10 Incredible Action Scenes In Terrible Movies
When great action happens to bad movies.
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00:00 Now, even most awful movies aren't entirely worthless. I mean, there's usually something
00:04 that can be praised, be it a decent performance, cool sliver of dialogue, or an idea that might
00:09 have worked better with a different approach. And then there are those terrible films that
00:13 manage to deliver a single thrilling action sequence amid a sea of otherwise atrocious
00:18 filmmaking choices. And that's what we're here to talk about today. I'm Jules, this
00:22 is WhatCulture.com, and these are 10 Incredible Action Scenes in Terrible Movies.
00:26 10. The Forest Fight - Transformers Revenge of the Fallen
00:30 The second Transformers film might well be the most unbearable of the lot, a cluster
00:35 migraine masquerading as a movie that is jam-packed with humour both embarrassing and offensive,
00:40 plus way too much talking and not nearly enough compelling action. The single saving grace
00:45 though comes at almost exactly the one hour mark, where Optimus Prime battles the combined
00:50 might of Autobots Megatron, Starscream, and Grinder. The thrillingly kinetic fight kicks
00:55 off in a gorgeous remote forest, and as presented in a full-frame IMAX aspect ratio, delivers
01:00 action with scale and clarity far in excess of anything else in the movie. The visual
01:04 effects hold up incredibly well to this very day, offering up a real sense of weight to
01:08 the duelling bots and palpable fear that Optimus will not come out on top this time. And eventually,
01:13 he doesn't. It's a sequence that proves what brilliance Michael Bay is capable of
01:17 when the conditions are right, even if it's miserably plonked into the middle of an otherwise
01:21 mind-numbingly awful movie.
01:24 9. Bond vs. North Korea – Die Another Day
01:28 Die Another Day sadly brought Pierce Brosnan's hit-and-miss tenure as 007 to an unceremoniously
01:33 woeful end, overindulging in silly action, corny one-liners, and an inane plot to the
01:38 point that it basically became a parody of itself. It's especially disappointing, as
01:42 the film's pre-title sequence promises a considerably better and more seriously-minded
01:46 movie, with James Bond facing off against a rogue North Korean army colonel and his
01:51 seemingly never-ending fleet of goons. The sequence shows Bond outnumbered in a way that
01:55 we've rarely seen before, forced to combine tech gadgetry with his scrappy cunning to
01:59 blow up the base, hijack a hovercraft, and start chasing the colonel. It's a scene
02:03 packed with ludicrously, explosively entertaining action beats, most of which is achieved practically
02:09 in stark contrast to the rest of the movie, before climaxing with a rather unexpected
02:13 result, and that is Bond being captured.
02:14 And when you start your movie with Bond outmanoeuvring a giant flamethrower and using an Uzi to
02:19 detonate mines, whilst piloting a hovercraft no less, you better have something insane
02:24 ready to follow up with. Sadly, Die Another Day didn't, and once Madonna's title track
02:28 starts up, it goes pretty much downhill.
02:30 8. Taking Out the Trash – Death Wish 3
02:33 By any standard metric of evaluating a film, Death Wish 3 is totally awful. A textbook
02:39 example of a franchise entering its shambling, zombified stage, as it continues to exist
02:44 only because the box office grosses haven't dried up yet. On a moral level, the reactionary,
02:49 up-winged politics are so disgustingly on-the-nose as to be unintentionally comical, enough that
02:53 the film has become something of an accidental, campy cult classic in recent years. But ironic
02:58 enjoyment aside, there is one sequence in the movie that is utterly unimpeachable as
03:03 action filmmaking goes, and that's the gonzo climax in which Charles Bronson's Paul rallies
03:07 the citizens of an overrun New York City to violently fight back against the creeps that
03:12 are haranguing them.
03:13 What follows is a glorious 15-minute orgy of cartoonish violence, beginning with Paul
03:17 unleashing an oversized minigun on the street punks, and only getting more absurd from there.
03:22 After finally running out of ammo, Paul reverts back to his trusty hand cannon to keep mowing
03:26 the bad guys down, intercut with the area increasingly coming to resemble an actual
03:31 war zone as the punks blow up basically every building and vehicle in sight. It is an absolute
03:36 bloodbath, with cops, criminals, and civilians all suffering massive casualties. Until the
03:41 sequence concludes with its pièce de résistance, and that is Paul blowing up the gang's leader,
03:45 Manny, with a bloody bazooka.
03:47 7. The Cliffside Ninja Fight - G.I. Joe Retaliation
03:51 Though G.I. Joe Retaliation was a tad more tolerable than its pure-jank predecessor,
03:56 primarily due to the presences of both Dwayne Johnson and Bruce Willis, it was still ultimately
04:00 a bland nothing-burger of a sequel that made no impact whatsoever. Yet there is a single
04:05 scene that people still fondly remember a whole decade later, and that is the wonderfully
04:09 thrilling Cliffside Ninja Fight, in which Snake Eyes and Jinx join forces to battle
04:14 an unrelenting fleet of ninjas whilst carrying an injured Storm Shadow up a cliff. In terms
04:18 of action design, it is both imaginative and technically impressive, focusing on the perilous,
04:23 breathless thrill of heroes sprinting across a cliff face with swords while cutting their
04:27 way through a ninja horde. It's a scene that feels more in tune with a kid playing
04:31 with their G.I. Joe action figures than anything else in the series' three movies, and it's
04:35 really the only truly worthwhile sequence in the entire bloody trilogy.
04:39 6. The Single-Take Shootout - London Has Fallen
04:43 While Olympus Has Fallen, the first entry into Gerard Butler's dad-thriller series,
04:47 was a solid slice of B-movie fun, sequel London Has Fallen touted a much meaner and more misanthropic
04:53 streak, as ultimately descended into outright xenophobia. But amid its 'Ugly America is
04:58 the best' vibe, there is one set piece that cannot be discounted, and that is the superbly
05:03 slick single-take shootout in which Secret Service agent Mike Banning battles his way
05:07 through the streets to save kidnapped US President Benjamin Asher.
05:11 Alongside a Delta/SAS extraction team, Banning gingerly pushes forward through the streets,
05:16 mowing down dozens of anonymous goons in a single seamless take. Even though the digital
05:21 joins between the takes are incredibly obvious, it's clear that a ton of effort went into
05:25 staging the sequence to be as immersive as possible, and it positively shames the resoundingly
05:30 pedestrian action thriller that the rest of the film becomes. For around five pulse-racing
05:35 minutes, it almost convinced us that London Has Fallen might be... a good movie.
05:40 5. The Fake Out Finale - The Twilight Saga Breaking Dawn Part 2
05:45 Twilight's final entry, Breaking Dawn Part 2, is an appropriately awful conclusion to
05:49 a series that never quite found a fun balance of frothy teen melodrama and campy thrills.
05:55 The second part of this two-part conclusion is, for the most part, a leaden bore, packed
05:59 with unintentionally cackle-worthy dialogue and drama, but that is saved for a climactic
06:04 showdown that is far better than the movie really deserves. Because the Breaking Dawn
06:08 novel ends on something of an uncinematic shoulder shrug, the filmmakers smartly came
06:12 up with something new that ultimately wouldn't actually piss off the diehard fans, and so
06:16 Part 2 wraps up with a wonderfully bonkers battle as the vampires and wolves team up
06:21 to fight the villains. For a PG-13 movie aimed at tweens, it's a shockingly violent war,
06:26 with cherished characters being dismembered and even decapitated before our very eyes,
06:30 though the vampires' ice-like composition makes the brutality a little more palatable
06:34 for families.
06:35 Fans were surely irate that characters who survived in the book were dying left and right,
06:39 until the fight suddenly ends and we realise that it was actually just a vision being shown
06:42 to the leader of the villains by Alice, which convinces him to walk away and that's that.
06:48 Make no mistake, Breaking Dawn Part 2 utterly stinks, but the filmmakers did the absolute
06:52 best they could with a tricky situation, delivering a smart, surprisingly visceral compromise
06:58 to the source material's non-ending.
06:59 4. The First Person Shooting – Doom
07:03 2005's Doom might be the better of the two live-action Doom movies produced to date,
07:08 the other being 2018's wretched director video Doom Annihilation, but it is still a
07:12 load of old bobbins for the most part. For starters, the 'hell' setting from the
07:15 video games was ditched for no discernible reason, and the bulk of the movie smacks of
07:19 a generic sci-fi action romp with recognisable branding cynically just slapped over it. But
07:24 there is a single sequence that captures the honest-to-god vibe of the video games, and
07:28 that's when protagonist John 'Reaper' Grimm is injected with a life-saving experimental
07:32 serum, bestowing him with superhuman abilities as he takes on the monster's gallery filling
07:37 the UAC research facility.
07:39 And the scene's big hook is that it's executed from a first-person perspective as
07:42 a single take in order to resemble the aesthetic of the games. It's goofy, for sure, but
07:47 it boasts a creativity and technical ingenuity that suggests a real love for the source material,
07:52 something that the script otherwise totally lacks.
07:54 Seeing Reaper blast his way through infected humans and mutated monsters alike, including
07:58 the monstrous Pinky, is a ton of fun, even if it's a sadly fleeting diversion in an
08:03 otherwise piss-poor adaptation.
08:05 3. Doom's Rampage - Fantastic Four, 2015
08:10 From one Doom to another now, with Josh Trank's ill-fated 2015 Fantastic Four reboot. Now,
08:15 depending on who you believe, the film was either hacked to pieces by a twitchy fox,
08:20 or Trank simply couldn't hack it as a big-budget filmmaker, but either way, the end result is
08:24 a chaotic, tonally jarring mess that unfortunately totally fell flat.
08:27 But there is one scene which hints at the film's darker potential, given that Trank
08:31 has spoken extensively about his movie being inspired by the body horror films of David
08:35 Cronenberg.
08:36 And that comes near the end, where Doom is awakened and embarks on a brutal rampage through
08:40 the research facility where he's being held. Cue Doom using his abilities to telepathically
08:44 explode the heads of anybody who tries to prevent his escape.
08:48 If you can get over Doom's undeniably silly design, it's a genuinely unnerving sequence
08:53 which ranks among the more disturbing set pieces of any superhero film from the last
08:57 decade. It may only last all of a hot minute, but what a minute.
09:00 2. The Chicago Chase - Jupiter Ascending
09:04 Jupiter Ascending is one of the biggest mega-budget disappointments of the last decade, an ambitious
09:09 dud from the Wachowskis that, despite its technical ingenuity, abjectly failed on a
09:13 narrative and character level. And let's not even get started on Eddie Redmayne's
09:17 Razzie-winning performance here.
09:18 But there's one set piece so masterfully executed as to be worthy of the Matrix, and
09:23 that's the eight-minute chase sequence in which Jupiter and Kane flee from an alien
09:26 fleet in downtown Chicago.
09:28 As the aliens attack, Kane scoops up a falling Jupiter with his rather nifty anti-gravity
09:32 boots, soaring across the Chicago skyline whilst the alien weaponry decimates nearby
09:37 skyscrapers.
09:38 There's an incredible visual clarity to the sequence, despite its frantic intensity,
09:42 enough so that we can fairly assume a good portion of the film's stonking $200 million
09:46 budget was spent on it.
09:48 As a dazzling VFX showcase and a reminder of what the Wachowskis are capable of, it's
09:52 a wonderful sequence. Yet coming so early in the first act as it does, it leaves the
09:56 rest of the movie scrambling - and failing - to live up to it.
09:59 1. The Attack on Pearl Harbor
10:02 Pearl Harbor
10:03 Michael Bay strikes again, this time around with his flaccid attempt to out-Titanic Titanic
10:08 in his 2001 war epic 'Pearl Harbor'. Clocking in at an excruciatingly overcooked 183 minutes,
10:15 the late, great Roger Ebert might have put it best when he said of the movie, "Pearl
10:19 Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours," about how on December 7, 1941, the
10:25 Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes
10:29 of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality.
10:33 And you know what? He's mostly right. The overwhelming bulk of Bay's film focuses
10:37 on a toe-curlingly feckless love triangle between three characters you're barely encouraged
10:41 to care about, and is set against the backdrop of a major piece of real-world history. Viewers
10:46 have to sit through 90 minutes of exhausting melodrama before the attack on Pearl Harbor
10:50 finally happens, but when it does, it at least has the courtesy to be a damn doozy.
10:55 Even Bay's toughest detractors will struggle to write this technically stunning sequence
10:59 off in its entirety, a staggering 30-minute pyrotechnics display combining incredible
11:04 practical stunt work and gorgeous VFX carnage. It's the only part of the movie that feels
11:09 even remotely worthy of holding James Cameron's jockstrap, as soon enough we're back to
11:13 business as tedious as usual for the remaining hour.
11:16 The attack on Pearl Harbor was so thoroughly ripe for a splashy Hollywood treatment that
11:20 Bay suffocated the centerpiece amid a wealth of gooey, unconvincing romance.
11:24 And there we go, my friends. Those were 10 incredible action scenes in terrible movies.
11:29 I hope that you enjoyed that, and let me know what you thought about it down in the comments
11:32 section below. As always, I've been Jules, you can go follow me over on Instagram, where
11:36 it's @RetroJay, with the O as in zero, and you can come check out all the Warhammer
11:39 miniatures that I've been painting, yes, I am a nerd. But before I go, I just want
11:43 to say one thing. Hope you're treating yourself well, my friend, with love and respect, because
11:47 you deserve all the best things in life, alright? As always, I've been Jules, you have been
11:51 awesome, never forget that, and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.