The Action Scene is a column that explores the construction of action set pieces in order to deepen appreciation for and spark discussion about action cinema.
2022 was a standout year for action cinema in terms of the sheer variety and virtuosity of action scenes it gave us. The following article rounds up some of the best. Like last year’s installment, the focus on action scenes—compressed, relatively self-contained displays of action filmmaking craft—means that some otherwise strong action or action-adjacent films didn’t make the cut (for example, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Fall, The Contractor, Detective vs. Sleuths, Moonfall) and a couple of included films are less than compelling beyond their set pieces.
All featured movies made their official, non-festival, US theatrical and/or streaming debut in 2022, hence disqualifying otherwise surefire inclusions like Limbo and Good Morning, Sleeping Lion (here’s hoping they get stateside distribution in 2023). For variety’s sake, I’ve limited myself to one scene per film.
And now, to the action. The scenes have been organized into loose thematic groupings to enhance ease of perusal and highlight thematic and stylistic patterns.
“IT’S NOT THE PLANE. IT’S THE PILOT”
It’s still very much the plane—the technical design of different aircraft in Top Gun: Maverick, conveyed both visually and aurally, inspires a tactile, even fetishistic awe—but Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw's (Miles Teller) statement, a pithy summation of his flight instructor Pete “Maverick” Mitchell's (Tom Cruise) philosophy, rings true as a description of the film’s stylistic approach, which frequently involves placing the camera inside the cockpit with pilots. In these shots, the pilot’s upper body constitutes the viewer’s visual anchor, remaining upright in the frame even when the plane barrel-rolls and the world outside turns topsy-turvy. This formal strategy appeals heavily to the viewer’s proprioception; rather than capturing the plane from the outside, these shots invite her to sense its physical mass from the inside and to “feel” as the aircraft turns and accelerates.
In the film’s most exhilarating scene, this proprioceptive approach is counterbalanced by two visual strategies that help restore some sense of geography (01:19:21 – 01:22:40 in the film): as Maverick completes a breakneck flythrough of a training course to show onlooking cadets that it can be done, the film toggles between cockpit views, occasional shots from outside the plane, and a three-dimensional digital rendering of the course, across which an airplane-shaped icon moves to track his progress. These other perspectives help the viewer proprioceptively extrapolate “outward” from the cockpit shots, orienting her within the film’s geographical space while retaining the vertiginous physicality of the pilot-tethered images. Induced is a feeling of not just flying, but flying toward, around, and through—that is, purposefully and directionally through space, from which a sense of strategic navigation emerges.
“Pilot” also takes precedence over “plane” in two car-centric films that, nonetheless, see their vehicular set pieces outpaced by scenes of their driver protagonists taking action outside their cars. In Special Delivery, a driver for an extralegal delivery service (Park So-dam) finds herself in deep water after she grows attached to one of her clients, a young boy with a target on his back (Jung Hyeon-jun). Following several slick, exciting-in-their-own-right scenes of precision driving that recall the likes of Drive (2011) and Motorway (2012), the film culminates in a tense, invigorating fight (01:32:54 – 01:37:06) that literally as well as symbolically sees our protagonist getting down and dirty, renouncing her cool professionalism and the protective insulation of her car’s four walls when things get personal. The innovative fight choreography in this scene involves her throwing herself at enemies who are physically much larger than her—at one point, she leaps up so that her entire weight can be used to drive a screwdriver into a supine man’s chest—and being thrown around in turn, rag-doll-like. This palpable size and weight difference generates terrific suspense, inviting worry that the resourcefulness she’s shown so far has finally met its match.
In Lost Bullet 2, the two most memorable action beats from the first film—a police station brawl in which protagonist Lino (Alban Lenoir) plows his way through a small army of cops, and a highway chase featuring gnarly bumper hooks that snag and rip apart enemy cars—are pointedly referenced and scaled up, making good on the sequel’s subtitle of “Back for More.” The 2.0 bumper scene is pretty spectacular, with the hooks now humming with an electric current that blasts enemy vehicles sky-high, but it’s the new police fight (00:39:49 – 00:44:08) that most astonishes. Though more complex in staging than its predecessor (in the sequel, Lino needs to fend off not only “good” cops but also masked “bad” ones trying to kidnap and assassinate an uncooperative key witness), the melee in Lost Bullet 2 features the same type of heavy, fumbling choreography and handheld camerawork. Traveling barely a couple of meters over the course of four-plus minutes, the scene is stressfully protracted, featuring an outnumbered Lino using any free limb he can to clobber the horde of opponents trying to subdue him.
VIDEO GAME CINEMA
Tracking an amnesiac, avatar-like character via a single, seemingly unbroken shot as he completes what are essentially a bunch of mini missions, Carter evokes the structure of first- and third-person shooter video games. That said, the film also pushes the “one shot” conceit to extremes beyond what such games typically offer, sending its camera racing around and beneath vehicles and tumbling out of airplanes. Though not always seamless, the illusion of continuity is maintained to such an extent that the film becomes an ecstatic celebration of the camera as a virtuosic body, moving as dynamically as the stuntpeople it captures. Positioning captured bodies and camera-body within a shared physical space, Carter immerses viewers in the sense of a tactile, navigable three-dimensional world that extends beyond the frame, while instilling the vicarious thrill of moving through it so freely. The film’s best and most spectacular set piece (01:14:51 – 01:22:56) maximizes this giddy immersiveness by pushing the mobility of all bodies to literal new heights: after free-falling alongside combatants who have deplaned several thousand feet in the air, the camera alights upon the back of a moving truck, leading directly into a Mad Max-style car chase featuring gun-toting pursuers flanking and attempting to board the larger vehicle.
If Carter is video-game-adjacent in form, Uncharted is the same only in content. Based on the eponymous video game series, the film adopts a more classically cinematic style that forays into the treasure-hunting subgenre without breaking any new ground. That said, the film does feature a couple of exuberant set pieces that compensate for a feeling of CGI-induced weightlessness via precise continuity editing and choreographic intricacy. These scenes reinject a sense of physical weight despite surfaces that look a bit too smooth and objects that move a bit too buoyantly, all of which evince the presence of digital manipulation. Specifically, the editing and choreography heighten viewers’ haptic engagement by foregrounding the complex mechanical interactions of physical objects in physical space (this appeal to haptic experience does, actually, bear an oblique resemblance to video games). Set aboard and outside a midair cargo plane, the film’s most exciting action scene (01:13:39 – 01:17:30) abounds with elaborate action staging of this kind, such as the sight of cargo netting—still stringing boxes like industrial-scale Christmas lights—trailing out the back of the plane’s open loading door while fighters attempt to clamber up its length back to safety. Here, the complexity of the choreographic design activates the viewer’s proprioceptive immersion, her physio-spatial sense of where objects and bodies are located and how they are moving in relation to each other.
ANTICOLONIALISM
Various action films from this year center on anticolonialist themes, the most high-profile of which is Avatar: The Way of Water. Over a decade in the making, this cinematic event sees Hollywood’s tech maestro James Cameron pushing his computer-generated fantasy world of Pandora to new heights of photorealistic lifelikeness (this effect is best appreciated in Dolby 3D and high frame rate, which lend images an uncanny sense of enveloping immediacy). Most of the film comprises meandering, exploratory passages designed to show off the textures and vistas of heretofore unseen regions of Pandora, but the movie switches fully into action mode during the climax, in which Na’vi warriors Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) attempt to rescue two of their kids from the clutches of Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), whose consciousness has been transplanted into a Na’vi body (02:37:15 – 0:2:41:45 in the film). As the couple tag-team against Quaritch’s forces, state-of-the-art CGI is joined by old-school action filmmaking. Clean, wide visual framing and long-enough takes deliver the kinesthetic satisfaction of seeing impacts—for example, spear impalement, a shattered visor—completed in their entirety, enhancing the sense of the computer-generated Na’vi bodies’ weight and solidity.
Set during the British Raj, RRR (short for “Rise, Roar, Revolt”) tells a tale of anticolonial resistance in the sort of mythic register that has been director S.S. Rajamouli’s claim to fame. A crucial part of the film’s power lies in the formal and thematic centrality of sound. A kidnapped girl’s plaintive song alerts her rescuer Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.) to her location within the residence of a despotic British governor (Ray Stevenson). Following his public flogging, it’s Bheem’s own song, which undercover revolutionary leader Raju (Ram Charan) later claims is more powerful than any physical weapon, that foments horrified onlookers into an insurrectional mob. When Raju himself is imprisoned, it’s the sound of Bheem’s rhythmic tapping and Raju’s percussive response that reunite the two brothers in arms, leading to the film’s showstopping climax. The middle R in “RRR” is “Roar,” which, in mediating between “Rise” and “Revolt,” seems to suggest that sound—as a physical vibration and sensation in and across bodies—drives and constitutes the groundswell of revolution; this vibrational swelling is then somatically translated to the viewer via the film’s own theater-shaking soundscape (one of the loudest I’ve ever heard). The galvanizing aural and physical connection between onscreen bodies and the viewer’s own forms an important dramatic and formal context for the film’s best action scene, in which the reunited protagonists decimate imperial forces within a forest (02:41:52 - 02:49:44). Here, the film’s investment in sound is joined by visual flourishes like slow motion and CGI-assisted long takes, which viscerally express and impart a sense of the duo’s synchrony and mastery of space, their synergistic connection against which colonial oppressors stand no chance.
HUNTERS AND KILLERS
Evoking films like Taken (2008), The Man From Nowhere (2010), and The Equalizer (2014), The Killer: A Girl Who Deserves to Die relishes in a slow-burn windup before unleashing a powerful cathartic rush once the action kicks into high gear. The film’s first full-scale set piece (a brief glimpse of which we’d already received in the film’s flash-forward prologue) pulls out all the stops, shifting from a close-quarters elevator fight to a single-take hallway melee as the protagonist Bang (a hitman who puts his skills to use after the girl he’s been tasked with babysitting gets abducted)decimates a small army of henchmen (00:38:10 – 00:41:17). Like in Carter, the “one shot” effect is often not seamless; halting focal-length shifts and bodies conveniently passing in front of the camera suggest the presence of masked cuts. This patent formal artifice lends an unreal quality to the action. In one sense, this works against the long take’s typical association with the physical and existential weight of “real” time and “real” space, but it also fits the tenor of the scene, which sees a stoic Bang cutting down enemies with ice-cold efficiency, almost like they’re not even there.
Where The Killer is lean and mean, Baby Assassins is loose and breezy, tracking two teenage killers as they dispatch targets and try to navigate the trials of adult life. In the film’s climactic action scene (01:21:36 – 01:25:54), one of the protagonists, Maohiro (Saori Izawa), faces off against a lanky yakuza henchman played by Masonori Mimoto, a frequent collaborator of the film’s fight choreographer Kensuke Sonomura. Up to this point, the youth and slighter physiques of Maohiro and her roommate/work partner Chisato (Akari Takaishi) had fueled the film’s tongue-in-cheek comedy, the comic dissonance of seeing two seemingly harmless schoolgirl-types brutally dispatching men twice their size. Here, however, a genuine sense of danger emerges, exacerbated by the enemy’s agility and long reach. As the fighters square off, Sonomura's trademark action style is on full display: blisteringly fast and detailed choreography, largely captured in longer takes that tend to deemphasize close-ups of specific blows in favor of flurries of almost-too-quick-to-see movement. This near-illegibility—emphasis on “near,” which means the viewer can still see specific moves, and, more importantly, see that they’re fast—telegraphs a sense of the fighters’ split-second strategizing.
Structurally and tonally, Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday sits somewhere between Baby Assassins and The Killer. Its tone is cheerful and comic, observing as the first film’s disgraced hitman protagonist Mike (Scott Adkins) completes assignments alongside his tech-savvy sidekick (Perry Benson) and a martial-arts phenom (Sarah Chang) whom he’s paid to ambush him at random hours so that he can let off steam via combat. Hitman’s Holiday, however, quickly streamlines into a full-blooded fight movie after Mike is coerced into protecting the whiny son (George Fouracres) of a major crime lord (Flaminia Cinque) against a parade of the world’s top assassins. The film’s best fight (00:41:55 – 00:47:48 in the film), which travels from bar to hallway to kitchen and shifts from gun-fu to mano a mano to knifework, is a self-contained masterpiece of geographic and choreographic variety. In lieu of relatively static shot setups, the highly engaged camera lunges, races, and bobs with fighters but somehow manages to land exactly where it needs to be to frame key actions, leading to a sense of extraordinary formal precision.
Scott Adkins also makes an appearance in Day Shift, the directorial debut of veteran stuntman J.J. Perry. The film centers on paid killers as well, but the assassins are bounty hunters this time around, and their targets are vampires. Adkins’s role is relegated to a one-scene cameo, but it’s a spectacular scene (00:58:38 – 01:04:01), featuring Adkins and Steve Howey as the Nazarian Brothers, a vampire-hunting duo who teams up with protagonist hunter Bud (Jamie Foxx) and a representative from the vampire-hunting union (Dave Franco) to raid a vampire lair tucked away within a suburban home. Within minutes of entry, the crew is swarmed by the creatures, some scurrying out from side rooms, others dropping down through the ceiling from the floor above. Here, Perry makes good on his affiliation with 87Eleven Entertainment, delivering the kind of clean, weighty, and witty action that the studio has made its calling card. As stunts and sight gags accumulate—a contortionist vampire, bent like a twist tie, receives a “buckshot mouthwash” that sends her sliding across the kitchen counter and clean through a cabinet door; Bud, after lodging a machete into a vampire’s neck, taps the blade so that it whirls in place like a fidget spinner, resulting in a surgically clean decapitation—the scene uses longer takes and clean continuity editing to develop an insistently physical form of action comedy, in which punch lines emerge from (as opposed to merely supplement) the virtuosic choreography.
SOUTHEAST ASIAN INFLUENCE
Intricate choreography and its vigorous execution similarly drive the final fight of Shadow Master, Singaporean director Pearry Reginald Teo’s genre mélange set inside a decaying, possibly haunted hospital. Doing proud the name of Prachya Pinkaew, who directed watershed Thai martial-arts films Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior (2003) and The Protector (2005) and is credited as one of Shadow Master’s executive producers, the scene (01:10:31 – 01:17:08) sees the Muay-Thai-practicing night-watchman protagonist (D.Y. Sao) facing off against the enemy’s top fighter (Brian Le of the popular YouTube martial-arts channel MartialClub, who also appeared in this year’s Everything Everywhere All at Once). A sense of insane athleticism and bruising power predominates, achieved through not just the choreography itself but shrewd and varied shot compositions that span side-view two-shots of the fighters; over-the-shoulder shots in tighter, visceral handheld; and high-angle views that generate visual dynamism.
Also committed to robustly physical action is The Princess, which tracks the eponymous royal figure (Joey King) as she fights her way down the tower in which she’s been imprisoned. Directed by the Vietnamese filmmaker Le-Van Kiet—known for the martial-arts film Furie (2019), whose star Veronica Ngo also appears here as the heroine’s fight trainer—The Princess’ appeal lies in its stylistic anachronism: the sight of medieval settings, costumes, and weaponry being deployed in service of what is structurally a martial-arts picture. Replete with dynamic but steady handheld shots that foreground the complex fight choreography and punchy cutting that accentuates specific moves, The Princess’ most thrilling action scene (00:39:23 – 00:47:01)—in which the heroine battles a wave of soldiers in the tower’s spiraling staircase—is exemplary of the film’s action in general. Relishing in a degree of sustained, kinetic, and agile action not typically associated with the medieval genre, the scene nonetheless counterbalances nimble choreography with the clunkiness of armor, shields, and swords, evoking the effort and coordination required to wield this hefty equipment.
The Big 4, director Timo Tjahjanto’s latest foray into action territory, tells of a police detective (Putri Marino) who becomes embroiled in a battle between assassins while investigating her father’s murder. Cranking up the levity vis-à-vis Tjahjanto’s last two action films—Headshot (2016) and especially The Night Comes for Us (2018), whose bloody nihilism I prefer—The Big 4 works best when it minimizes comedy and leans into hyperviolence, which, though tame in comparison with its predecessors, still delivers the pleasure of complex choreography punctuated by jolts of gnarly bodily harm. In the film’s most spirited set piece (01:57:47 – 02:07:15), which crosscuts between a couple of different one-on-one face-offs, Tjahjanto eschews simpler, steadier framing in favor of dizzying visual dynamism. The camera rushes, loops, and lunges; the cutting is rapid; and the action is often staged along the camera’s z-axis (for example, a character punching directly at the camera, sharply angled over-the-shoulder staging that seems to elongate action into depth, and editing that repeatedly pushes the limits of the 180-degree rule)—all of which lend the scene a propulsive, vertiginous energy.
ANIMATION
In Jujutsu Kaisen 0: The Movie, prequel to the anime series of the same name, a sense of speed and power is pushed to an extreme via the expressive affordances of animation, which saturate the film with jagged bolts of color and movement. This style is on full display in a scene in which a team of sorcerers attempt to quell an onrush of cursed spirits while fighting the people who provoked it (01:13:09 – 01:17:46). Filled with graphic flourishes that evoke speed and impact; the tactile judder of low-frame-rate animation; drawn bodies that seem to stretch and snap to convey the force of blows; and whiplash-inducing depth staging in which visual framings shift from extreme long shot to extreme close-up (or vice versa) in the blink of an eye, the scene both exaggerates and eschews live-action’s presentation of three-dimensional space, more than compensating for animation’s detachment from “real” bodies through an intensely kinetic and punchy visual style.
Mortal Kombat Legends: Snow Blind, the third film in the direct-to-video adult animation series from Warner Bros. Animation, likewise revolves around superpowered fighters and embraces animation’s expressive potential. At the outset of the film’s best fight (00:55:26 – 00:59:38), however, Snow Blind deploys animation completely differently than Jujutsu Kaisen. Observing as blind swordsman Kenshi attacks the enemy’s lair, the segment is composed to give the impression of an unbroken shot circling around Kenshi while fighters leap into the ring a few at a time. Whereas Jujutsu Kaisen’s action style pivots around spiky discontinuity—sharp angles and splashes of color that split the image—this moment from Snow Blind achieves an impressive rendering of continuous, volumetric physical space, thanks to the clever arrangement of (digitally generated) cel animation layers. Crucially, the illusion isn’t perfectly seamless: background and foreground layers look ever so slightly mismatched, so that Kang appears to be rotating on a turntable of sorts. The result is a thrillingly idiosyncratic flight of action whose appeal lies in its mechanical smoothness—contiguous layers turning around each other like cogs in a machine—even as bursts of gore, visual judder, and shifting speeds of motion inject a sense of force and impact.
Whereas Jujutsu Kaisen and Snow Blind deploy 2D animation, the CGI film Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the latest installment in the Shrek cinematic universe, traffics in the impression of three-dimensional objects, bodies, and environments. That said, this style also collides with more painterly, graphic touches that recall Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), which the filmmakers have cited as an influence. The film’s most ecstatic set piece in this vein is its first (00:04:45 – 00:08:20), in which the titular feline rogue (Antonio Banderas) fends off human soldiers before turning his attention to a towering woodland monster that has been roused by the commotion. As the protagonist executes one acrobatic, high-flying maneuver after another, the screen comes alive in shocks of color; spectacularly non-naturalistic, almost velvety drawn surfaces; and shifting frame rate in which animating on “one’s” (the image is advanced every frame, leading to smoother movements) is alternated with animating on “two’s” (the image is advanced every two frames, resulting in a jerkier rhythm). A celebration of animation’s proteanness and elasticity, The Last Wish’s visual eclecticism also evokes the aesthetic of a pop-up book, in which two- and three-dimensional spatial representations converge.
LAW AND DISORDER
In The Gray Man, the latest non-Marvel effort from the Russo brothers, a prisoner-turned-CIA-assassin (Ryan Gosling) goes on the run after receiving a flash drive of incriminating information. Ping-ponging from one global city to another on a virtually scene-by-scene basis and filled with showy formal flourishes—including whirligig drone camerawork, and firecrackers and smoke grenades that whiz at and around the camera during fight scenes—The Gray Man works as an exercise in propulsive, borderline assaultive hyperactivity that peaks in the film’s action centerpiece (01:08:50 – 01:17:51). Supervised by veteran stunt coordinator Spiro Razatos, most well-known for his work on the recent Fast and the Furious films, the scene shifts from a high-ordnance courtyard shootout to a chase involving a tram and several flanking vehicles. Here, the film’s hyper-kinetic visual busyness—rapid cutting, tighter shot framings, and objects, bodies, and debris repeatedly tumbling and flying toward the camera—joins a tenuous-but-still-present adherence to visual continuity, thus generating a tactile, breathlessly paced experience.
Shadowy government programs and brawny action likewise characterize Vikram, a spiritual sequel to the eponymous 1986 film and the second installment in director Lokesh Kanagaraj’s series of films set within the same cinematic universe (following Kaithi [2019]). Bearing a flashback-heavy, Citizen-Kane-style interview structure, Vikram follows the commander of a black ops team (Fahadh Faasil) as he attempts to piece together the past of a seemingly ordinary man (Kamal Haasan) whose death feels out of place next to the other victims of a political assassination. Developing in a manner decidedly unlike Kane, Vikram reveals its namesake to be the man’s alter ego—Agent Vikram, leader of an earlier-generation paramilitary unit—and, furthermore, shows that the man is actually still alive. In the film’s most hard-hitting showdown (02:06:12 – 02:07:53), Vikram fully lives up to the hushed, reverent tones with which other characters, and the film itself, have so far treated him by delivering a showcase of blunt, brutal strength. Through the terseness and gruesomeness of his takedowns—each enemy henchman is felled within a couple moves, and finishers range from crushed jugular, to oral impalement on a pencil-holder of pointy writing instruments, to an uppercut whose force drives the victim’s teeth to sever his own tongue—the scene expresses the thrilling, even scary power of this mythologized figure.
The stunts in Vikram come courtesy of Anbariv, a prominent duo of action choreographers who also worked on this year’s Beast. In this Die Hard riff, Veera, an ex-field-operative (Vijay) for India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), intervenes after terrorists take over a mall. Among the film’s fun and imaginative action scenes—which bend physics while retaining a sense of hard-hitting physicality—the best is the first (00:06:12 – 00:11:44). Observing as Veera swiftly and brutally resolves another hostage situation, the scene abounds with neat formal touches—the fight toggles nimbly between different styles of action, from slow-motion-heavy impacts and falls to bursts of “real-time” martial-arts combat captured via kinetic handheld camerawork—and sight gags, such as a henchman being kicked through a second-story banister while clutching an unclasped grenade, leading to his exploding in midair.
The Chinese direct-to-video actioner VR Fighter (a.k.a. One More Shot) centers on an ex-cop (Louis Fan of exploitation classic Riki-Oh: The Story of Riki [1991]), now working as a professional bodyguard, whose search for a cure for his ailing daughter lands him a gig as a virtual-reality tester. The film’s best action scene, however, occurs before any of this takes place, while the protagonist is still a police captain (00:04:05 – 00:15:40). Observing as he and his team are ambushed during an exfiltration mission, this frenetic stretch of mayhem is built from handheld tracking shots; cleanly framed, complexly choreographed, Hong-Kong-style hand-to-hand combat; and turbo-charged gun battles featuring spasming bodies and spraying CGI blood. All of this testifies to the pulverizing spectacle that can be created on a modest budget.
****
As this piece hopefully demonstrates, action cinema is as varied and dynamic as the chases and melees it depicts. Throughout the year, “The Action Scene” tends to adopt a more historical focus, but the annual roundups aim to show just how much is happening right now. To that point, some honorable mentions with strong action scenes: The Woman King, The Round-Up, Prey, Blade of the 47 Ronin, The Violence Action, The Witch: Part 2. The Other One, Hunt.
An exciting year of action concludes, another awaits. Full speed ahead.