10 greatest action scenes that no one ever talks about
Everybody loves a great action movie, right? When a filmmaker executes all the elements of a truly exciting action sequence to the best of their ability, it’s exhilarating to watch. In fact, when you’re sitting in a cinema watching George Miller pull off mind-boggling feats that you can’t quite comprehend in Mad Max: Fury Road or watching Tom Cruise defy death itself in Mission: Impossible, it feels like pure cinema.
Over the years, there have been countless action sequences that fans will put on any list of the best the genre has to offer. From the hallway fight in Oldboy to the freeway chase in The Matrix Reloaded, and from the shootout in Heat to the showdown at the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill, great action can cement a film’s place in the public consciousness.
But what about the action scenes that don’t go down in history? There have been plenty of films that have given their audience stunning sequences that, for whatever reason, haven’t stuck around in the culture as much. Indeed, some of these scenes come in movies that otherwise couldn’t be described as action films, and perhaps that is why they find themselves slightly forgotten.
Here is a list of ten greatest action scenes that no one ever talks about. Hopefully, it can shine a light of some lesser known sequences that deserve to be thought of in the same breath as the classics.
10 greatest lesser known action scenes:
The apartment building chase – ‘Seven’ (David Fincher, 1995)
The sequence that inspired this entire list is the apartment building chase scene at the heart of David Fincher’s superlative serial killer thriller Seven. Over the years, I’ve always thought it was a cool burst of action in the middle of an otherwise foreboding, procedural movie and a great showcase of John Doe as a physical threat, as well as a cerebral one.
However, watching the scene during the recent IMAX 30th anniversary re-release was a mind-blowing, transformative experience. After seeing the scene in that gloriously enormous and devastatingly loud format, I’m now convinced it’s one of the best chase sequences ever committed to film. From the moment Doe shoots at Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman’s detectives when he sees them lingering outside his apartment, Fincher seizes the audience by the throat and throws them into a breathless, frantic, and complex scene that goes all throughout the grimy apartment building.
It’s heart-pounding stuff, with Pitt showing real action chops that he’d only utilise a handful more times in his career. Fincher’s camera is jerky and handheld at times, composed and coolly removed at others. By the time Pitt’s David Mills ends up lying on the ground in a rain-soaked alley, Doe’s gun to his head, the audience is barely able to catch its breath before Fincher gives us one of the movie’s signature shots. In essence, everyone should be talking about this scene. All the time.
The warehouse shootout – ‘French Connection II’ (John Frankenheimer, 1975)
William Friedkin’s classic cop thriller The French Connection isn’t an action movie, but it features arguably the greatest car chase in cinema history. By contrast, French Connection II, which has largely been forgotten by history, has much more action, yet none of it is as memorable as Friedkin’s truly insane – and highly, highly illegal – chase. This isn’t to say the action in French Connection II is bad, nor that the movie deserves to be consigned to the abyss. Far from it, in fact.
The movie follows Gene Hackman’s ‘Popeye’ as he travels to Marseille to track down villainous drug dealer Alain Charnier and bring him to justice, once and for all. Director John Frankenheimer – who would later rival Friedkin’s car chase with a similarly breathless one in 1998’s Ronin – fills Doyle’s French sojourn with lots of gunfights, foot chases, burning buildings, and it all works brilliantly. Doyle is on a revenge mission in the movie, and nothing will get in his way – especially when Charnier’s goons keep him captive for days and get him addicted to heroin. Yes, really. It’s a dark movie.
For my money, though, the climactic shootout between Doyle, his French police ally Inspector Henri Barthélémy, and a host of machine gun-wielding bad guys is pretty damn thrilling. An earlier scene at the docks, which nearly results in Doyle and Barthélémy, is also equally exciting and a testament to the enduring power of practical action sequences. It all looks so real, so it hits in a different way to most action scenes today.
The knife fight – ‘The Hunted’ (William Friedkin, 2003)
Speaking of Friedkin, he may have delivered one of the greatest action sequences that everyone talks about in The French Connection – but he also gave us a truly stunning one in 2003’s The Hunted that nobody talks about. In this thriller, which received bafflingly middling reviews, Benicio Del Toro plays a traumatised special forces soldier who has gone off the reservation and begun hurting civilians. Tommy Lee Jones is his grizzled former instructor tasked with hunting him down.
Throughout the film, there are couple of well-staged chases and some impressive fights, but Friedkin saves the best for the climax. When Del Toro and Jones face off in a knife fight to the death on a cliff edge, it’s genuinely one of the best choreographed fights of the last several decades. Both actors – who aren’t exactly known for fight choreography – trained extensively in the Filipino fighting style ‘Sayoc Kali’ to make their battle look real, and it paid off in spades.
The fight mightn’t be one of the glitziest fights in movies, but what it lacks in spectacle, it makes up for in sheer gritty, harrowing brutality. Both characters are willing to take hits to themselves in order to land more devastating ones on their opponent, and it is wince-inducing in its punishing physicality. Del Toro revealed he actually broke his wrist while filming the sequence, and when an interviewer pointed out that Jones also broke Will Smith’s rib on Men in Black, he quipped, “Yeah, when you work with Tommy, bring a gun.”
The police station fight – ‘Malignant’ (James Wan, 2021)
Despite being known primarily as a horror director, James Wan is no stranger to action. After all, he has directed two Aquaman movies, the vigilante thriller Death Sentence, and Furious 7. However, he mixed his worlds to surreal and incredible effect in 2021’s Malignant, his truly insane ode to the Giallo movies he loves. It gave horror fans a new icon – Gabriel, the evil parasitic twin who turns his sister Madison into a murderous backward serial killer – and culminated with one of the craziest action sequences of recent years.
The police station fight scene, in which Gabriel – who grows out of the back of Madison’s head – gruesomely dispatches a host of cops and criminals, briefly captured the imagination of social media upon release. However, it seems to have been forgotten in the years since, and I can’t allow that to stand. I mean, in how many movies can you watch someone cut a swathe of destruction the likes of which you’ve rarely seen, all while reversing the normal forward momentum of a human being? It’s one of those scenes that keeps making the brain fritz, but in a good way.
The camera movement in the scene adds to its bizarre unreality because of how it swoops through the police station. Wan revealed that he actually shot the sequence with a camera attached to a robotic arm whose movements had to be pre-programmed. This meant the cast and stunt team’s movements had to be carefully choreographed because the camera wasn’t going to stop moving once the arm had been programmed. Wan admitted, “It can be really dangerous if you don’t get to your mark correctly because you’re gonna have this massive heavy piece of equipment that comes like barreling at you and then just stops inches away from your nose.”
Cliff and Rick murder the Manson Family – ‘Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood’ (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)
Quentin Tarantino loves reworking history in cathartic, usually ultra-violent, ways. He did it in Inglourious Basterds to great effect, but I’d argue that he excelled himself with the gloriously bloody manner in which three members of the Manson Family meet their ends in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. When Tex, Sadie, and Katie show up at Rick Dalton’s house to kill him after he yells at them about their excessively loud muffler, a truly absurd and downright hilarious scene begins.
You see, the murderous cult members don’t find Rick in the house – not at first, anyway. Instead, they find Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth, who is tripping on LSD but still recognises them from when they met earlier at Spahn Ranch. Tex, played by Austin Butler, tries to intimidate Cliff, who just laughs in his face, and then Tarantino lets the audience watch as Cliff murders a pair of real-life murderers. Then, when Sadie, played by Mikey Madison, ventures outside to the pool area, she finds Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick – who promptly lights her on fire with a flamethrower.
Is the scene offensive in its sheer ludicrousness? Yes, probably. However, it’s also funny as hell, creative in its violence, and a wonderful way to end Tarantino’s ode to an era of Hollywood – and real-life history – that has always fascinated him. At the time, the ending made an impression, but I’d argue it should have been even more talked about. Perhaps people will rediscover it in the coming years now that both Butler and Madison have risen through the Hollywood ranks.
The car vs biplane chase – ‘Charley Varrick’ (Don Siegel, 1973)
In the ’70s, hangdog-faced comedic star Walter Matthau made an unlikely play to be a grizzled leading man in a trio of crime movies: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Laughing Policeman, and Charley Varrick. All three films proved that Matthau could turn his hand to the genre brilliantly, and Charley Varrick, in particular, showed a side of the star audiences had never seen before. As a former stunt pilot and explosives expert who gets involved in a heist, Matthau is cool in an unassuming way – something that couldn’t be said of him in many other films.
The movie is one of the ’70s most underrated movies, and it probably suffered from being director Don Siegel’s first picture after the all-conquering Dirty Harry. However, it’s ripe for rediscovery, and is arguably worth watching for its climactic car vs biplane chase scene alone. Taking place in a Reno junkyard, the sequence is action-movie perfection and a true showcase for Siegel’s low-key mastery of how to make his scenes look real and visually stunning at the same time.
Amusingly, though Charley Varrick’s reputation has improved over the years, one person who didn’t like the movie was its star. Unimpressed with how difficult he found the film to follow, he reportedly sent Siegel a letter that said, “I have seen it three times and am of slightly better than average intelligence (IQ 120) but I still don’t quite understand what’s going on. Is there a device we can use to explain to people what they’re seeing?”
The prison riot – ‘Extraction 2’ (Sam Hargrave, 2023)
The “oner” is probably the most overused filmmaking technique in action cinema these days. What was once an exciting and unique way to showcase the incredibly complex choreography that goes into an action scene has become slightly rote exercise in box-checking. Because every big action movie needs a sequence that looks like it was shot in one take, right? Having said that, I’m about to be a complete hypocrite, because the oner in Extraction 2 is amazing and should be talked about more.
Even though Netflix constantly championed the popularity of both Chris Hemsworth’s Extraction movies, it’s perhaps sometimes hard to believe the streaming giant. After all, have I spoken to anyone in real life who loved the rip-roaring adventures of the ludicrously named Tyler Rake as much as I did? No, not really. But if I had, I definitely would have waxed lyrical about the prison riot scene in Extraction 2, which is about as impressive a feat of modern action movie filmmaking as you’ll find.
In 21 minutes of bone-crunching, blood-spattering mayhem, Rake tries desperately to extract his quarry from a Georgian prison in the middle of a full-scale riot. Hemsworth is extremely believable fighting and shooting for his life, and by the time he escapes the prison and finds himself gunning down a plane while on board an armoured train, he and the audience are experiencing action nirvana. It’s too bad it couldn’t be seen on a big screen.
Hit-Girl vs the hallway of goons – ‘Kick-Ass’ (Matthew Vaughn, 2010)
In 2010, Matthew Vaughn’s preposterously entertaining comic book splatterfest Kick-Ass charmed and upset audiences in equal measure. Any controversy mostly came down to Chloe Grace Moretz’s Hit-Girl character – a 12-year-old conscripted into a violent war on crime by her certifiably insane father Damon aka Big Daddy. Depending on who you asked, Hit-Girl was either the perfect example of society and cinema going down the tubes, or the most riotously entertaining part of an already thrilling movie.
Hit-Girl’s big moment in the film is the uber-violent hallway scene in which she cuts down a group of gun-toting henchmen to the dulcet tones of Joan Jett’s ‘Bad Reputation.’ The scene, like the rest of the film, is blackly hilarious and exceedingly gory in a cartoonish way, without ever totally divorcing itself from reality. It’s a tonal balance that Vaughn hit perfectly, and arguably hasn’t been able to repeat for the rest of his career.
In truth, maybe that’s why Kick-Ass, and this action scene, aren’t talked about as the modern classics they truly are. The movie received a dismal sequel which missed the proper tone by a country mile, and Vaughn’s subsequent career has almost exclusively been devoted to the inferior Kingsman franchise.
The horse in the elevator – ‘True Lies’ (James Cameron, 1994)
Even though James Cameron has only directed nine films, it still feels like True Lies is one that people don’t talk about as much as they should. Yes, the man directed classics like the two Terminator films, Aliens, and Titanic. Yes, he’s arguably been devoting far too much of his time and effort to tales of blue aliens on a CGI planet.
But, dammit, that doesn’t mean we should ignore the time he had Arnold Schwarzenegger’s quintessentially American government agent Harry Tasker ride a horse into a glass elevator on the side of the building before trying to get it to jump off the roof of a skyscraper.
In case that doesn’t make it obvious, True Lies is one of Cameron’s most over-the-top movies – but it’s executed with such skill that it all seems perfectly plausible in context. This scene, in particular, is a mind-bogglingly complex mix of motorcycle stunts and horse-riding, and it ends with Schwarzenegger hanging off the building. He then scolds the horse by saying, “What the hell were you thinking?” Why don’t we talk about this scene every day, is what I’m really asking.
The asylum massacre – ‘The Invisible Man’ (Leigh Whannell, 2020)
Leigh Whannell’s 2020 version of The Invisible Man was a canny mix of horror, science-fiction, action, and psychological thriller. It asked some fascinating questions about the nature of abusive relationships and how society reacts to them. It boasted of a bravura lead performance by Elisabeth Moss. Oliver Jackson-Cohen was skin-crawlingly menacing as the titular invisible man when in his normal form, and the invisibility suit he uses to enact psychological torture on Moss’ character is rendered with great faux-scientific rigour.
The film’s best action scene, in my book, is the hard-hitting hallway sequence in the asylum in which the invisible man murders every guard and orderly that gets in his way. Whannell applies some of the same camera moves he utilised in the similarly underrated Upgrade, so the audiences watches as the camera whips and swoops in the middle of the action with thrilling speed and dexterity.
Whannell used a mix of CGI and old-school techniques to pull off the sequence. “We had Lizzie being pulled around in wires,” he told Radio Times. “We had a stunt person in a green suit, who then had to be removed digitally. But then also in those scenes we would also use really old school practical effects like pulling doors closed with a piece of string.” He chuckled, “Some props guy would be hidden in a cabinet!”
