The 10 Best Action Movie Stunts Of The Last Decade

Hollywood stunts became even more complex during the last decade and we can’t wait to see what the new decade has to offer. Even though the advancement of technology has caused the overreliance of CGI, a good number of filmmakers still prefer to do things the real, hard way. We can’t complain since the results are always amazing.

Stunt performers never receive any major recognition in award shows but we salute them. Some of the stunts in the following films were not easy to pull off. A few of them were even done by the actors themselves. Why delegate when you are capable? Here are the best action movie stunts of the 2010s.

10 Skyfall: Bond Fighting Patrice On Top Of A Moving Train

Skyfall is regarded by many as the best Bond film of all time and it isn’t hard to see why. In the opening scene, Bond and his team chase a mercenary called Patrice who has stolen a hard drive containing the identities of undercover MI6 agents. Bond and Patrice find themselves on top of a moving train where they have to fight it out.

The scene is intense because the train is moving on a railway on a bridge that’s very high up from a river. You can’t help but feel that one of them is going to fall any minute. Far away, Moneypenny is watching the two via the lens of a sniper rifle. She wants to take out Patrice but she has no clear shot. However, when the train is about to disappear through a tunnel, M orders Moneypenny to take the shot anyway. Unfortunately, Moneypenny ends up hitting Bond who falls hundreds of meters, ending up in the water. Right after that, the Bond soundtrack begins. Classic moment.

Stunt coordinator Gary Powell was quoted saying, “Craig did most of the work. He was in the car, did a lot of riding on the motorbike, obviously a lot of stuff on the train roof, getting into the digger, running across the digger, the fight stuff on the big bridge.”

9 Fast Five: Dragging A Giant Vault Through The Streets Of Rio

In Fast Five, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his team are forced to steal a giant vault full of cash that belongs to Rio criminal mastermind Hernan Reyes. The gang breaks into a police station where Reyes had bribed officers to keep the vault and pull it out using their high horsepower Dodge Chargers. They drag it through the city, destroying several cars and buildings in the process as the police chase them.

Stunt coordinator Jack Gill is said to have built several vaults for the scene. Two of them were motorized so that they could be mobile during the chase. Several vehicles and buildings were indeed destroyed. One of the stuntmen also ended up breaking his shoulder.

8 Inception: The Hallway Dream Fight

Inception has sometimes been termed a confusing movie. It’s hard to understand what’s really going on if you don’t concentrate like you are in a Quantum Physics class. Nevertheless, it was hailed by critics as a masterpiece. Who are we to say otherwise?

There is a dizzying scene in the film where a fight takes place in a rotating hallway. It’s only a dream but director Christopher Nolan insisted on it being shot in an actual rotating room. Given the complexity, it is said to have taken three weeks to shoot. Over 500 crew members were present to make sure everything went off without a hitch.

7 The Hunger Games – Mocking Jay Part 1: The Landmines

When Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and District 7 rebel against the authority, they are forced to flee in a scene that serves us one of the best action stunts of the last decade. As they move, they activate an entire landmine which ends killing plenty of Peacekeepers.

The explosions were CGI of course but the strategic running and jumping were all real. It takes a lot of skill to throw yourself like a body that’s been blown up for real.  It’s no surprise that as far as dystopian films go, this was easily one of the very best.

6 Mad Max: Fury Road: The Polecats Scene

This scene was made possible without any use of CGI. You can’t help but wonder how? Well, stunt coordinator Guy Norris had 150 stuntmen hanging on speeding vehicles and swinging while artificial winds blew through them. It took about eight weeks to prepare for it.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, Norris said, “George Miller always imagined that we would have to use CGI for safety’s sake, but I had other ideas”.Most of the scenes were shot in the Namibian desert.

5 The Raid: Hallway Fights

The Raid has some of the best action sequences of all time. Most of the fight scenes take place in hallways because 99% of the film was shot in a single highrise building. Low budget? No problem. The fight scenes looked as real as ever, from the way punches landed to the way bones broke and bodies fell on the floor.

There was a good reason for that. Actual martial artists, some of whom had never acted before, were used during filming. The actors who played the police officers were also required to do boot camp military training sessions in order to learn how to use weapons.

4 Black Panther: Seoul Car Chase

Since most superhero movies are full of CGI, it’s normally hard to tell which action sequences were done by actual stuntmen (if at all there were any). In reality, a lot of stunt work takes place. Otherwise, the films would just be considered self-playing video games, right?

In Black Panther, there is a car chase in the South Korean city of Seoul where we see T’Challa riding on top of a speeding Lexus LS 500 F-Sport. This was done by a real stuntman wearing the Black Panther suit. He also fell a couple of times. Ouch!

3 John Wick Chapter 3: Falling From The Roof

The franchise that received the career of Keanu Reeves has plenty of impressive stunts. It’s hard to single out one but we’ll have to settle for the roof fall in John Wick: Parabellum. As the movie is approaching the end, Wick falls from a roof and all the way to the ground.

As he is falling, his body twists and turns as he gets tossed between the balconies of adjacent buildings. Surprisingly, he survives all this. We know it’s you, Superman. But the scene wasn’t entirely fake. The stuntman’s costume was fitted with well-cushioned rubber pads to neutralize the impact of the fall.

2 Dark Knight Rises: Rescuing Bane From A Plane

When Christopher Nolan is on the director’s chair, nothing can go wrong. In this final film of the Dark Knight Trilogy, the opening shows supervillain Bane (Tom Hardy) getting rescued from a plane in which he is being held captive.

Filmed above the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, the stunt captured a group of men shifting from one plane to another with ease. The other plane then falls to the ground because… well… they no longer need it. The scene looks impossible in real life but it was done without any use of CGI.

1 Mission Impossible 5: Climbing The Burj Khalifa

Cruise is definitely the king of death-defying stunts. The fact that he always prefers to not work with stuntmen makes his work even more impressive. In Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, the actor was suspended on a harness about 1700 feet from the ground while shooting the Burj Khalifa scene.

During the filming, there were heavy winds which caused Cruise to crash into the building several times. The scene was scary even for the crew. Director Brad Bird told ABC News, “One night, after one of the earliest shooting days, I bolted up in bed realizing that we had our star dangling about a mile up in the air on a thin wire and my brain was screaming, ‘What the hell are we doing?”

About The Author

Philip Etemesi
(1215 Articles Published)

Philip Etemesi is an author, journalist, screenwriter and film critic based in Nairobi. Kenya. As a child, he preferred watching movies like The Goodfellas instead of Home Alone. His girlfriend constantly has to pull him from the front of the TV but he just keeps returning. Stubborn dude! An animal lover, Philip also has a pet giraffe called Refu.

More From Philip Etemesi