13 Movie Stunts That Deserved Oscars

It’s always good to hear welcome news, even when it arrives 97 years late. So it was Thursday when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors announced that beginning in 2027 they will annually award an Oscar for Achievement in Stunt Design. Or: there will finally be an Oscar for Best Stunts beginning at the 100th annual Academy Awards.

This is genuinely happy tidings considering stunts and derring-do have been the hallmarks of why folks have gone to the cinema since the glory days of the silent era when Harold Lloyd hung precariously from a clocktower in Safety Last! (1923) or Douglas Fairbanks shimmied up literal draw bridge chains in Hollywood’s first Robin Hood movie circa 1922. Nonetheless, the Academy has strangely ignored the daredevils that make their biggest tentpoles to this day box office draws. It’s wonderful to see that changing, but we would like to honor a baker’s dozen or so achievements that have stood the test of time and deserved Oscars in their day.

Charlie Chaplin Ends Up a Cog in the Machine of Modern Times (1936)

When Charlie Chaplin decided to retire his Little Tramp persona with one glorious swan song in Modern Times, his kind of physical comedy and breathtaking stunt work were already things of the past. In the 1930s, sound brought talkies and an emphasis on comedy of the screwball and musical variety. Yet for all intents and purposes, Modern Times is a silent movie, and one of Chaplin’s best as he got to do everything that made him a star 20 years earlier—now with an overt political bent.

Take one of the most visually impressive gags ever conceived as a critique of capitalism and industrialization. Midway through Modern Times, Chaplin’s Little Tramp ends up swallowed by the literal machine of a factory that grinds him through its gears where he is expected to perform menial repairs. It is far from the most death-defying trick on this list, but it is an example of physical stunt work reaching a comedic and artistic grace that makes cinema richer. The stunt created an indelible image that nearly a 100 years later packs allegorical punch.

Yakima Canutt Jumps Between Horses in Stagecoach (1939)

So much of our idealized image of the Old West, both as a historical setting and as a movie genre, is derived from the iconography of John Ford. Mythic compositions of men on horses, and perhaps thornier depictions of Native Americans in pursuit, define many of Ford’s best films. And 1939’s Stagecoach is high among them. This was the first film in which Ford worked with his onscreen muse John Wayne in Monument Valley, and it set the tropes that many Westerns still follow. What is Firefly if not Joss Whedon’s Stagecoach in space?

Stagecoach also has perhaps the definitive “cowboys and Indians” chase sequence where Apache raiders descend on the titular stagecoach as it makes a frantic dash across Indigenous territory. The chase features two iconic stunts executed by the movie’s stunt coordinator Yakima Canutt. The first of which sees Canutt play an Apache warrior who jumps from his horse to the stagecoach’s team of steeds—only to fall beneath the animals and the wheels of the coach. It’s such a spectacular image that Steven Spielberg remade it 40 years later in Raiders of the Lost Ark, minus the horses. Yet the even more impressive stunt is when Canutt, now made up to resemble Wayne, leaps between each pair of horses pulling the stagecoach in order to take the reins of the out-of-control leader and guide man and beast to safety. It’s still breathtaking almost a century later.

Chariot Race in Ben-Hur (1959)

Ben-Hur became the first film to ever win 11 Academy Awards. To this day, no film has bested that number (though several have tied it). Well, it would have been 12 if there was an Oscar for stunt work. Even 65 years later, there are few sequences as astonishing as the Roman chariot race that proves to be the centerpiece of this monumental Biblical epic.Running at 11 minutes in length, the race was not actually directed by Ben-Hur helmer William Wyler, but rather second unit directors Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt (yes, him again). Filmed with luscious 65mm cameras and 72 horses beneath a vibrant Italian sun, the sequence is gorgeous eye candy to just stare at. But the stunt work is itself so marvelous that to this day urban legends persist that either a stuntman or horse died while making it.

There is no historical evidence of either occurring, however there was a close call that you can watch in the film: the shot of Judah Ben-Hur getting flipped over his own chariot after it strikes a barrier along a wall of the arena? That wasn’t scripted, and the stuntman who performed it nearly died: Joe Canutt, Yakima’s son. He didn’t though, and it changed the scripting of the scene with the filmmakers adding a beat of Charlton Heston being forced to pull himself back in.

Rick Sylvester Skis Off a Glacier in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Really if there had been Oscars for stunts in the last 100 years, the James Bond franchise would have probably collected close to a dozen by now. There are so many to choose from: Bill Suitor operating a real-life jetpack in Thunderball (1965); Wayne Michaels performing the highest bungee jump ever captured on film in Goldeneye (1995); everything Sebastien Foucan did in the Madagascar parkour sequence of Casino Royale (2006).

Yet if we are only going to pick one for this list, it has to be when Rick Sylvester skied right off a glacier atop a Canadian mountain for a sum of $30,000. It’s still the defining 007 stunt which opens one of the series’ best movies where Bond, in a ridiculous yellow “undercover” ski uniform, escapes Soviet assassins by launching himself into an abyss where he does nothing but fall for a breathless 20 seconds. He then pulls the chord on an absurd and terrific Union Jack parachute. Way to keep a low-profile, James. It’s all captured in one unbelievable long shot that cuts just before one of Sylvester’s skis nearly punctures his parachute, which would have sent him plummeting.

Outrunning a Boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

This was one of the trickier ones to include. There are so many great stunts in the Indiana Jones pictures, so how do you pick just one? For pure adrenaline spectacle, we suspect Vic Armstrong in a fedora and torn shirt dangling from a rope bridge in Temple of Doom (1984) might be the winner. And Spielberg’s homage to Stagecoach where Armstrong again is dragged beneath and behind the wheels of a jeep in Raiders is probably the most complex set piece performed in the first Indy flick.

Still, great stunts aren’t only about real-life danger. It can also be about aesthetics, originality, and indelible iconography. Hence why the first thing that pops in your mind when you read the words “Indiana Jones” is still probably the sight of the ragged archaeologist outrunning a boulder by the skin of his teeth—a trick done without a stuntman. That is clearly Harrison Ford outrunning the boulder! Of course it’s not really a boulder, but a still gruesome 300-pound prop made of fiberglass. It is also on a track, hence why Ford was able to do the stunt. Nonetheless, it remains one of the all time great movie moments that gets the hair to stand on end as a visible movie star appears to be within inches of becoming a pancake as he stumbles his way into an enormous spider’s web. 

Jackie Chan’s Explore Slide in Police Story (1985)

A performer who should have a whole collection of stunt Oscars, Jackie Chan made a career out of pushing his body to the limits one insane stunt (and many more broken bones) at a time. We could pick a trick he did, or sequence he choreographed, in almost any of his Hong Kong films. But his character’s bizarre choice to chase bad guys at a shopping mall in the first Police Story remains a personal favorite.

In the sequence, his prey is escaping down at the lower levels of massive mall, so instead of following in close pursuit down a crowded escalator, Jackie decides the most efficient way to catch them is to lunge at a not-so-near pole and slide about four stories down—for real and with no wires—while shattering every string of Christmas lights in his path before crashing through a real partition of glass and wood at the bottom. Reminiscing years later about the stunt, Chan said, “I made my jump, grabbed the pole, and watched the twinkling lights crack and pop all the way down, in an explosion of shattering glass and electrical sparks. Then I hit the glass. And then I hit the floor. Somehow I managed to survive with a collection of ugly bruises… and second-degree burns on the skin of my fingers and palms.”

Michelle Yeoh Catches a Train in Police Story 3 (1992)

I was conflicted about including this one since we are trying to keep this list to one entry per franchise, however given that this was Michelle Yeoh’s own jaw-dropping moment in Police Story 3, it seems safe to include the moment where she literally jumped a dirt bike onto a moving train.

The moment comes at the end of the movie when Yeoh’s young Interpol agent is attempting to catch up and help Jackie save the day. Not only did Yeoh successfully land the bike onto the train but she rode it the near length of the train cars’ rooftops before jumping off after her character loses control. However, even that last bit is somewhat for real since Yeoh, who had never before ridden a dirt bike before making this movie, was unable to cleanly escape the vehicle. So that’s really her kicking it away and off the train while its wheels are still spinning!

Tree Fight in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Another case of the stunt work achieving a gracefulness and artistry that supersedes just pure adrenaline, this duel among the trees between Chow Yun-fat and Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon remains one of the most surreal and achingly beautiful “fight scenes” in cinema.

Admittedly, calling it a fight scene is almost a misnomer. This is really a chance for two protagonists in direct conflict to properly introduce themselves to each other. As such, there is a serene peacefulness to the ostensible violence occurring between two martial arts masters gliding between treetops. The sequence came to director Ang Lee in a dream and was realized by stunt choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, whose stunt team is probably best known in the West for popularizing wire-fu in movies like The Matrix. Yet the wirework in Crouching Tiger is better, and it really is Zhang and Chow up in that wilderness, dancing in the green.

Rotating Hallway Fight in Inception (2010)

A case can be made that the sequence where Joseph Gordon-Levitt and several members of stunt coordinator Tom Struthers’ team fought in a rotating hotel was just doing a more elaborate version of that time Fred Astaire wowed ‘em by dancing on the walls and ceilings of his own hotel room in Royal Wedding (1951). Which is true, but it’s no less impressive given how dizzyingly complex director Christopher Nolan made his action version of the showstopper.

Choreographed on a rotating set in an air hangar outside London, this sequence was the culmination of months of training by Gordon-Levitt and Nolan’s teams to create the sense that gravity was a fluid, sputtering resource in a dream world where the only limits was your knowledge of kung fu. It’s hypnotic.

Tom Cruise Scales World’s Tallest Building in Mission: Impossible 4 (2011)

Once again, we come to a stunt legend where it is difficult to choose which sequence to include. Tom Cruise has had a late career renaissance as a modern day Douglas Fairbanks. His appearance in a movie over the last 15 or so years is a near-guarantee you’ll see some death-defying hijinks. So should it be the time he hung from a real plane as it took off in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation? Or how about when he performed hundreds of HALO jumps from 25,000 feet in 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout? The last movie in the series was pretty much marketed around him trying to one-up Rick Sylvester’s TSWLM stunt by riding a motorcycle off a mountain with a parachute as his only salvation.

We ultimately decided to go with the stunt which really signaled this transition in Cruise’s career. It was in December 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol that Cruise revitalized his career by playing a real-life Spider-Man along the sun-kissed glass of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. It’s more or less the same trick Harold Lloyd did 90 years earlier, only higher and in Cruise’s case, he has safety harnesses holding him in place. Yet they don’t even digitally remove that element. They astutely make it part of the story, with the idea being both the harness and his character’s glue gloves only have a fixed amount of time to keep him safe. Afterward he’s street pizza. It’s a marriage of movie star charisma, superb visual storytelling, and old-fashioned derring-do captured in massive IMAX cinematography.

Bane Hijacks a Plane in Midair in The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Another Christopher Nolan sequence, this one is also the favorite of the director’s stunt sequences in his Batman trilogy. A bit of a riff on a similar scene in the James Bond movie Licence to Kill, Nolan improves on his influence by recording in eye-popping IMAX photography how a team of aerial stuntmen, coordinated by Tom Struthers again, literally jump from one massive plane to smaller charter flight, and commandeer it with little more than wires, explosives, and guts. The wings coming off is a digital effect. Almost everything else is not.

Pole Cat Craziness in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

We were tempted to just include all of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road as a single entry. This mad fantasia of gas-guzzling grandeur is one set piece marvel after another, strung together in a feature-length chase sequence that ascends to a level of cinematic Valhalla where all is shiny and chrome. But if we must narrow it to one scene that the Academy can point to and go, “Witnessed!” it would probably be the pole cat spectacle.

With Miller’s gang of Australian lunatics… er, stuntmen trained by the acrobats of Cirque du Soleil, these blokes really swayed in the breeze (purely because it looked cooler) on poles above cars going anywhere between 30 and 60 MPH in the Namibian desert. They then swung on said poles over movie stars, including Zoë Kravitz who is really whisked by a pole-catter from one speeding vehicle to another, with nothing but hard desert earth beneath their feet. God Bless George Miller. No, really, that must’ve been the case because the fact no one died makes this something of a miracle.

The Last 40 Minutes of John Wick 4 (2023), All of It

Much like the James Bond and Mission: Impossible franchises, the John Wick flicks are an embarrassment of riches for stunt work and spectacle. Begun by former stuntmen-turned-directors Chad Staheleski and David Leitch, and with every film in the mainline series so far still directed by Staheleski, the John Wick movies are a chance for those who know the intricacies of stunts to translate that into pure cinema.

Which might make it a bit of a shame the series is not ending after what was clearly intended to be the grand finale in John Wick: Chapter 4. Everything about this entry acted like it was embracing the kitchen sink mentality, including an epic climax of stunt work that begins with one of the most impressive oner action sequences ever conceived—this one taking an overhead, godseye view to the carnage as Keanu Reeves shoots his way through enemy territory—and culminates in an even more impressive, seeming series of oners where Reeves and Donnie Yen fight their way repeatedly up a long, outdoor Parisian staircase in Montmartre filled with assassins who want old Johnny boy dead. It’s a visual crucible of Mr. Wick’s trials and travails distilled into a masterpiece of carnage.

The post 13 Movie Stunts That Deserved Oscars appeared first on Den of Geek.