Ah, set-pieces, the building blocks used by action filmmakers to craft their works of pure butt-kickery. Thanks to a combination of countless talented filmmakers, charismatic performers, invaluable crew members, andTom Cruise’s general desire to die for real for our entertainment, it’s been agreatdecade for action. Here, we’re celebrating the best, most bone-crunchiest set-pieces from 2010 to 2019,InceptiontoAvengers: Endgamewith stops for films likeJohn WickandMad Max: Fury Roadalong the way.
Two notes:1)We didn’t rank these set-pieces, because sometimes you just wanna watch the cars go boom without anyone yelling at you, ya know?2)We were pretty loose with the definition of whatcountsas an action set-piece. I believe my exact directive for my colleagues was “if it whips ass in some way, it counts.” May you carry this advice into all things, friends.
For evenmoreBest of the Decadegoodness, check out myranking of every comic book movie of the decade, plus Adam Chitwood’sranking of the 2010s' best scores.
Inception- The Spinning Hallway
If Fred Astaire had been in action movies instead of musicals, it would look a lot like the hallway fight fromInception.Christopher Nolanwas able to use his dream-within-a-dream conceit to really mess with reality, and his fantastic 2010 movie never does it better than when the hotel level of the dream loses gravity and poor Arthur is forced to not only improvise, but fight off projections while bouncing off the walls, ceiling, and floors. The camerawork required to get this scene right is absolutely bonkers, but Nolan and cinematographerWally Pfistersomehow managed to pull it off, and it remains just as thrilling now as it was when it debuted at the beginning of the decade. –Matt Goldberg
Not much could make you clench quite like the most tension-filled moments ofBreaking Badand right at the top of that squirm-inducing pile is Hank Schrader’s (Dean Norris) parking lot run-in with the Juárez Cartel’s twin assassins (LuisandDaniel Moncada). While other notable entries in the recent Golden Age of TV reveled in surprise deaths,Breaking Badloved to shock by putting a main character right in the crosshairs of certain doom and then, somehow, pulling them to safety. That’s exactly what happens here. There are like, 15 separate moments from the moment the twins arrive to the final life-saving trigger-pull that you think Hank is a goner. Any sound close to an ax being dragged across concrete still gives me the chills.– Vinnie Mancuso
Fast Five- The Vault Heist
TheFast and Furiousfranchise has always been a high-energy jolt of fun, but 2011’sFast Fivetook things to a new level and set the template for the rest of the franchise to come by introducing The Rock, going overseas, and absolutely ghosting on the laws of physics. Nothing sums that new spirit up better than the infamous vault heist. We’d seen the family heist all kinds of things over the years (long gone were the days of street racing and basic electronics theft,) but this time, they dead-ass strapped a giant vault to the back of two cars and went racing through the streets of Brazil. Dom (Vin Diesel) and Brian (Paul Rudd), natural, driving in tandem with an absurd pendulous weight dragging behind them, tearing up the city as it goes, making impossibly sharp turns – science be damned! Almost a decade later andJustin Lin’sFast Fiveremains a benchmark of the serious, joyous and action-packed with an all-timer central set-piece. –Haleigh Foutch
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol- The Burj Khalifa Climb
By now, theMission: Impossiblefranchise has settled into its place as a showcase for Tom Cruise to almost kill himself for real. But the scene that really kicked off the trend came in the fourth film, directorBrad Bird’sGhost Protocol, in which Cruise’s Ethan Hunt scaled the side of the tallest building in the world, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. In trademark Tom Cruise fashion, the actor strapped his own damn self in 1,700 feet up the tower’s 2,700-foot peak to nail the shots of a desperate Ethan using magnetic gloves to climb from floor to floor. The height itself is dizzying—that slow pan straight to the ground is still some of the most I’ve ever moved in a movie theater seat—but what makes the scene is the way Bird and cinematographerRobert Elswitstart the tension at an impossible height and just. keep. topping it. As each magnetic glove fails Ethan, the scene turns into a ticking clock 163 stories from the ground. Absolutely stomach-turning in the best possible way and arguably the best set-piece in the entire franchise.–Vinnie Mancuso
DirectorGareth Evans’The Raid: Redemptionis the type of ultra-fluid action movie that makes you realize the only difference between a fight scene and a dance number is the thuds and thumps. The choreography from Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian introduced a large part of the western audience to Pencak Silat, the full-body fighting style originating from Indonesia, and it’s only fair that the two violence artists saved the best brawl for themselves. Toward the end of The Raid, rookie special forces agent Rama (Uwais) discovers the grimy room in which the brutal gang heavy Mad Dog (Ruhian) has been torturing Rama’s estranged older brother, Andi (Donny Alamsyah). Mad Dog, a psycho with a sense of flair, lets Andi go for the sport of it, and what follows is a 2-on-1 melee that devolves into a violent whirlwind of fists and feet that Evans manages to contain in-camera. The choreography, timing, and physicality is, simply put,insane, and up there as one of the greatest no-frills, no-weapons, no-mercy fight scenes of all time.–Vinnie Mancuso
The Dark Knight Rises- Crashing This Plane, With No Survivors
If you spent your first IMAX viewing ofThe Dark Knight Risestrying to figure out just what the hellTom Hardywas even saying as Bane, you unfortunately didn’t notice that the opening toChristopher Nolan’s Batman three-quel is one hell of a technical marvel. We’re introduced to Hardy’s burly masked bad guy as he bamboozles CIA agent Bill Wilson (Aidan Gillen) into giving up nuclear physicist Dr. Leonid Pavel (Alon Aboutboul) aboard a moving plane. Bane’s cronies descend upon the aircraft from another plane, eventually crashing it [extremely garbled voice] with no survivors. Nolan hasbeen quoted as sayingthe scene is his proudest achievement “if you’re talking pure mechanics”, and that’s no surprise. The noted old-school filmmaker pretty much pulled off the mid-air plane heist for real while filming it with IMAX cameras, hanging stunt performers from wires hundreds of feet off the ground and actually dropping the main hull of a C-130 military transport to the ground.–Vinnie Mancuso
The Avengers- Battle of New York
The Avengerswas a make-or-break point for the MCU, not just in terms of combining characters from disparate movies, but also in delivering thatextraspectacle fans expected from putting all those good-looking superheroes in the same movie. The Battle of New York is an epic, surprising, even messy climax for this iconic superhero film, but what really makes this action set piece soar are the character moments. Writer/directorJoss Whedonensures that each hero gets a significant beat in the final battle (from “I’m always angry” to Cap directing New York’s finest), and the whole thing is peppered with Whedon’s terrific sense of humor. It’sfun, which stood in stark contrast to some doom-and-gloom final battles of the time, and it’s capped off with two marvelous pieces of iconography: the “one-shot” that zips from hero to hero doing battle, and the “Avengers Assembled” shot of all our heroes standing in a circle, looking at the faceless horde above, and resolving to bring this invasion to an end.
While this set piece would be eclipsed in terms of scale and herculean feats in future Marvel films, the first-ever assemblage of the Avengers still holds up today as a wildly entertaining feat of movie magic. –Adam Chitwood
Fast & Furious 6- Tank Chase
Really, theFast & Furiousfranchise can be divided into two parts: Before and after directorJustin Lingot himself a whole-ass tank and plowed his way through reality into a heightened world of all-out, high-octane cartoon fuckery. Lin directs the absolute hell out of this insane finale sequence, in which villainous mercenary Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) attempts to rob a military convoy of a highly-dangerous computer chip, with Dom (Vin Diesel) and the rest of the fambly aiming to stop him. Not one to be out-gunned by muscle cars, Shaw commandeers a tank, smashing it into cars, barricades, and walls alike as cement flies and bodies hang in and out of every vehicle on the highway. It is awildten minutes, and it ends with one of the least likely leaping saves ever put to film. I love it in all its absurd, flaming glory.–Vinnie Mancuso
Ninja II: Shadow of a Tear- Bar Fight
Scott Adkinsis a DTV action great of our generation earning a place alongside JCVD as a king of landing split-kicks, but after the uninspired standard fare that was 2009’sNinja, it was one heck of a shock when the 2013 followupNinja II: Shadow of a Tearsurprise round-housed you in the face with its awesomeness. Now, of course, this is not a deep character study film, but it is an absolute force of killer fight scenes. There are so many you could pick, but my favorite is definitely big bar showdown that pits Adkins against a room full of rowdy bar patrons and feels like it was lifted straight out of the machismo action classics of the 90s. Adkins is an incredible athletic performer, sometimes almost balletic with his movements, and he spins-kicks and flips his way through the bar without breaking a sweat, flipping around in the air like he maid a bargain with gravity. It’s an absolute hoot. –Haleigh Foutch
Snowpiercer- Tunnel Fight
Nobody does class warfare quite likeBong Joon Ho. TheParasitefilmmaker is riding high on his Hitchockian class thriller, but he brought a much more blunt and literal approach to the subject matter with his 2013 apocalyptic genre-hybridSnowpiercer.Set on a train that never stops running through an apocalyptic frozen wasteland, the film follows a revolution by the starving citizens living in the squalor of the last train cars while the people upfront live in indulgence. Their fight for freedom takes them from train car to train car, with a hideous surprise waiting in each new chamber. But they get their worst greeting when they open the door to find a small army of masked men armed with axes, waiting to take on the underfed masses carrying only pipes and a passion for survival.
Director Bong constantly evolves the stakes of the battle, pitting his heroes up against an already outmatched battle before even more at them. First, there are the frozen-over tracks that threaten to derail them with each impact, but then the nastiest bit. With a long tunnel ahead, the armed men are equipped with night-vision goggles, leaving the opposition blind in helpless. Bong switches to green-tinged first-person goggle shots for the pitch-black massacre, until someone calls for fire and a rousing relay race ensues to bring the fighters the light they need to win the day – or at least not get totally annihilated. Bong makes a meal for the senses through the whole thing, playing with light, sound (those stabbing noises!), and speed to make sure you feel every brutal blow. In a testament to an impeccably-crafted scene,Snowpiercer’s big set-piece isn’t just entertaining, it’s all story – you could literally clip the sequence out and present it as a thesis for the film. –Haleigh Foutch
