Ahh, stunts. The most dangerous game. Aside from man himself, of course, but even that requires some good old-fashioned stunt work. When it comes to risking life and limb for our entertainment, some of Hollywood’s finest certainly tried to outdo themselves this year.
In what could’ve easily been a two-horse race between everybody’s favorite vengeful assassin and the world’s most famous top-secret spy, when it came to the IGN staff’s voting was there room for an underdog? The answer is yes, kinda. But also not really.
This year's best stunt race was one of escalation. Not just jumping from higher heights or killing goons at a geometric rate, but each of our entries seems to have figured out a way to just be… more.
Sequels of course are all we get, so in a way it makes sense that the most memorable stunts of the year were franchises one-upping their previous entries, beginning with our scrappy little kinda-underdog.
Runner-Up: Extraction 2: Helicopter Landing on a Train
Netflix’s Extraction shares more than a little DNA with John Wick. There’s a focus on fight choreography. It’s helmed by a stunt man in Sam Hargrave, who worked his way up through the ranks to get his shot at a director's chair. It’s led by a star in Chris Hemsworth who enjoys getting his hands dirty and, thanks to Extraction 2, it’s a franchise ramping up the insanity!
One of the highlights of the first Extraction was a lengthy “oner.” Or a faux oner at least; several shots stitched together to make one continuous bit of action. To pull it off, Hargrave strapped himself to the hood of a car to operate the camera for part of it. Naturally, the next logical place to go was to operate the camera mere feet from a helicopter landing on top of a moving train.
Extraction 2’s oner so determinedly outdoes its predecessor’s counterpart, the sun comes up part of the way through. It’s on screen longer, the stakes are bigger, the enemies more numerous and with bigger guns. Also, there was more fire, but that was nine minutes into the oner and seven minutes before Hargrave moves the camera (and I’m speaking literally here, because he had it on his shoulder for the shot) beneath the helicopter as it drops a skid onto the roof of a moving train and deposits five mercenaries to continue the pursuit of Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake.
It is inarguably a cool shot. One that took very real skill, care and ingenuity to pull off, but unfortunately one that only 4.1% of our voters thought should win. The only thing the stunt has working against it is the rest of the oner. It’s a relatively quiet moment in a 21-minute non-stop action sequence that makes up 19% of the film's run time, in which Hemsworth would eventually blow up that helicopter. It’s easy to overlook in that respect, but an incredible feat of filmmaking in literally every other. Maybe in Extraction 3 they’ll figure out how to land a train on a helicopter.
Runner-Up: John Wick: Chapter 4: Caine’s Osaka Hotel Fight
Meanwhile, in another franchise born outside of the studio system, John Wick continued to headshot his way through the fantasy realm of hitmen into Chapter 4. This is a franchise that has arguably perfected the art of escalation. What started as a $20 million gun-fu exhibition of efficiency in filmmaking ballooned into a nearly three-hour runtime and a cast of characters to match. So it’s not surprising that 16.3% of our votes went to one of the new guys.
Donnie Yen’s Caine, like Mark Dacascos’ Zero in Chapter 3, serves the purpose of expanding the world of the franchise by way of new and eccentric characters. And thanks to God-tier escalation, an eccentric sushi chef in Chapter 3 is escalated to a blind assassin in Chapter 4 and almost steals the show.
Our voters were given the option of “Caine’s Osaka Hotel Fight,” which is fittingly nondescript. It seemed like Caine had several Osaka Hotel Fights: one in the kitchen against some cannon fodder, one in the weapons room with John himself and another great one with Hiroyuki Sanada’s Koji. That they all run together into a singularly votable sequence is as much a testament to Donnie Yen’s charismatic brand of ass-kicking as it is to director Chad Stahelski doubling down on the right things.
Where narratively the franchise has always dug deeper into the High Table’s lore. Where the action is concerned, Stahelski digs with equal giddiness into his bag of tricks. The Osaka Continental sequence showcases Caine's ingenuity with his doorbell chimes in the kitchen, his scrambling improv skills against John and his sense of honor against Koji. By the time we leave Japan, we know everything there is to know about Caine and what he can do and the only thing left to do is escalate it.
Runner-Up: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One: Motorcycle Jump
It is literally impossible to talk about stunts in 2023 and escalation in action franchises without talking about Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. I tried and I even had to use the word impossible twice in the same sentence and I hated every second of it, but here we are.
Tom Cruise’s lifelong dream of driving a motorcycle off a cliff was all the trailer Dead Reckoning Part One needed and, for better and worse, really defined the movie as a whole. We were so familiar with the image, the sheer audacity of the stunt, even how they pulled it off thanks to an extensive behind-the-scenes featurette, that much of the two hours leading up to the jump were spent just kind of wondering when the jump was coming. I would also argue because we’d seen the practice jumps and behind-the-scenes footage so much, the digital elements of the finished product were that much more obvious.
All that said, it was an incredible stunt. It combined driving skill, skydiving, and building a remote ramp on a Norwegian cliffside and was ultimately far more front and center than Extraction 2’s helicopter or a sequence of Donnie Yen’s blades in the front half of a three-hour bloodbath. On pure chutzpah alone, there’s nothing to top it. But it still came in second place.
With a healthy 32.7% of the votes, it was on top of a lot of people's lists, but it seems to have been docked a few points for a reason. To venture a guess as to why, I’d say that Ethan Hunt jumping off a cliff at that moment didn’t really matter. The sequence leading up to it, with Benji helping Ethan get back on the train, is a reverse-engineered half-joke whose sole purpose is to put Tom Cruise in a spot where he needs to jump off a cliff. There’s nothing organic about why he’s there, not like the reasons he climbed the Burj Khalifa in Ghost Protocol or clung to the outside of a plane in Rogue Nation.
This was a stunt for stunt’s sake which, while I won’t begrudge the man for doing it, did cost him the top spot in our Best Stunts category.
But speaking of lengthy run times where you’re just kind of waiting on a reveal of a thing you know is coming, let’s get to that top spot.
Winner: John Wick: Chapter 4: Overhead Shootout
Well hello again, Mr. Wick. Like struggling up a famous staircase only to fall down and have to struggle up again, I’m going to bang this escalation drum until we’re all tired of it. But at 46.9% of the votes, I really believe we got this one right.
The overhead shootout sequence in John Wick: Chapter 4 does a little bit of everything the rest of our nominees did and then some. It’s an extended take, over two minutes, with intricate choreography in a space that affords set pieces like an exploding cooktop from which to backflip. It escalates the weaponry by giving Jonathan the fiery dragon’s breath shotgun shells, so his bullets literally look different, but those things aren’t that different than what Jonathan’s been doing for three movies and two hours. What makes this set piece sing is the camera work.
Suddenly rising above the ceiling, we spend the sequence floating from room to room watching John Wick from a wholly different angle. At this point in the movie too, it was a much-needed bit of juice in the proceedings, as the relentless bludgeoning was starting to get exhausting. But it wasn’t a gimmick for the sake of it either. Stahelksi and his team of stunt imagineers used the new camera angle to its fullest, staging battles through the walls, designing holes into the floor to give the shot vertical depth, placing a piano in exactly the right spot for a dog to jump over while a flaming man leaves one room screaming, only to enter another moment later to be shot again, keeping perfect pace with the overhead movement of the camera.
It is a remarkable scene in a franchise built around innovative action choreography and, while nobody landed a real helicopter on a real train, I do think that nearly half of my voting colleagues nailed our pick for the best stunt sequence of the year.
