Motorcycles first appeared in film only 10 years after the birth of the moving image, with Alf Collins’s short, A Motorbike Adventure, in 1895. That predates even the first appearance of cars in motion pictures. You could say that the motorcycle is inextricably linked with filmmaking, having been featured throughout nearly 130 years worth of films, from Buster Keaton’s harrowing handlebar riding in Sherlock Jr., to Tom Cruise riding a BMW scrambler against traffic in Mission: Impossible – Fallout. In both cases, the actors did their own stunts, as motorcycles have become a proving ground that many action stars use to enhance their believability.
It’s been a proving ground for directors and cinematographers, as well, as high speed, trailer-mounted photography and drone shots have become the industry standard, and have only been enhanced by the capabilities of CGI. Still, nobody has been more important to the process of capturing daring motorcycle stunts than the stunt performers themselves, who have doubled for everyone from Steve McQueen to Keanu Reeves in some of film history’s greatest two-wheeled daredevil acts. When the skillful stunt riding and photography cooperate properly, audiences are treated to moviemaking’s most extravagant and exciting action sequences.
If you want to understand the dangers involved in doing stunts on motorcycles, look no further than Joi Harris, a stunt performer who was killed on the set of Deadpool 2doubling for Domino when she was ejected from her bike. The tragic death was a reminder of how high the stakes are in creating this type of entertainment.
The following are the 20 most daring motorcycle stunt scenes in movie history.
20 The Bourne Ultimatum
There’s nothing an audience loves more than a beloved film star doing his own motorcycle stunts. Matt Damon split the duty with some stunt performers in The Bourne Ultimatum, but gets kudos for some high-speed, helmet-free shots of the actor kicking an enduro into high gear. Damon shows some dirt bike skills in Bourne, navigating a few jumps that wipe the frame in a hyperbolic chase scene and prove that the actor wasn’t afraid to get dirty and give Jason Bourne a little extra believability.
19 Black Rain
Michael Douglas put his motorcycle riding capabilities on full display in Black Rain, a cyberpunk action film with two key motorcycle scenes. The first sees Douglas, as Detective Nick Conklin, in a street race on his Harley-Davidson Street Glide along the Brooklyn waterfront, easily dispatching of his foe thanks to a hair-raising jump over some construction obstacles. Then, in the film’s final scene, Douglas hops on a dirt bike to hunt down his nemesis, Sato, through the vines of a wine farm. Ridley Scott used some expertly-shot helicopter photography for the scene, though it’s pretty clear in a few shots that its Douglas’ stunt double on the bike.
18 Electra Glide in Blue
Before there was CHiPs, there was Electra Glide in Blue, a bike cop movie named for the police-issue Harley-Davidson Electra Glide. The film stars Robert Blake as John Wintergreen, a bike cop in Arizona who in one scene finds himself trailing an entire bike gang with his partner. The scene features some heavy motorcycle crashes, with stunt performers doing everything from flying headlong over the hood of a cop car, to trying to navigate the bike after being set on fire.
The film is a document of a time when the rules around stunts were much more relaxed and stunt performers risked their lives daily on set. Quentin Tarantino used these incredible performers as the basis for Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
17 Burn Out
Burn Out is a hard-hitting French drama for Netflix about a bike racer named Tony Rodrigues, who assumes a drug debt for his child’s mother when a drug shipment she is storing goes missing. Tony is forced into service as a drug courier for the mishap, as his exceptional skills on a bike make him a perfect drug runner to transport narcotics from Belgium to Paris.
The film is a motorhead’s delight, with the greatest of many high-speed scenes being Tony’s second drug run, when he takes the limiter off his Ducati 1299 Panigale and blasts through a police checkpoint, leading to a memorable chase scene where Tony foils the cops by using some clever braking. The film features dirt bikes and track bikes as well, as Tony desperately battles to get on a motorcycle team before his dreams begin to fall apart thanks to his dangerous side job.
16 Hard Target
On the scale of unintentional comedy, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s role as Chance Boudreaux in Hard Target gets a perfect 10, as the film sees Van Damme and his hockey mullet hairdo in one lovably implausible situation after another, including when he stands on the seat of his Honda Motorcycle for a game of chicken with some pursuant goons. Naturally, Van Damme only has a handgun at his disposal, riding head on towards a Chevy Silverado full of machine-guns. Van Damme lives up to the film’s name, however, flipping over the top of the speeding truck while blowing away his enemies, one-by-one.
15 Rumble Fish
Mickey Rourke has swung a leg over many a motorcycle on screen, most memorably as Motorcycle Boy in Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s Rumble Fish. Rourke’s character Motorcycle Boy, a mysterious former gang leader who has been missing for months, makes a grand reappearance in Coppola’s film, when his younger brother Rusty (Matt Dillon) gets into a fight with town heavy Biff Wilcox. When Biff slashes Rusty with a glass shard, Motorcycle Boy chooses violence and launches his bike at Wilcox, with terminal consequences. It remains the only time in film that a motorcycle has been used like a heat-seeking missile.
14 The Matrix Reloaded
Previously unexperienced with motorcycles, Carrie-Anne Moss was tasked with a big challenge for The Matrix Reloaded. Not only did Moss need to perform a high speed stunt scene with no helmet, she also had another actor riding on back. Moss describes, for Entertainment Weekly, her fear and exhaustion from doing the scene, stating that “[a] passenger’s life depended on me being impeccable and perfect because I knew that if I allowed my mind one moment of doubt that I could hurt another human being. And I held that for all of those days…It was exhausting holding that mental absolute knowing that I was going to keep him alive.”
13 The Place Beyond the Pines
Ryan Gosling proved his willingness to put his butt on the line by doing the majority of his own stunt work in The Place Beyond the Pines. That included several motorcycle scenes on a Suzuki dirt bike. Still, some scenes are far too dangerous for actors to do themselves or to get the required insurance, and the one-shot bank robbery that sees his character ride out of the back of a truck before committing a heist and making his getaway meant that Gosling had to relinquish his duties for the scene to his stunt double. No matter how willing actors are to perform their own stunts, their will always be a place for stunt doubles when these scenes are shot practically.
12 The Dark Knight
Christopher Nolan’s films rely heavily on the director’s unique eye for innovative technologies. For The Dark Knight, Nolan conceived of The Batpod, a motorcycle with giant 20-inch tires that can turn on an opposite axis to aid in steering. The bike’s unveiling is the peak of the film’s action, as Batman (Christian Bale) finds himself in hot pursuit of a fleeing Joker (Heath Ledger), employee all the bike’s unique characteristics to elude police and hunt down The Joker. Stunt performers were up to the difficult task of steering the massive bike for the scene’s practical shots, though not without danger, as at one point a stunt performer crashed the bike into an Imax camera.
11 Skyfall
These days, audiences have seen so many motorcycle chase scenes that directors are eager to heighten them even further, with Sam Mendes doing so by placing 007 (Daniel Craig) in hot pursuit of another agent atop the roofs of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar in Skyfall. Craig did some work on the bike, but the rooftop stunts were performed by Robbie Maddison, a modern-day Evel Knievel who holds the world record for the longest motorcycle jump at 346 feet on a modified Honda CR500. Maddison is the crème de la crème of motorcycle stunt performers, doubling for James Bond, Venom, and Xander Cage throughout an illustrious career — but his greatest movie scene remains his super risky rooftop ride in Skyfall.
10 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the silliest installment of the franchise, with Indiana (Harrison Ford) constantly bickering with his father Henry (Sean Connery) over their next move. One such decision is hopping in a BMW R75 motorcycle with a sidecar to escape the Castle Brunwald. It’s not long before Indy and his father have Nazi troopers chasing them down. Indy literally gets medieval on them, using a checkpoint barricade as a lance and jousting an oncoming soldier straight off the back of his bike.
Then he jams the broken piece he has left over between the spokes of another bike Nazi attempting to push him off the road, sending the trooper “high side” about 20 feet in the air. This elicits for Indy only some feint praise from Henry…but they’re working on it.
9 The Road Warrior
A gearhead’s delight, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior encompassed some of the 80s best stunts, as Australian director George Miller put his extensive knowledge of automobiles and stunt work to bat in creating the film’s extremely dangerous chase scenes. In one, Max (Mel Gibson) hijacks an oil tanker, only to be hunted down by the trucks, dune buggies and motorcycles of a roving band of marauders. The sequence required hundreds of stunt performers, in some cases leaping off the back of motorcycles onto the tanker, all while outfitted in nothing more than some football pads.
All of Miller’s Mad Max films feature amazing motorcycle stunts, but The Road Warrior harkens back to a time when stunt performers took much greater risks.
8 Top Gun
Tony Scott’s incredible eye for action and Tom Cruise’s daring stunt performances married brilliantly in the original Top Gun, as Maverick utilized the Kawasaki GPZ900R, at the time the fastest production bike on the road, to race with an F14 fighter jet in the film’s most memorable shot, recreated for Top Gun: Maverick 36 years later. The movie began Cruise’s decades-long love affair with motorcycles, and while the film doesn’t feature any real stunts on the bike, it created an image that is maybe the most synonymous with motorcycles in film.
7 Terminator 2: Judgement Day
“I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle.” While Arnold Schwarzenegger did the majority of the Harley riding himself in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the film’s incredible LA River bike jump was actually performed by his stunt double. James Cameron employed an elaborate wire track, attached to the stuntperson’s back, so he could launch his Harley-Davidson off the precipitous jump and still ride away safely after bouncing off the ground in a hail of sparks. The scene also featured some impressive dirt bike riding from John Conner (Edward Furlong) as the two elude the T-1000 when he crashes his Mack truck into an overpass.
6 Il Profeta
Ann-Margret does it all in Il Profeta, acting ably in fluent Italian, and navigating a Moto Guzzi motorcycle through the streets of Italy in little more than hot pants and a sweater. While there are no daring stunts per se, Margret gets kudos for breaking gender barriers, even doing a walk-and-talk (ride-and-talk?) with Vittorio Gassman in one scene. Margret was never afraid of doing her own stunt work, even riding a snowmobile at age 52 into the hearts of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in Grumpy Old Men.
5 John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum
Keanu Reeves has made John Wick into his most beloved film character by working tirelessly at producing high-intesity action sequences like the ones in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. The film’s motorcycle chase involved extensive work both on location and in front of green screens, as director Chad Stahelski pieced the sequence together using high speed motorcycle stunts and hand-to-hand combat. Reeves did extensive training to complete these scnes, and has long been an avid motorcycle rider and collector.
4 Mission: Impossible – Fallout
In the risk department, it’s hard to match the heavily-coordinated motorcycle sequences in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which saw Tom Cruise doing his most daring motorcycle stunts to date (that’s set to be outdone with his motorcycle-to-parachute jump in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning this summer). Cruise deserves tremendous praise for his efforts to keep theatrical films alive, seemingly one-upping his previous efforts in every successive M:I film. In Fallout, cruise weaves a BMW Scrambler through the streets of Paris, complete with several near misses that required pinpoint accuracy from the film’s stunt crew and action unit. The effect is one of the most edge-of-your seat motorcycle sequences of all time.
3 The Wild One
Marlon Brando’s performance as Johnny Stabler in The Wild One created the 1950s greatest motorcycle icon, as the film was so controversial upon its release that it generated an X Rating and was banned for years in the U.K. Brando’s character employed the famous Triumph Thunderbird 6T, which the company initially objected to, given the bad boy image of the film, before later realizing it made the bike one of the most iconic ever. Brando did plenty of riding himself in the film, and the image of him in his leather motorcycle jacket and aviators has become a symbol of those who ride.
2 Easy Rider
Easy Rider is as connected to American motorcycle identity as much as any other 60s film, making choppers famous as Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper rode through the southwest atop their iron horses. The film also includes some hairy stunts, when the two square off against some hippie-haters who blow them off their bikes using a shotgun. The scene became emblematic of mainstream America’s resistance to counter-culture movements like bikers, and the film itself became maybe the most famous motorcycle film ever made.
1 The Great Escape
When considering the mythos around motorcycle stunts, no stunt is more highly regarded than Captain Virgil Hilts’ (Steve McQueen) fence jump in The Great Escape. Doubling for McQueen was Bud Ekins, the most famous motorcycle stuntperson in film history. While relatively tame by today’s standards, the jump was no small feat atop a Triumph TR6, a heavy bike that came down with a wallop after clearing the cow fence. Ekins was a dear friend of McQueen’s, with the two frequenting dirt tracks and sand dunes together, and cementing a relationship as storied as any between actor and stunt performer.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
