From John Wick to Mad Max: Fury Road, there are plenty of great action movies from the past decade that deserved an Oscar for Best Stunts (if such an award existed). After years of campaigning by the stunt community – most recently by the cast and crew of the stunt-centric action comedy The Fall Guy – the Academy is officially considering introducing a stunt category at the Oscars. Bill Kramer, the CEO of the Academy, told Empire, “We’re talking to members of the stunt community who are Academy members about the possibility of [a Best Stunts category].”
The toughest thing about introducing a Best Stunts category at the Oscars would be determining the criteria for the “best” stunts of the year. Tom Cruise jumping a motorcycle off a mountaintop in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One was certainly an exciting spectacle, but its awkward placement within the story didn’t feel organic or necessary. From Extraction to Baby Driver to RRR, there are plenty of movies with breathtaking stunts that not only blend seamlessly with the storytelling, but actually serve the narrative and the characters.
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2014 – John Wick
John Wick changed the face of the action genre when it arrived in 2014. At a time when action films had devolved into a tired, frenzied shooting style with Bourne-style shaky camerawork and rapid-paced cuts making the action completely incoherent, John Wick came along and captured its fluid fight scenes and silky-smooth shootouts in mesmerizing long takes. It drew attention to the stunt work as opposed to distracting from it.
The fact that Keanu Reeves performed a lot of his own stunts for the film allowed the editors to use minimal cuts for maximum impact. The first John Wick movie upped the ante for fight choreography and vehicular stunt work on the big screen. Wick gets thrown from a second-floor railing onto a first-floor dancefloor; he gets flung into the air by a speeding car.
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2015 – Mad Max: Fury Road
George Miller returned to the Mad Max universe with one of the greatest action movies ever made in 2015. Mad Max: Fury Road was stuck in development hell for years, and for a while, it seemed as though it might never get made. But when it finally hit theaters, it was well worth the wait. Fury Road has all the grit and visceral spectacle of The Road Warrior, but with a much bigger budget and more advanced technology to pull it off. It was a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic experience.
The film is essentially one long car chase, with Immortan Joe and his forces relentlessly pursuing Max, Furiosa, and Joe’s liberated wives across the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Along the way, Miller’s stunt team does just about everything it’s possible to do with speeding cars. They blow up cars, they crash cars into each other, and they have War Boys jumping between cars. Fury Road is a mind-blowing showcase for vehicular stunts.
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2016 – La La Land
Not every movie with impressive stunts is an action movie. 2016 delivered plenty of action movies with impressive stunt work: Jason Bourne, Deadpool, Deepwater Horizon, Captain America: Civil War. But the most impressive stunts of the year were in Damien Chazelle’s Golden Age-style musical extravaganza La La Land. To bring the dance numbers to life, Chazelle assembled an army of the best dancers in Hollywood.
From the opening sequence of dancers tapping their way through congested L.A. traffic to the climactic sequence of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling floating through the stars, La La Land is full of awe-inspiring “How did they do that?” stunt work. La La Land didn’t go home empty-handed at the 89th Academy Awards: it won Best Director, Best Actress, and four other Oscars. But it should’ve won Best Stunts, too.
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2017 – Baby Driver
Reeves and co. came back with even more breathtaking stunts in John Wick: Chapter 2 in 2017, but those fistfights and firefights were topped by the jaw-dropping vehicular stunts in Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver. Wright’s tale of a hard-of-hearing getaway driver who burns rubber to the tune of his banging iPod playlists pioneered a whole new subgenre: the action jukebox musical. Not only are the car chases in Baby Driver synchronized perfectly with the soundtrack; they feature some truly mind-blowing stunts.
One of the most iconic Baby Driver stunts is from the opening chase as Baby slides his getaway car around a succession of obstacles without braking for a second. And that’s just one example of the impeccable stunt driving seen in Baby Driver. Plus, it’s not just car chases; the movie has great shootouts and foot chases, too.
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2018 – Mission: Impossible – Fallout
In its past few installments, the Mission: Impossible franchise has become an exercise in one-upmanship as Tom Cruise has pushed himself to do more and more daring stunts with each sequel. This started with the fourth film, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, which saw Cruise scaling the side of the tallest building in the world. It continued in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, which saw Cruise hanging off the side of a plane as it took off.
But it reached its peak in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which has Cruise pulling off one of these badass stunts in every other scene. He rode a motorcycle the wrong way around the Arc de Triomphe; he even included a shot of himself breaking a bone on a rooftop jump. There are so many awesome stunts in Fallout that some of the most exciting stunts from the trailer – like Cruise flying a helicopter into an oncoming truck – ended up being cut from the final film.
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2019 – John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum
The John Wick team raised the bar yet again with their high-octane threequel, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. The stunts in Parabellum are just as stunning as the first two movies, but with even more impressive feats and outside-the-box thinking. Wick rides a horse down a busy New York street while being chased by armed motorcyclists; he takes a pair of attack dogs into battle with a legion of goons.
To top it all off, at the end of John Wick: Chapter 3, Wick falls off the roof of the Continental Hotel. It would’ve been easy to just create this rooftop fall using CGI, but it wouldn’t have the visceral impact of a real stunt. Stuntman Jackson Spidell pulled off this sequence by doing two separate falls onto crash pads. Talk about an Oscar-worthy achievement.
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2020 – Extraction
Marvel stunt coordinator Sam Hargrave made his directorial debut with the Netflix action thriller Extraction. The plot of an Australian black-ops mercenary saving a drug lord’s kidnapped son in Bangladesh left little room for anything other than action. Tyler Rake and his young ward bond along the way, with a sort of Lone Wolf and Cub dynamic, but there’s danger lurking around every corner throughout their life-threatening adventure.
Hargrave established his signature directorial style with his heavy use of long takes. He keeps his camera locked on Rake’s shoulders and follows him into the heat of battle. Chris Hemsworth and the stunt team were up to the task of pulling off these long-take action scenes. Extraction rarely gives its audience a second to breathe, and its action is more than worthy of a Best Stunts Oscar.
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2021 – Nobody
After making the unlikely leap from comedic actor to dramatic actor, Bob Odenkirk made yet another unlikely leap from dramatic actor to action hero with his turn in 2021’s Nobody. John Wick screenwriter Derek Kolstad cooked up a rich mythology of a seemingly ordinary suburban husband and father who turns out to have a long history of government-sanctioned killing. Director Ilya Naishuller filled the movie with eye-popping action scenes, and Odenkirk committed wholeheartedly to the stunt work.
From the iconic bus brawl to the gun-toting home invasion to the climactic shootout, Nobody is full of incredible action scenes. Each sequence is marked by breathtaking stunt work pulled off by Odenkirk and a team of the industry’s finest stunt performers. It would’ve deserved an Academy Award for Best Stunts if the Academy recognized exceptional stunt work.
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2022 – RRR
S.S. Rajamouli brought the bombastic, anything-goes energy of Bollywood musicals to an explosive action epic in his 2022 masterpiece RRR. RRR is jam-packed with big set-pieces, tossing its heroes into a hostile crowd or setting a bunch of wild animals free to wreak havoc. Rajamouli choreographs the brutal fight scenes of RRR like he’s choreographing a lavish musical number, and the result is a wildly entertaining cinematic ride.
RRR won the HCA Award for Best Stunts, so it would’ve been primed to take home the Academy Award in the same category (if the Academy had that category). The movie is over three hours long, but it flies by because the action scenes are so gripping and the stunt work is so engaging. This movie is an unstoppable force of nature. It won an Oscar for the song “Naatu Naatu,” but it should’ve won one for stunts, too.
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2023 – John Wick: Chapter 4
The John Wick team raised the bar once more with John Wick: Chapter 4. After three John Wick movies that each upped the ante from their predecessor, John Wick: Chapter 4 managed to emerge as the biggest, baddest John Wick movie to date. From the opening horseback chase through the desert to the overhead Dragon’s Breath sequence, John Wick: Chapter 4’s stunts topped all the stunts that came before.
Once Wick gets to Paris for the final showdown, John Wick: Chapter 4 becomes a masterclass in cinematic stunt work. Wick does donuts around some goons in his car while shooting at them from the driver’s window. He fights an army of henchmen amidst the speeding traffic around the Arc de Triomphe. And to top it all off, he gets kicked halfway down the tallest staircase in Paris, then thrown down the other half. If any movie deserved an Oscar for stunts, it’s John Wick: Chapter 4.
Source: Empire
