The Action Scene explores the form, history, and visceral power of action cinema through its set pieces.
Clockwise from top left: Baby Assassins: Nice Days (Yugo Sakamoto, 2024), Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet, 2025), Ne Zha 2 (Jiao Zi, 2025), I Am What I Am 2 (Su Haipeng, 2024).
2025 proved that action cinema is alive and kicking.
The following article rounds up my fifteen favorite action set pieces of the year. All inclusions made their US streaming or theatrical debut in 2025. As usual, I’ve limited myself to one scene per film and organized scenes by theme.
MARTIAL (OUT)LAW
Top and bottom: The Prosecutor (Donnie Yen, 2025).
Two Hong Kong screen legends headlined splashy action spectaculars this year: Donnie Yen in The Prosecutor, for which he doubled as director, and Jackie Chan in The Shadow’s Edge. It was difficult picking just one scene from each. Narrowly edged out were The Prosecutor’s opening police raid—with its exhilarating drone- and CGI-assisted camerawork that shifts from more conventional framing, to a tethered, third-person-shooter-style viewpoint, to a first-person subjective shot—and the attempted assassination in The Shadow’s Edge, featuring blistering, cause-and-effect editing and extensive engagement with the interiors of a cramped apartment. The victors: The Prosecutor’s MTR-set climax, in which cop-turned-lawyer Fok (Donnie Yen) fends off mob assassins trying to silence the witness he’s escorting (Locker Lam) (01:38:32 to 01:45:53 in the film), and the final fight in The Shadow’s Edge, where back-from-retirement supercop Wong (Jackie Chan) brawls with master thief Fu (Tony Leung Ka-fai) within a restaurant (02:02:40 to 02:07:55 in the film).
In both scenes, the choreography is intricate, involving not just big swings and impacts but smaller swerves and grace notes. Caught in a headlock and wrestling over a gun, Fok kicks his opponent’s leg forward so that he can shoot him through the foot. After the camera tilts down to catch the foot being moved, the segment concludes with a close-up of the wince-inducing injury—violence as punctuation. At the start of the fight from The Shadow’s Edge, Wong rushes Fu, pushing him back. In a barrage of split-second shots, we see Wong shoulder-throw Fu (captured in a medium shot); Fu, as he’s landing, hook his right leg around Wong’s from the front (medium shot of legs); and Wong, shoving Fu back to unfasten the leg (low angle medium long shot, framing torsos and upper thighs), wrap his own leg behind Fu’s (medium shot of legs again), sending them both falling back (medium shot of torsos tipping frame right).
Top and bottom: The Shadow’s Edge (Larry Yang, 2025).
Both scenes make effective use of props and the physical environment. In The Prosecutor, the forest of MTR grab poles serves as both obstacle and opportunity, requiring combatants to weave around them while also blocking enemy strikes. When the final boss of the hit squad, a brass-knuckled pugilist with a grudge (Yu Kang), hurls haymakers at Fok, the dented poles telegraph his seismic strength.
In The Shadow’s Edge, Fu’s weapon, a switchblade, forms a striking visual throughline. Kept crisply and almost continuously in view—close-ups of the weapon abound, and, even in long shots, precise lighting ensures that the glinting blade catches the eye—the knife and its palpable metallic sharpness make the action feel more tactile and dangerous. When the fight travels to a cramped storage space, forcing combatants to hunch over and kneel down, the tighter framing and increased visual clutter underscore the camera’s own physical constraints, heightening a sense of claustrophobia in the scene. Meanwhile, flashes of improbable roominess—for example, a sweeping roundhouse kick by Fu, captured in a quick but wide shot—seem more startling and cathartic by contrast.
Top and bottom: The Sixth Robber (Chris Huo, 2025).
The most pronounced spatial constriction on this list, however, appears in a scene from the Chinese DTV film The Sixth Robber, in which three burglars, after raiding a transport van full of cash, are ambushed by a security guard (Yuen Biao) who has snuck into the backseat of their getaway car (01:04:12 to 01:05:49). The ensuing three-on-one melee unfolds entirely within the vehicle and is a marvel of efficient visual communication. Plunging into a dense tangle of limbs, seatbelts, and car seats, in which combatants are practically piled on top of each other and options for camera placement are severely limited, strategic framing and editing nonetheless gives us just enough information to track the flow of the action. Furthermore, consistent with a general trend in Chinese DTV action, many shots adopt z-axis staging (actions moving toward or away from the camera) and wide-angle framing that seem to expand the car’s interior, and the camera is constantly tilting and bobbing, further dynamizing a mise-en-scène of minimal maneuverability. The chief thrill of this set piece stems from a sense of spatial problem-solving: Somehow, director Chris Huo and his team have delivered clean editing, varied framing, and intricate choreography within such a notoriously confined space.
Top and bottom: The Old Way (Fan Xiang, 2025).
The Sixth Robber is chock-full of scuzzy characters and unflinching brutality. The Chinese DTV historical actioner The Old Way features a more honorable posse of outlaws. Small-time hoodlum Peng (Zhang Jin) and his two subordinates (Guo Yiqian and Ning Huanyu) infiltrate a lavish wedding hosted by a ruthless gang, trying to aid the bride-to-be (Cheng Yi), who has sold herself to save her fellow villagers from having to pay the gang tribute. When their true plan comes to light, one of the gang members sends an assassin after Peng into a forest, leading to the film’s best fight (00:54:46 to 00:57:37 in the film). Tossing Peng a pair of short sabers in the spirit of either fairness or competition, the assassin lunges in with his own knives, kicking off a blitz of steel-slinging. Glimpsed largely in two-shots that keep both fighters in frame—some displaying the combatants in profile, some peering down from overhead, one slick shot arcing down from an overhead position to a ground-level framing—the blisteringly fast choreography presents an intricate dance of interlocking limbs and blades.
LETTING LOOSE
Top and bottom: Baby Assassins: Nice Days (Yugo Sakamoto, 2024).
In The Prosecutor, Yen sports a slim suit, the fitted fabric accentuating each snappy move he makes, establishing him as sharp, alert, and professional. Costume conveys character at a glance: Fok is a straight-arrow, no-nonsense lawman whose integrity cuts through the noise. By contrast, baggy pants and outerwear are the attire of choice in the finale of Baby Assassins: Nice Days, in which young hitwoman Mahiro (Saori Izawa) squares off against Kaede (Sosuke Ikematsu), a lone wolf with the obsessive, self-imposed mission of racking up 150 kills (01:33:19 to 01:36:44 in the film). Dispensing with the knives used in the (also excellent) preceding fight—which left Mahiro’s partner Chisato (Akari Takaishi) out cold—the final test of their skills is a back-to-basics, bare-knuckle brawl in which the two rain down blows in extremely close quarters.
Cycling through a dizzying array of maneuvers—while pinned between a standing Kaede’s legs and curled up in a ball, Mahiro rocks side to side to unbalance him; to free herself from a standing headlock, she braces both feet against his thighs, pushing herself loose—this fight, and the film in general, represents action director Kensuke Sonomura at the peak of his powers. One of the most innovative fight choreographers working today, Sonomura has carved out a niche designing artfully disheveled action. Unlike the previous section’s examples, in which fights are broken up into relatively discrete beats through punchy editing, Sonomura’s shots often run longer and hang back, framing the scuffling dance of fighters reacting to each other in real time: clinching, feinting, sliding, pivoting. The prominent sound of rustling fabric heightens a sense of constant microadjustment, a sonic motif visually enhanced by the characters’ loose-fitting clothes, tactile reminders of the way that fabric feels on our bodies when we move.
Top and bottom: Ghost Killer (Kensuke Sonomura, 2024).
“Looseness” is a guiding principle for Sonomura’s work in general, which eschews slick, precise choreography in favor of beats that are more open and tentative—evoking the messiness and uncertainty of real-world fighting. The final face-off in Ghost Killer, which sees Sonomura performing double duty as director and action director, exemplifies this quality (01:27:28 to 01:32:52 in the film). In this scene, college girl Fumika (Akari Takaishi), possessed by the spirit of dead hitman Hideo (Masanori Mimoto), takes on a tough henchman (Naohiro Kawamoto) in the dingy basement of a yakuza lair. Throughout the film, Fumika and Hideo are often shown side by side whenever he doesn’t “take full control”: we see and hear him chatting with her, even though other characters cannot. When he does take over in situations that call for prowess in combat, the film toggles between two strategies: presenting a suddenly stone-faced Fumika dispatching men twice her size, and showing Hideo in action with the understanding that it’s still Fumika’s body that’s performing the movements.
Sonomura opts for the second strategy in the film’s climax, letting two seasoned stunt performers do their thing. The result is an extraordinary feat of screen fighting technique. Lengthy passages of choreography unfold with minimal cuts, the camera tracking and circling around actors Mimoto and Kawamoto as they bob, weave, grapple, and throw jabs; when blows are dodged, they miss by mere centimeters, demonstrating the performers’ precision. A sense of tactical improvisation prevails. Using both hands to defend his eye from the henchman’s knife, Hideo knocks away the weapon with the side of his head, sending it clattering to the floor; later, his left arm immobilized, he tucks in his left knee to block a punch with his shin. Rather than feeling like predesigned “choreography” that’s subsequently “executed,” such moments seem to emerge from the specific, organic demands of the unfolding fight, each action eliciting an adaptive response. The burden is on the performers to not only memorize the choreography but sell this sense of genuine reactivity. That the scene feels so raw is a testament to Mimoto’s and Kawamoto’s skill and preparation and, as longtime collaborations of Sonomura, to the trio’s synergy.
Top and bottom: Demon City (Seiji Tanaka, 2025).
A different kind of messiness marks the fights in the live-action manga adaptation Demon City, which centers on former hitman Shûhei (Tôma Ikuta) and his mission of vengeance against the men who murdered his family and put him in a coma. The film is full of visceral, convulsive brawls in which a tightly wound Shûhei, his face taut and movements jerky with rage, throws himself at enemies with abandon. The most extreme of these fights happens early in the film, when one of the killers he’s after (Masanobu Takashima) sneaks into his hospital room to finish him off, triggering a slow emergence from his coma (00:31:11 to 00:32:15 and 00:33:51 to 00:35:34 in the film, with a brief break in between). The ensuing fight is a nail-biting spectacle premised on Shûhei’s physical limitations: Despite still being partially paralyzed, he improbably gets the upper hand on his attacker and an underling that later joins the fray. With slapstick-adjacent visuals, like our hero lurching about like a zombie and flopping around on the floor like a spilled goldfish, the scene generates spectacular catharsis through a scenario of spectacular constraint.
HEAVY LIFTING
Top and bottom: Ballerina (Len Wiseman, 2025).
Chad Stahelski reportedly reshot much of the John Wick spinoff Ballerina, a rumor that the film itself bears out. Focusing on Eve (Ana de Armas), a trained killer raised in the Ruska Roma, a syndicate of assassins with a public front as a ballet company, the film tracks her quest to find her father’s murderers, which brings her to a quaint mountain village. Upon arriving at a cozy two-floor restaurant, she is almost immediately shot at by the next person who enters (Daniel Bernhardt), kicking off bedlam in which she fends off a parade of tactically trained townspeople instructed to take her out (01:09:40 to 01:14:27 in the film).
On full display is the kind of lucid filmmaking and weighty, effortful choreography associated with the John Wick movies (2014–2023). Longer takes and depth staging abound, fleshing out a sense of tactile, three-dimensional space; even the briefest shots consistently present stunts in their entirety—a head plowing through glass, a body crashing onto a table—thus selling their authenticity. While struggling with an opponent in the background, Eve pivots to shoot an enemy that pops in foreground-left. A few moments later, this first opponent, now functioning as a meat shield in the foreground of the frame, receives an axe swing meant for Eve, who then shoots the second assailant in the chin before lobbing the axe deep into the background at a third newcomer, cleaving his forehead and sending him over a railing—all in one shot. A stunts showcase, this scene underlines the physical effort and coordination of its own execution, making it a worthy addition to Stahelski’s résumé.
Top and bottom: Freaky Tales (Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, 2024).
Stunts-centric action filmmaking has become the calling card of action design company 87Eleven Entertainment, cofounded by Stahelski and John Wick codirector David Leitch, and 87North Productions, the production firm spearheaded by Leitch and producer Kelly McCormick. Two other releases this year bear the “87” tag—Nobody 2 and Love Hurts—but their fights are surpassed by the climax of anthology film Freaky Tales, which, in its commitment to visual clarity and heavy movements, feels like an honorary “87” entrant (01:25:51 to 01:30:33 in the film).
After his girlfriend is murdered in a home invasion perpetrated by neo-Nazis, Golden State Warriors star player Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis) visits the gang’s suburban stronghold equipped with an arsenal of bladed weapons and deadly martial arts training. The satisfaction of this scene stems from not just the hate group’s gory demise but Ellis’s magnetic physicality, which recalls Keanu Reeves’s from John Wick. Lanky and big-boned, Ellis’s movements feel lumbering but deliberate. Each maneuver—cracking a thug in the face after flicking open a cabinet door as a feint; pelting a succession of gangsters with throwing knives hidden in his yellow combat vest—feels extra precise because it seems to take an extra millisecond to execute, suggesting the forethought that’s required to mobilize such a bulky physique. The curtness of the takedowns—each opponent is felled within a couple moves—reinforces this sense of pinpoint accuracy.
Top and bottom: Exterritorial (Christian Zübert, 2025).
Contemporary “one shot” action scenes foreground the labor of coordinating performers’ movements with those of the camera itself, generating a sense of physical and existential weight. The continuous recording seems to “authenticate” the spectacle that we see as actually having taken place; even in cases of obvious postproduction manipulation (green-screen backdrops, jankily masked cuts), “oners” elicit the primal thrill of seeing action unfold in real time and real space. The oner centerpiece in Exterritorial, about an ex-special forces mother named Sara (Jeanne Goursaud) who uncovers a criminal conspiracy after her son (Rickson Guy da Silva) mysteriously vanishes inside the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt, thrives on the interplay between onscreen physicality and camera technique (00:36:10 to 00:38:20 in the film). After two thugs show up at the room of a refugee held captive at the consulate (Lera Abova), keen on thwarting her attempts to share incriminating information, Sara intervenes, using her tactical training to take out the aggressors.
Most of the scene occurs within one (stitched-together) long take that travels from bedroom to bathroom, the impression of real-time struggle conferring a sense of bruising heaviness and accentuating the fight’s choreographic idiosyncrasies: for instance, the way Sara, being slighter in strength and physique, relies a lot on her elbows to maximize damage, forming a striking visual arc each time she twists her torso, or how, in general, the fight involves big, gesticulative motions that fill the frame, visually “opening up” the tangle of bodies in a centrifugal way. Framing this action, the camera transforms how it feels. Twice, the camera plummets with a body falling to the floor, triggering the viewer’s own stomach to drop. Elsewhere, laterally tracking her as she drives an opponent into the wall, the camera slips slightly past the wall’s edge at the moment of impact before swinging back to re-center the fighters, as if it itself had been pushed by Sara and needed to regain its footing. This subtle visual grace note—the reciprocating camera movement of past-the-wall-then-back-again—viscerally imparts the force of the push to viewers.
MIMESIS — ABSTRACTION
Top and bottom: Ne Zha 2 (Jiao Zi, 2025).
According to scholar Maureen Furniss, animation exists on a continuum between “mimesis” and “abstraction”: between imitating the natural world as we perceive it and embracing the medium’s blank-canvas logic, having been drawn from scratch on a page (or screen). Closer to the mimesis pole would be something like Disney’s photorealistically animated Lion King reboots (2019–2024), which are virtually indistinguishable from live-action footage; nearer the abstraction pole would be experimental animation like Norman McLaren’s Blinkity Blank (1955), which is composed entirely of lines and shapes flickering across a black background. Most mainstream computer animation falls somewhere in the middle, splitting the difference between the solidity of real-world bodies and objects and the elasticity that animation affords. Ne Zha 2, the Chinese blockbuster sensation and, at press time, 2025’s highest grossing film in the world, demonstrates the thrilling possibilities of this aesthetic intersection, especially in a scene where dragon prince Ao Bing, occupying the body of the demon-born protagonist Ne Zha, duels a water demon atop bamboo stalks in front of a waterfall (00:58:02 to 01:02:04 in the film).
Although editing still drives the scene’s progression—in classic Hong Kong style, the camera angle changes dynamically, each shot tailored precisely to the bit of action it’s framing—there are moments that giddily exceed what live-action cinema could practically achieve. Animation’s capacity for molding bodies and space is showcased via longer takes that feature characters and “camera” whipping around with impossible ease and speed. When movements like this are staged in extreme depth—actions often launch from extreme foreground to extreme background or vice versa, with the “camera” struggling to keep up—and bursts of slow motion that arrest splash-panel-style compositions, the film draws on a stylistic toolkit reminiscent of anime, inviting reflection on how different animation styles convey texture, weight, and force.
Top and bottom: I Am What I Am 2 (Su Haipeng, 2024).
Centering on a young lion dancer named Gyun who enters an MMA tournament to pay for his injured father’s medical expenses and save a local gym from being absorbed by a predatory competitor, I Am What I Am 2 is also computer-animated, but it hews closer to Furniss’s mimesis pole. Although some of its aesthetic choices call to mind contemporary trends in computer animation (rubbery-looking skin, somewhat exaggerated body proportions), the film’s design is, on the whole, startlingly realistic. From parting blades of grass to a bowl of stir-fried noodles to fighters’ taut, anatomically detailed musculature, the world of I Am What I Am 2 feels tactile and lived-in, qualities expressed most vividly in the ring.
In the film’s most thrilling fight, Gyun squares off against a veteran Muay Thai fighter, his toughest opponent yet (01:10:49 to 01:22:39 in the film). One of the film’s greatest strengths is the way it develops story and character through action. Here, the tentativeness that Gyun displayed in his debut bout has been replaced by more sure-footed movements. The start of his latest fight expresses this shift. Once the starting bell rings, Gyun and his adversary leap right into a highly technical exchange of blows, music and crowd noise minimized to accentuate whooshing swings, thudding impacts, and the thumping of feet on canvas. The film downplays the animation principle of “squash and stretch”—deforming drawn objects to convey weight, force, and vitality, such as a ball flattening into an oval upon hitting the ground, or a chest ballooning to convey a deep intake of breath—so that characters retain their sense of corporeal solidity. Evoking live-action photography, the fight derives the brunt of its visceral power from traditional cinematic techniques: editing and framing (shrewd alternations between wide and tight, level and overhead); “camera” movement (zipping, slingshotting around); and fight choreography (some of the year’s best, dynamic in a way that conveys characters’ in-ring strategizing).
Top and bottom: Avatar: Fire and Ash (James Cameron, 2025).
Even closer to Furniss’s mimesis pole is the photorealistic CGI in Avatar: Fire and Ash. Like its predecessors, the film shines most in 3D, high frame rate (HFR), and the highest possible resolution, which accentuate the fine details of tactile verisimilitude that the visual effects team have achieved: the pores and sweat on Na’vi faces, the scuff marks on a yellow bulldozer, the ocean water line that seems to lap at your lower eyelids. HFR smooths out motion blur, sustaining a sense of uncanny, you-can-practically-touch-it clarity even in movement.
The set piece that best exploits the film’s riot of optimal formats involves the Na’vi Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) attempting to rescue her husband and tribal leader Jake (Sam Worthington) from the clutches of the US military with the assistance of a couple allies (02:02:15 to 02:10:02 in the film). Set on and around the flight deck of Bridgehead City, a US coastal research base on the Na’vi planet of Pandora, the scene presents a cluttered, layered mise-en-scène—railings, walkways, towers, industrial equipment—that enhances the effect of the 3D, providing more reference points for us to discern the stereoscopy at work. The illusion is further heightened by depth staging, like when Neytiri, skimming across water atop her pterodactyl-like steed, sends ocean spray in the direction of the camera, leaving droplets on the lens, or when the camera later adopts her first-person point of view, staring out precariously over the creature’s neck as it weaves through Bridgehead City’s dense industrial infrastructure. Viewing format plays an essential role in the scene’s kinesthetic power. In terms of traditional framing, editing, and choreography, the action is merely pretty good. With 3D and HFR, however, bodies and scenery feel fuller and more solid to begin with, infusing even the most basic choreographic maneuvers with an exceptional sense of substance and weight.
PLASTIC REALITY
Top and bottom: Good Bad Ugly (Adhik Ravichandran, 2025).
A dance hall fight scene in Good Bad Ugly, in which former crime boss AK (Ajith Kumar) beats up an army of gangsters to find the culprit behind his son’s wrongful imprisonment (00:40:29 to 00:44:23 in the film), is largely live action, but the sheer deluge of editing and image-manipulation techniques displays a degree of plasticity comparable to the animated examples above. As AK punches an opponent with his trademark spiked knuckle-duster, the frame momentarily freezes and turns grayscale, with AK’s body highlighted in orange; this intermittent freeze-framing happens a few more times, featuring the same orange-on-black palette. Elsewhere, a long take of AK clobbering his attackers mixes buoyant camera movement with the sort of extreme ramping that is ubiquitous in Indian action cinema—rapid, lurching oscillations between slo-mo and real-time/sped-up—reveling in disorienting artifice. Jump cuts and percussive editing abound, synced to a driving rap-metal soundtrack (in the original Tamil version). Outlandish, gravity-defying choreography—a thug, blown back by pistol fire, topples over his teammates like bowling pins; after AK tosses his sunglasses aside in stylish, action-hero fashion, his associate (Sunil) snatches them in midair using a metal clasp attached to a chain, securing his boss’s accessory—sits alongside bruising, practical, furniture-destroying impacts. This borderline experimental scene evinces what I have elsewhere described as a postproduction aesthetic: a palpably manipulated visual style that trumpets the power of editing and digital visual effects. When paired with the spectacle of AK demolishing adversaries, this aesthetic conveys a feeling of total spatial mastery.
Top and bottom: Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet, 2025).
The sparse but indelible oeuvre of husband-wife team Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani features avant-garde reimaginings of European pulp traditions, from giallo (Amer, 2009; The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, 2013) to spaghetti westerns (Let the Corpses Tan, 2017) to 1960s Eurospy movies, which are the main reference point for their latest project, Reflection in a Dead Diamond. The duo’s films enact a kind of foreground-background inversion, in which typical genre signifiers—giallo’s flashing blades and macabre mansions, spaghetti westerns’ treasure chests and desert standoffs, Eurospy’s Bond-inspired gadgetry—are subsumed into an orgy of sensation. Stretching leather, chafed skin, dilating pupils, cold metal, hot breath—all and more are evoked through amplified Foley, extreme close-ups, and fragmented editing, overwhelming the viewer with a barrage of vivid, often erotic textures. These films feel like trips into the sensory subconscious of pulp cinema, the unruly materiality that is typically subordinated to genre iconography and narrative. They turn their respective genres inside out; any flashes of familiarity only serve to highlight just how alien the whole package is.
All of this makes the relative classicality of the central fight in Reflection in a Dead Diamond, in which a leather-clad assassin named Serpentik (Thi Mai Nguyen) takes on a bar full of chain- and switchblade-wielding thugs, stand out (00:23:50 to 00:26:54 in the film). It isn’t that Cattet and Forzani’s experimental machinations have been dialed down in any significant way; the editing remains elliptical, flitting from close-up to close-up, hyper-fixating on specific elements while leaving much to the imagination. Rather, it’s that contemporary action sequences already tend toward impressionism. Typical continuity rules are often stretched and broken; accelerated cutting and fusillades of tighter framings are par for the course. This scene from Reflection in a Dead Diamond presents a happy marriage of action filmmaking grammar and the directors’ signature style, in which the propulsive concatenation of tactile, often gruesome details—hair full of barbed wire raking across skin; a spiked stiletto jamming through a jaw; blood and teeth pooling on a foosball table, courtesy of a figurine spun against the mouth—feels not so far removed from the way Hong Kong action cinema pieces together choreography shot by shot, sans establishing shot (a technique that the late, great David Bordwell called “constructive editing”). In pushing this visual fragmentation even further than usual, Cattet and Forzani probe the limits of action filmmaking while retaining the visceral rush of tried-and-true methods.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Clockwise from top left: Mahavatar Narsimha (Ashwin Kumar, 2025), Diablo (Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, 2025), Baaghi 4 (A. Harsha, 2025), Bodyguard 3 (Nie Rongxin, 2025).
Beyond these fifteen selections, 2025 featured an abundance of good action. Some honorable mentions: Narasimha fights Hiranyakashipu and palace guards in Mahavatar Narsimha, Marty defends the safe house in Heads of State, Wan-seo versus Yeong-chun in Hi-Five, antique swordplay in Bodyguard 3, the rooftop fight in Thug Life, the bar massacre in Diablo, Ronnie takes on masked thugs in Baaghi 4, mansion katana mayhem in They Call Him OG, the holding cell brawl in Madharaasi, the car fight in Vidaamuyarchi, Chandra demolishes special forces in Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra, the Mughal army ambush in Chaava, climactic cross-cutting in Escape from the 21st Century, and the final fight against Yagyu siblings in Shogun’s Ninja.
Various action or action-adjacent films missed the cut in terms of their set pieces but are overall worth watching. These include Night Call, Eenie Meanie, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, 40 Acres, Last Bullet, The Fantastic 4: First Steps, Samurai Fury, Bullet Train Explosion, Deathstalker, Playdate, M3gan 2.0, Predator: Badlands, Play Dirty, Sinners, Dhurandhar, Retro, The Naked Gun, and Safe House.
Another year of exciting action awaits. Upcoming releases include two Jason Statham vehicles, action-horror-comedy They Will Kill You, hard-R swashbuckler The Bluff, Takashi Miike’s MMA foray Blazing Fists, high-profile blockbuster sequels like Mortal Kombat II, Dhurandhar 2, and Dune: Part Three, and (hopefully) Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious and Qin Pengfei’s Wings of Dread. Full steam ahead.
Illustration by Niklas Wesner.
Continue reading Notebook’s 2025 Year in Review.