Earlier this week at the Jalopnik office (aka in our Slack channel) we were discussing the new season of “Stranger Things,” which most of our staff agrees is pretty bad so far, and naturally the conversation evolved into talking about cars, both the ones in the show and in other pieces of media. “Stranger Things” has always had good cars in it, but there have also been lots of nerdy problems with the automotive casting, like Barb driving a too-new Volkswagen Cabriolet in the first season. That’s led me to my question for today: What on-screen automotive mistake annoys you the most?
This can either be a specific instance of something in a particular movie or TV episode, or a mistake that you see happen all the time in shows and films. I always get annoyed when the glamour shots are of a new-model car, but then when it has to get into an accident or be shot up, they use an older generation of the car. I get you might not want to pay to blow up a new Range Rover, but come on!
This annoys me every time
I could name a bunch of different general mistakes that bother me all the time, but instead I’m going to use a specific example from one of my favorite franchises. Every “Mission: Impossible” movie has some sort of automotive element, like a car chase or a cool car being driven, and basically all of them vehicular stunts even further with setpieces like helicopter chase in “Fallout” (which also has one of the best chases of all time) the bike jump in “Dead Reckoning Part One” and the biplane fight in “The Final Reckoning.” The M:I series has long had a partnership with BMW, with the Bavarian automaker providing the hero car (and bikes, and villain cars) for nearly all of the movies. In 2015, the then-brand-new F80 M3 was the star car of “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation,” in which Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg escape from baddies on motorcycles through the streets of Casablanca (in reality filmed in a few different locations in Morocco), while chasing after Rebecca Ferguson who’s on her own superbike.
Early on in the chase Cruise drives the M3 down a long, dramatic flight of stairs, and instead of wearing the M3’s lovely set of 19-inch wheels, the stunt car clearly has smaller wheels from a normal 3 Series. I understand that the F80’s stock wheels would surely not be able to handle the abuse of jumping down those stairs, but it wasn’t as bad as it looks — they built ramps on the stairs and digitally removed them. It’s still a lot to ask of performance wheels and tires, but I still think it’s an obvious blunder that even someone who isn’t a car enthusiast would notice. At least the M3 has its stock wheels for the whole rest of the scene, even when it’s getting totally smashed up and, at the end, flung through the air. I think the stair scene is even more annoying to me because Cruise does all his own driving, and in the more recent films (especially those directed by Christopher McQuarrie, like “Rogue Nation”) the reality of the stunts is emphasized so heavily.
Alright, what about you, dear reader? What on-screen automotive mistake annoys you the most? Let me know in the comments below, and I’ll round up my favorite answers later this week.
