The Action Scene explores the form, history, and visceral power of action cinema through its set pieces.
Clockwise from top left: Boy Kills World (Moritz Mohr, 2024), Life After Fighting (Bren Foster, 2024), Blade of Fury (Qin Pengfei, 2024), Black Storm (Qin Pengfei, 2024).
This past year may have been the decade’s strongest yet for action scenes. Half of the honorable mentions could’ve held their own against most main-list entries from previous years, and some of this year’s scenes rank among the best I’ve ever seen within their respective set-piece categories (two car chases, a two-on-one elevator brawl, and a subterranean melee are standouts).
The following list rounds up my fifteen favorite action scenes of 2024. As usual, I’ve limited myself to one scene per film, and to films that made their US theatrical or streaming debut in 2024. Scenes have been organized by theme to highlight patterns and enhance ease of perusal.
ON HOME TURF
Top and bottom: Fury 12 Hours (Wu Hao, 2024).
A testament to the exceptional work being done in low-budget, direct-to-streaming Chinese action (several other examples populate this list), Wu Hao’s Fury 12 Hours (all films 2024 unless otherwise noted) depicts a graying, grieving, ex-military shopkeeper (Andy On) who is thrust back into combat when a woman (Bi Xue) enters his store with armed pursuers hot on her heels, carrying a flash drive of incriminating evidence. Energetic gunplay and fisticuffs ensue—most thrillingly, a showdown between the shopkeeper, several enemy underlings, and the Big Bad’s gun-toting, machete-wielding foster daughter (Ni Kexin) in one of the tunnels running underneath his store (00:40:31 to 00:44:50 in the film).
Driven by a mellow, repetitive bass lick that evokes the cool, practiced way in which On’s hero dispatches opponents, the scene recalls golden-age Hong Kong action in the way that its punchy editing threads tightly framed maneuvers and impacts—a gun being jammed into a throat, an adversary-turned-meat-shield being riddled with friendly fire, a knee being kicked out from under someone—with wider, more full-bodied views of the varied fight choreography (which references both The Raid, 2011, and The Raid 2, 2014). That said, this relatively classical style is also accented by more contemporary flourishes like whip-pans, z-axis staging toward or away from the lens, and an active handheld camera. This mix of old and new yields a fight scene of exceptional propulsion and dynamism—possibly the year’s best.
Top and bottom: Life After Fighting (Bren Foster, 2024).
Home once more becomes a war zone in the epic finale of Life After Fighting (01:25:15 to 01:51:37 in the film), starring and directed by actor and martial artist Bren Foster. After rescuing several of his students from a child trafficking ring, Foster’s character, Alex, is presented with an ultimatum: return the hostages or your girlfriend’s son (Anthony Nassif) dies. Alex insists that the exchange occur at the martial arts school where he teaches. With no intention of giving a single child up, Alex unleashes his full martial arts arsenal on wave after wave of ski-masked thugs, a taste of which we’d received in preceding scenes of sparring, friendly competition and subduing random agitators trying to pick a fight. (Screenwriting contrivances reveal that all these troublemakers were part of the criminal organization all along and therefore deserve a second, more spectacular beating.)
The scene projects a sense of speed and power: its long handheld takes provide clear views of the combatants while also getting physically involved in the action, pivoting and whipping around with the fighters. The no-holds-barred fight choreography constantly iterates on maneuvers seen earlier in the film, from tae kwon do back kicks to Brazilian jiu-jitsu submission holds. Standing 5’11” and rippling with muscle, but with impeccable form and flexibility—his kicks form a cleaner visual line from hip to toe than one might expect from a guy his size—Foster marries brawn and balletics in a way reminiscent of Scott Adkins, the contemporary gold standard in this department. As Foster kicks, grapples, and punches his way through the enemy legions, the impacts look highly convincing, suggesting full-contact or nearly full-contact choreography. Props to the committed stunt people who take these hits: their falling, flailing, jerking bodies are the unsung support that help Foster look this physically formidable.
WARPATH
Top and bottom: Striking Rescue (Cheng Siyi, 2024).
Some of the year’s best action saw characters defending their home turf; another subset unfolded on the road to justice and vengeance. In Cheng Siyi’s Striking Rescue, Tony Jaa plays a Muay Thai fighter hunting those who killed his wife and daughter. His search takes him to a run-down hotel that doubles as the base of operations for a crime boss (Ge Shuai), who shows up with his goons after the receptionist tips him off. The ensuing brawl traverses the length of a cramped hallway, an environment that works to Jaa’s character’s advantage: the narrow passageway bottlenecks his opponents, allowing him to take them on a couple at a time (01:04:25 to 01:07:57 in the film).
In this scene, framing tends to be tighter to correspond with the spatial constriction but often pulls back enough to show off Jaa’s physicality. More than two decades on from the release of Ong-Bak (2003), Jaa remains a dynamic screen fighter, here innovatively incorporating a machete into his Muay Thai choreography; one beautiful moment match cuts from a shot of him slashing a thug in the chest to a shot of his elbow cracking against another combatant’s temple, the second move riding the momentum of the first. Through it all, Jaa keeps his form tight and snappy, his face contorting furiously to express his character’s rage. It’s one of the best action performances of the year, mobilizing the entire body to express the protagonist’s singular, primal focus.
Top and bottom: Mayhem! (Xavier Gen, 2023).
The best fight in Xavier Gens’s Mayhem! (2023) also begins in a hallway before spilling immediately into an elevator, offering a two-in-one set piece. In the scene, Sam (Nassim Lyes), a French ex-convict in Thailand seeking revenge for the death of his wife (Loryn Nounay) and the kidnapping of her daughter (Chananticha Tang-Kwa) at the hands of a crime boss (Olivier Gourmet), takes on the boss’s underlings (01:18:45 to 01:23:05 in the film).
The two halves of the fight are stylistically distinct. The hallway segment, awash in teal, revolves around bare-knuckle, blunt-force trauma. Blows often have a bony or meaty timbre, the Foley design evoking the grisly, anatomical details of internal body damage; dizzying camera tilts and pans seem to want the viewer to feel it “inside” as well, engaging the vestibular system. The elevator segment, sandy in lighting, is filled with punctures: bullet through foot, knife in shoulder, broken glass in face, and, in a hilarious moment, a knife protruding from one combatant’s thigh being used to stab their opponent through the hand, stacking body parts on the blade like kebabs on a skewer. A Grand Guignol showstopper, the scene recalls action director Jude Poyer’s work on season one of Gangs of London (2020–), cocreated by Gareth Evans (The Raid, 2011), which abounds with similarly barbarous bloodletting.
Top and bottom: Curbing Violence (Qin Pengfei, 2024).
The next two entries, Curbing Violence and Black Storm, were helmed by Qin Pengfei, a staggeringly prolific rising star in Chinese direct-to-streaming action. In 2024 alone, he directed six films—that we know of—and designed the action for Eye for an Eye 2, which receives an honorable mention at the end of this piece. The premises of both pictures are similar: a hard-nosed cop (Jiang Luxia in Curbing Violence, Ashton Chen in Black Storm) seeks to bring down a corrupt corporate bigwig, played in both cases by a snarling, convulsive Bao Bei’er, incarnating a sadistic man-child whose tantrums and appetites cost lives. In Curbing Violence, the mission is personal from the outset—Bao’s villain, guided by perverse superstition, rapes the policewoman’s sister (Zhao Xixi), who then ostensibly takes her own life. Things swiftly become personal for the police detective in Black Storm, who finds himself in the middle of a criminal conspiracy terrorizing a small village.
The centerpieces of both films—an alley face-off between cop and gangster (Liu Fengchao) in Curbing Violence (01:00:22 to 01:04:13 in the film) and an elevator brawl between cop and two assassins (Bai Xuecong and Wang Yitong) in Black Storm (00:36:04 to 00:39:41 in the film)—showcase Qin’s trademark action style: big, flashy movements that sweep across the frame and are often staged into depth, with hits extending toward or away from the camera. Through circling camerawork and wide-angle lensing that seems to elongate the camera’s z-axis, the onscreen space appears to swell in volume, making the fight choreography feel more exaggerated and powerful.
Top and bottom: Black Storm (Qin Pengfei, 2024).
The Black Storm melee, in particular, feels like a self-dare. It paradoxically presents Qin’s spatial expansion within a scenario of spatial constraint: the four walls of the elevator form a claustrophobic death trap, severely limiting the mobility of fighters and camera alike. It’s precisely this dialectic between expansion and constriction that makes the scene so exhilarating. Qin’s amplified style seems to improbably enlarge the elevator’s interior; despite the cramped jumble of bodies, the visual blocking and unexpectedly wide framing consistently afford clear views of specific choreographic beats. Embodied camerawork compensates for the combatants’ lack of space through visceral tilts and whip-pans, which help convey the force of impacts. The scene invites us to marvel at how fight choreography can still feel so sweeping, seismic, and lucid within such a confined setting.
BLADEWORK
Top and bottom: Blade of Fury (Qin Pengfei, 2024).
The third Qin Pengfei scene on this list features a round-robin-style matchup of actors from the previous two. In the virtuosic penultimate fight of Blade of Fury, bounty hunter Pei Xing (Ashton Chen), also known as “the Jackal,” faces off against a cocksure guard, played by Liu Fengchao (01:13:01 to 01:16:06 in the film). Present are the same Qin signatures—wide-angle lensing, depth staging, big sweeping movements—but this scene in particular displays his mastery of golden-era Hong Kong action’s twin formal tendencies: wider, longer takes that capture multiple choreographic beats within the same shot, and rapid cutting that pieces together the action via a succession of precisely framed details. Exemplifying Qin and his team’s technical virtuosity, the scene alternates between these two registers—between spacious, circling two-shots of the Jackal’s lightning-fast straight sword interlocking with the guard’s long polearm, and quick, tight framings that telegraph rapid-fire cause-and-effect (for instance, one shot shows the guard striking the handle of his weapon, the next shows the polearm arcing around from the impact and the Jackal narrowly dodging it via a wire-assisted backward skid).
Top and bottom: The Wild Blade of Strangers (Wei Li, 2024).
An especially girthy polearm is the weapon of choice for Tian Anye (Zhang Jin) of Wei Li’s The Wild Blade of Strangers, a former military leader living in seclusion after a bloody coup leaves his comrades dead. Pulled back into action as the reluctant protector of a woman (Xia Meng) and her baby, who is revealed to be the rightful successor to the throne, Tian dusts off his old armor and weapon for the film’s climactic fight (01:31:34 to 01:35:00 in the film), in which he crosses blades with the high-ranking, dual-sword-wielding general leading the hunt (Geng Le).
In their length and weight, polearms tend to be relatively unwieldy; they cannot be moved as fast or as flexibly as other weapons. The fighter needs to plan ahead. How to parry a strike or launch one’s own with the slightest shift of the handle, the smallest pivot in one’s stance? The best polearm choreography often conveys this strategic, anticipatory thought process; the Wild Blade of Strangers scene does so through an exhilarating visual style that complements the idiosyncratic physics and mechanics of its hero’s weapon-work. Tighter shots highlight the cause-and-effect between Tian’s micro-adjustments and the polearm’s movements (a twist of the handle leads to a twisting of the blade so that it snags the enemy’s cape, shearing off fabric), while techniques of temporal manipulation (overlapping edits that repeat part of the action in the previous shot, as well as rapid oscillations in speed between slow motion, real-time, and sped-up) generate a lurching, heaving rhythm, evoking the weapon’s cumbersome weight.
Top and bottom: 100 Yards (Xu Haofeng and Xu Junfeng, 2023).
Extending codirector Xu Haofeng’s interest in the form and function of martial arts—as previously seen in films like Judge Archer (2012) and The Final Master (2015)—100 Yards (2023) depicts the bitter rivalry that develops between Shen (Jacky Heung), the son of a dying martial arts master, and Qi (Andy On), the top apprentice, after the master leaves the martial arts academy to Qi. Within the ensuing, absurdist parade of duels, the most thrilling showdown occurs before an audience of the academy’s board members, with the outcome determining who will take over the school (00:54:12 to 00:58:14 in the film).
Captured in steady, crystalline shots and stripped of music to accentuate clanging metal, whooshing movement, and shuffling steps, the scene minimizes flourish to emphasize the tactical specifics of martial arts technique—especially the frustrating inability of Qi’s twin butterfly swords to best the longer reach of Shen’s longsword. The way the form of the weapons seems to predetermine who wins the duel evokes the film’s larger interest in formalities and formalism: 100 Yards fastidiously depicts different martial arts styles as being rooted in specific schools of fighting, and martial arts in general as an exclusionary institution organized around stringent rituals. The film’s deadpan tone—created through flat performances and austere staging—fits this thematic focus, producing a feeling of inertia.
TAG TEAM
Top and bottom: Boy Kills World (Moritz Mohr, 2024).
Two fights from Moritz Mohr’s Boy Kills World—a factory-set thrashing of enemy heavies and a final-boss face-off featuring silat extraordinaire Yayan Ruhian—could’ve easily made the cut here, but, at the time of this writing, the slight edge goes to a brother-sister team-up (Bill Skarsgård and Jessica Rothe) against special-forces-style corporate security within a cavernous metal hallway (01:28:35 to 01:30:44 in the film). As children, the siblings bonded over arcade games, and Skarsgård’s character periodically barks phrases like “Medium punch! Heavy punch! Total knockout!” in voice-over throughout the film. Fittingly, the hallway fight evokes the giddy feel and flow of gameplay. Propelled by El Michels Affair’s fizzy, boppy “I Get Mine,” the scene joins together deliriously slick fight choreography, where characters mow down opponents with superhuman ease; a rapid ping-ponging from one region of space to another, whether through whip-pan-heavy tracking shots or rat-a-tat cross-cutting; and fine-grained oscillations in speed, between slow motion, real-time, and sped-up. It’s a dizzying stylistic cocktail that, within the typically third-person medium of cinema, approximates the visceral immediacy of playing a first-person shooter. In particular, the micro-shifts in film speed emulate the shifting attention of the expert player: the way the seasoned gamer perceptually locks onto particular tasks and details—a target to be shot, an item to be snagged—such that these aspects become momentarily suspended and magnified in the player’s experience.
Top and bottom: Deadpool & Wolverine (Shawn Levy, 2024).
If the Boy Kills World set piece conjures the feeling of playing a first-person shooter, the climactic team-up in Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine aesthetically evokes the side-scroller (01:40:15 to 01:43:01 in the film). Tracking laterally alongside the eponymous pair (Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman) as they butcher a mob of Deadpools from other timelines, the scene exudes giddy artifice. Spurts of blood are thick and goopy like putty, and combatants’ movements are smooth, executing beats, combos, and poses with a sense of preprogrammed precision. Making a case for using lateral tracking shots in action scenes (the hallway fight in Oldboy, 2003, is the most famous example), the scene presents a slick, gleefully synthetic style to match the postmodern glibness of the Deadpool character, whose winking, fourth-wall-breaking schtick detaches him from diegetic reality.
Top and bottom: City Hunter (Yûichi Satô, 2024).
The climactic shootout in Yûichi Satô’s manga adaptation City Hunter observes as world-class marksman Ryo (Ryohei Suzuki) dispatches a posse of—again special-forces-style—opponents in a warehouse while his assistant (Misato Morita) helps him reload by tossing him gun magazines. Rapid cutting, synced to the staccato rhythm of guns being locked, loaded, and fired, drives this scene of hyper-precise gunplay, but two different framing and editing strategies are used. At points, the scene cuts rapidly between a gun being fired and a target being struck, generating a feeling of blistering temporal compression. Elsewhere, weapon discharge and felled target are shown in the same frame, creating a subtle sense of spatial realism—of proximate bodies within a shared tactical space.
Moments of spectacular flourish modulate the scene’s click-clack percussiveness: a whip-pan that traces a bullet’s ricochet off a storage tank into an opponent, for instance, or when a metal floor plate is dislodged by Ryo’s gunfire to spin in place, upright, like a revolving door, deflecting enemy salvos while allowing him to slip his own, well-timed bullet past the rotating edges.
Top and bottom: The Roundup: Punishment (Heo Myeong-haeng, 2024).
Bad guys team up too. One of the year’s most memorable duos appears in Heo Myeong-haeng’s The Roundup: Punishment, the fourth film in the series about the crime-fighting misadventures of bearish supercop Ma (Ma Dong-seok). As they attempt to bust an online gambling operation in the Philippines, Ma and his crew cross paths with knife-maestro mercenary Baek (Kim Mu-yeol) and his right-hand man Cho (Kim Ji-hoon), who are tasked with violently ousting competitors so that their boss (Lee Dong-hwi) maintains his monopoly on the market. The two fight Ma in the film’s excellent, airplane-set climax, but the action in the finale is narrowly surpassed by an earlier brawl: after their business relationship with their employer sours, the duo, outnumbered but unfazed, squares off against hired muscle sent by their former boss (01:06:37 to 01:09:05 in the film).
Flanking their opponents on two sides before lunging in like lions pouncing on a herd of gazelle, the pair projects a thrilling sense of discipline and tactical precision. Both are armed with a knife, but the fight choreography delineates distinct combat styles: while Cho integrates the blade into a boxer’s duck-and-weave technique, throwing his opponents off kilter with a combination of snappy left hooks and right-handed stabs, Baek adopts a more freeform approach, slashing and stabbing a range of body parts with practiced efficiency. The scene’s clean visual style—handheld but with steady long takes that track the action—suits the choreography, affording clear, wide views of the fight’s tactical specifics while exuding a similar sense of precision and control.
ROAD WARRIORS
Top and bottom: Furiosa (George Miller, 2024).
If Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) was an exercise in stripped-down storytelling—it’s one extended car chase whose narrative turning point is a literal U-turn—Furiosa is about sprawl. Spanning years of story time and divided into chapters like an epic poem, George Miller’s prequel reproduces this ethos of expansion at the level of its style. Although propulsive editing of the sort seen in Fury Road still predominates, new here are sinuous tracking shots that snake through and around the action, adding a newfound sense of scale and choreographic complexity—the “real-time” work of coordinating bodies, vehicles, and the camera itself. Despite often lasting just a few seconds, these gliding shots subtly stall a sense of relentless forward movement, expanding beats and moments in a way that’s analogous to the film’s disjointed episodes, which seem more interested in present-tense worldbuilding and mythmaking than racing toward a goal.
Such shots modulate the rhythm of Furiosa’s action centerpiece, in which the tricked-out oil tanker known as the War Rig (a version of which appears in Fury Road) is beset by marauders during a supply run, all while a certain stowaway (Anya Taylor-Joy) clings perilously to the vehicle’s underside (01:04:01 to 01:16:37 in the film). One bravura shot—the most spectacular in the film—tracks back as a War Rig defender hurls an explosive-tipped spear in the direction of the camera, thus revealing a two-seater motorcycle flanking the tanker. The rear passenger dismounts, wearing a pair of metal skis and tethered to the bike by a rope, allowing them to skim across the sand. Skier soon becomes parasailer: a chute unfurls that pulls them back, then up off the ground. The buoyant camera mimics this vertical movement before circling around to glimpse this airborne attacker flinging their own incendiary javelin at the War Rig. The shot continues circling, revealing another airborne comrade lobbing first a grenade, then a grappling hook in the tanker’s direction. A technical and choreographic tour de force, this shot—and the scene as a whole—embodies the film’s commitment to both epic sweep and intricate physical mechanics, meeting the high bar for action set by the film’s epochal 2015 predecessor.
Top and bottom: Fighter (Li Bingyuan, 2024).
Like Furiosa, the car chase in Li Bingyuan’s Fighter—an amusingly out-of-left-field digression within a film about competitive MMA fighting—features kinetic camera movement, but in this case it aims to disorient as much as orient the viewer in the action. This strategy, in concert with a pyrotechnic panoply of other techniques, creates what is probably the year’s most blistering set piece (00:39:52 to 00:44:45 in the film). Approximating what a Hong Kong–style action film might look like if overseen by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor of Gamer (2009) and the Crank series (2006–09), the scene observes as a fighter-in-training named Shaonan (director Li Bingyuan) and a getaway driver (Xue Qin) mount a rescue of Shaonan’s coach (Yao Xingtong), who has been kidnapped by gangsters.
Shifting from an on-foot rescue to a high-octane pursuit involving two cars and a bevy of dirt bikes, the scene is a veritable catalog of contemporary action techniques, compressed and intensified to near-experimental extremes. The scene is jolting and whiplash-inducing: there are crash cams strapped to wheels and car hoods; claustrophobic shots overcrowded with shattered glass and distressed faces; overlapping edits that replay an impact from different angles, generating a lurching rhythm; and whirligig camera moves, like a shot looping beneath Shaonan as he forms a human bridge between two vehicles. Somehow, tried-and-true continuity editing threads everything together to create a coherent sense of geography and trajectory, even if only just barely. The beauty of this set piece lies in this “barely”: the feeling of body, space, and the senses being stretched to their limit.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Clockwise from top left: Baby Assassins: 2 Babies (Yugo Sakamoto, 2023), Monkey Man (Dev Patel, 2024), Singham Again (Rohit Shetty, 2024), Second Life (Chris Huo, 2024).
In its dynamism, eclecticism, and visceral propulsion, the Fighter car chase feels like a microcosm of the year in action scenes. Some honorable mentions: the dining room melee in Qin Pengfei’s The Bodyguard, Chan’s fight with Chau’s gang in Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, Mahiro versus Yuri in Baby Assassins: 2 Babies (2023), the cleaning-supplies fight in Second Life, the shootout at the docks in Singham Again, the kitchen-and-elevator fight in Monkey Man, the final shootout in Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Optimus Prime versus Megatron in Transformers One, the log chase in Hundreds of Beavers, ambushing the Harkonnen spice harvester in Dune: Part Two, the car oner in Carry-On, the warehouse mano a mano in Bangkok Dog, the car chase and market brawl in The Greatest of All Time, the park foot chase in I, the Executioner, the apothecary shop fight in To Live Through Death, the yakuza massacre in The Shadow Strays, when children join the battle at their peril in Kill (2023), the meat-packing-plant rescue in Desperado, the introductory bounty hunt in Eye for an Eye 2, and the opening foot chase in The Pig, the Snake, and the Pigeon (2023).
An incredible year for action scenes has concluded, but the earliest 2025 releases are sustaining the momentum. Hitting theaters this Friday are Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, the sequel to the muscular cops-and-robbers 2018 cult favorite, and The Prosecutor, the latest martial arts extravaganza from star and codirector Donnie Yen, kicking off a year packed with promising titles that range from Nobody 2 and War 2 to Tron: Ares and Diablo. Onward we go.
Keep reading Notebook’s 2024 Year in Review.