LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles’ reputation as a bank-robbing wonderland may be receding — a good thing — but it leaves behind some all-time, on-screen highs. If you watch all five of these films, you’ll understand what makes for a perfect action-thriller, equal parts tense talk and exhilarating release. What you end up doing with that knowledge, we hereby indemnify ourselves of, formally.
‘Ambulance’ (2022)
A hard truth to swallow but one that must be reckoned with: Michael Bay, the virtuoso of violence who never met an explosion he didn’t like, unleashed a landmark L.A. crime film. He didn’t make it quietly. In a near-abstract downtown emptied out by the pandemic, Bay executed his most liberated piece of Bayhem, a post-bank-heist chase movie that doubles down on its own heightened sense of ridiculous at every turn.
‘The Bling Ring’ (2013)
Fine, no bank here. A story this local, based on an actual string of Hollywood Hills burglaries, needed to crash our list, because it gets at something essential about the subgenre. Writer-director Sofia Coppola exfoliates the lust for celebrity lifestyles that often powers theft, even at its most haphazard and uncoordinated. These high school students were never going to get away with it, but for a while, their run is consequence-free.
‘Drive’ (2011)
Cruising through the night, the unnamed getaway driver (Ryan Gosling) awaits his next gig, even as the distractions of a vulnerable neighbor in need (Carey Mulligan) and a chatty, menacing mobster (Albert Brooks) grow too big to ignore. Filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn’s nail-biter owes some of its tough-minded minimalism to Walter Hill’s 1978 “The Driver,” though when your style is this confident, the result transcends all predecessors.