts to sabotaging her car so she won't go out by herself.
• In Scrooged the Ghost of Christmas Past takes the form of a maniacal New York Cabbie who makes a u-turn through a hotel's front awning right after Frank gets in. Turns into a Brick Joke when Claire hails his cab at the film's end.
  Claire: Taxi! Can you get me to the IBC building in three minutes?
  Ghost of Christmas Past: [chomping cigar] Which floor?
• Father Thomas in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit is a menace on the road. How he got the job when he doesn't have a driver's license and his passengers do is unknown.
• Annie from Speed 2: Cruise Control. What made this egregious is that she was a perfectly capable driver in the first film who just simply lost her license for "speeding", but she then mutated into a completely incompetent driver incapable of handling a motor vehicle.
• The bus driver played by the Late Great Ray Charles (yes, the blind guy) in Spy Hard. Tends to say "Next stop, X... I think," on one occasion ending with an Offscreen Crash.
• James T. Kirk, in Star Trek, apparently learned how to do this when he was a kid in the rebooted universe (see the Live-Action TV section). He drives a vintage Corvette into an old quarry, while being chased by the futuristic Highway Patrol. He really didn't want his step-father to sell his dad's car.
• Star Wars:
  • Anakin Skywalker, even when he's not in an extreme sports race or space battle — and on Coruscant, driving is a three-dimensional affair.
    Obi-Wan: I don't mind flying — [has to duck] — but what you're doing is suicide!
  • Anakin's piloting: Crazy? Yes. Bad? Anything but. He's one of if not the best pilot in the entire series based on the ridiculous lengths he's willing to go to. Remember, he's been at this since he was podracing as a kid.
  • Han Solo counts as well — doing the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs and flying into a goddamn asteroid field to avoid TIE Fighters are insane by any measure.
• Wyatt Earp in Sunset, mostly because he doesn't know how to drive.
• The entire point of the Taxi series of action-comedy movies written by Luc Besson. In the second movie, he actually upgraded his cab for limited flight (well, increased jump-length, but still, it had WINGS...), and installed automatic barf-bags for the passengers.
• In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Bumblebee shows off his rather poor flying skills when he and the other Autobots head into battle. Sam is not at all comforted when asking Bee about his skills piloting said Decepticon craft beforehand, Bee only giving a "so-so" gesture in response. Wheelie and Brains don't fare much better when they stumble across the same ship thanks to their small sizes.
• TRON: Kevin Flynn doesn't really know how to fly a Recognizer, and it shows. He bounces off canyon walls, takes out a bridge span, and ends up crashing it in the middle of town.
  Flynn: Pretty good drivin', huh?
  Bit: NO
  Flynn: Who asked you?
• TRON: Legacy: Driving crazy certainly runs in the family, as Flynn's son Sam is completely disregarding most traffic safety regulations while driving to the Encom Tower for his annual prank. Flynn's apprentice Quorra turns the tables on Sam later by blasting her way into the Game Grid with a light runner, rescuing Sam, and going top speed over the hostile terrain of the Outlands, leaving Sam holding on for dear life.
• In Watch Your Stern, Blissworth is ordered to ride Commander Fanshawe's bicycle as fast as possible to catch up to Commander Phillips' car and retrieve the Creeper torpedo plans, which only causes him to ride into Admiral Pettigrew and knock him into a crate.
• In Jackie Chan's Who Am I?, the female lead that isn't a CIA operative has this as her one redeeming feature. She Drives Like Crazy... with amazing skill. She gets through an alley by essentially driving over something to tip the car on it's side. After she's through the narrow passage, she... somehow... manages to get the car right-side up again and zooms off. In the final part of the chase scene, she's driving through what is largely a parking lot/road in Amsterdam and sees a spot. Without hardly breaking her at least 50 mph speed, she turns and backs into the spot, stopping on a dime, and everyone in the car ducks down as the pursuers drive by. Other than that, she's The Ditz.
• Nikki Finn in Who's That Girl, once she gets a hold of Louden Trott's car.
• Unlicensed driver Withnail in Withnail and I. When Marwood (AKA "I") wakes up in the back seat of his Jaguar to find Withnail at the wheel rapidly weaving in and out of early morning traffic on the M25, Withnail simply explains, "I'm making time."
• The subject of the MST3K-ed Scare 'Em Straight short "X" Marks the Spot is a truly extreme example, speeding through school zones (though he gets better on that), turns in the wrong lane, and runs people off the road whilst passing. On hills. In the face of oncoming traffic, all while it never being his fault.
• Anna from Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, played by Sophia Loren, manages to rear-end three different cars during one short drive to the country, and she nearly hits two different pedestrians.

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