Best Movie Stunts of All Time, Over Nearly 100 Years of Oscars

Buster Keaton’s lifetime of (literally) death-defying stunt work may have crossed the line from risky to foolhardy here: the side of a whole building falls down onto Buster, but his standing figure fits neatly into the upstairs window. There was no margin for error: an inch off in measurement or a sudden gust of wind and he would have been flattened.

This entry fudges a bit on the timeline, but no litany of great stunt work can omit the four-eyed comedian Harold Lloyd. In Speedy, Lloyd — or rather his stunt double for the most dangerous turns — barrels through the streets of New York at the reins of a horse-drawn trolley. In an unplanned accident left in the film, the trolley crashes into a pillar of the old IRT elevated subway. The driver goes flying.  “No one was hurt and it was a miracle that the horses were saved,” reported Variety. In 1919, Lloyd had lost a thumb and finger from his right hand in an explosion (not a stunt) during a publicity shoot, so his strength and dexterity throughout his “thrill films” is all the more remarkable.

The choreography of the biplanes buzzing like swarms of mosquitos in Hells’ Angels (1930) is the obvious choice, but the flyers in Howard Hawk’s The Dawn Patrol (1930) were also aces. The nod goes to Hawks because the 46 stunt flyers who took to the air for simulated combat in his film all returned to the ground safely.

“This was before the special effects boys learned how to make ‘exploding’ bullets as safe as cap guns,” recalled James Cagney, who played the title gangster. When Cagney ducks down an aisle behind a “stone” wall, a former WWI machine gunner off screen opened fire. “The wall crumbled to sawdust, and so would I had I been there two seconds before,” gulped Cagney.  

At a time when the competition in aerial acrobatics was fierce, the stunt flying in John Ford’s salute to the right stuff of aerial postal workers was praised as “sensational,” “breathtaking” and “hair raising.”  The topper comes when a hotdog flyer buzzes an airfield and zooms his biplane not once but three times through the length of a hanger.

The U.S. Army Air Corps planes buzzing the Empire State Building are real, hired off the books (and without filing an official flight path) by producer and former Great War pilot Merian C. Cooper.  In the studio insert, that’s Cooper and his partner, director Ernest B. Schoedsack, in the cockpit machine gunning Kong. “It is a great piece of imagination, hatched in the brain of a showman for showmen, produced in grand style and good taste, and most capably acted and directed,” read THR‘s 1933 review.

 “Thrilling as a bugle call, vivid as a campfire flame, vital as the crimsoned pages that he lived, Pancho Villa marches again to the mad music of ‘La Cucaracha!” blurbed the New York American of Jack Conway’s biopic of the Mexican revolutionary, packed with spectacular equestrian battle scenes and featuring a genuine Vorkapich montage.   

Henry Hathaway wrangled 1,200 humans and countless horses on an 88-day shoot over four locations and 40 studio sets. It was a notoriously jinxed production: myriad extras and stunt people hobbled away with broken bones, animal trainer Melvin Scufe was hospitalized from a camel bite, and star Franchot Tone fell twelve feet and was knocked out cold while fighting Gary Cooper.

Another great Howard Hawks aerial drama in which no one got killed. “There is nothing more thrilling on screen that an airplane taking off and landing,” once said Hawks. In its assessment, THR was approving of the Warner Bros. production. “An exciting comedy drama of commercial aviation which has the authentic feel of the game and is up to the minute in its display of the inside workings,” the paper’s 1935 review read. “Handsomely produced, well directed and enacted by an excellent cast of twenty with James Cagney and Pat O’Brien at its head, this offering is headed for substantial returns up and down the scale.”

Special effects magic and adroit stunt work, from pros, extras, and stars bring to life the Category 5 meteorological event that climaxes John Ford’s South Sea adventure romance. A breathless trade reporter marveled at how the “six 12-cylinder wind machines roared in deep-throated synchronicity to send showers of blinding spray about huddled groups of natives, and tons of water were sent hurling down 65-foot inclines to engulf principles struggling in a tank below. The effect to the eye was blind chaos.” No one drowned. 

The Technicolor theatricality of Michael Curtiz’s men in tights shenanigans may disguise how dangerous the air can get with all those swords slashing and arrows zipping around. In one scene, arrows were shot from a distance of 100 feet on a 40-foot elevation at two stunt men wearing wooden breastplates. “The stooges were knocked flat by the impact!” chortled THR at the time.

The sequence of Yakima Canutt falling under a team of six stagecoach horses and the stagecoach remains the platonic ideal of Hollywood stunt work. In costume as an attacking Indian, he leaps at full gallop from his horse and lands between the front two horses pulling the stagecoach. Falling between the horses, he is dragged along the ground until he lets go and lies flat as the horses and the stagecoach pass over him. (Steven Spielberg could not resist repurposing the stunt in Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981], with a truck subbing for a stagecoach.) Canutt considered the exploit (“stunt” seems too trivial a description) his personal best. “A whale of a good story that has brilliant direction, writing and acting,” THR wrote in its 1939 review.

The prolific Michael Curtiz concocted one of Yakima Canutt’s trademark stunts in this popular Errol Flynn western hailed as “sure-fire box office smash” by THR at the time. Doubling for Flynn, Canutt rides one horse leading another horse. His horse gets shot and falls, Canutt grabs the saddle horn of the other horse, and, pony express style, bounces up into the saddle of the second horse. “This was a good gag and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself,” said Canutt.

During WWII, the most exhilarating onscreen action was in the newsreels and the combat reports performed by GIs who were not members of the Screen Actors Guild. “Hollywood will be called upon by the government to increase its efforts for the building of patriotism and boosting of the sales of defense bonds and stamps; the former will be achieved via motion pictures, and the latter by personal appearances and shorts,” THR wrote in December 1941, shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack.

Directed by and starring Laurence Olivier, the British import — a medieval war film informed by the ongoing mechanized war — was shot in 1944 and released stateside in 1946.  The staging of the climactic battle on St. Crispin’s Day in 1415 featured hundreds of knights on horseback in a melee of Technicolor bloodletting that had critics musing about the more recent conflagration. The British “won the battle with the atom bomb of the day, the longbow,” noted Variety at the time.  

A mishap that occurred during Cecil B. DeMille’s frontier action adventure shows the danger of even seemingly routine stunt work. As Variety unsentimentally described it that year: “Three stuntmen were badly injured on location at Cooks Forest outside of Pittsburgh. The men were hurt while filming a scene which called for them to swing from their horses, grab onto a limb and disappear into the tree foliage. Instead, they landed in a hospital.”

Howard Hawks yet again. The fabled 1,000-mile cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Abilene is recreated with startling verisimilitude thanks to a battalion of hardworking horsemen and tens of thousands of cattle who look lethal even when not stampeding. “The picture would be notable on one count — if no other — the magnificent action material that is accomplished in the movement of the huge cattle herd across the western plains, an element of the story that reaches an electrifying climax,” praised THR‘s review.

In a beautiful display of equestrian skill, shot by John Ford in a valorizing long take, ranch hand turned stunt double turned actor Ben Johnson jumps on a horse and rides into the distance at breakneck speed, man and beast like a single creature. THR‘s review called it “the finest outdoor picture produced in Hollywood for a very long time.”

Directed by Jacques Tourneur, the Burt Lancaster swashbuckler warrants a look not so much for its dauntless gymnastics — Lancaster was a trained acrobat who routinely did his own stunts — but because the authenticity of the stunt work incited a prolonged legal battle over truth in stunt advertising.  Unbeknownst to Jack Warner, the publicity department at Warner Bros. came up with its own stunt and offered $1,000,000 to anyone who could prove Lancaster did not do his own stunts in the film. An extra on the set claimed to have proof Lancaster cheated and claimed the bounty. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that Lancaster had in fact performed all his dangerous stunts, and had used a stand-in only briefly, to rest between scenes, not to avoid risk. 

Director William Wellman’s female-centric western should be better known. At the time, THR deemed it a “a big, sprawling, tremendously dramatic drama of pioneer days whose high artistic and dramatic content inevitably bracket it with such memorable outdoor narratives as Stage Coach.” Through sheer force of will, assisted by Robert Taylor and a hardy crew of stunt men and women, the frontier ladies drive and drag their Conestoga wagons through rivers and over mountains to get to the promised land of California — and their husbands.

Six-year-old Steven Spielberg was mesmerized by the (miniature work) train wreck in Cecil B. DeMille’s three ring circus, but the daring trapeze artistry and risky proximity to elephants will impress older viewers. DeMille boasted that his stars really risked their lives for the film. THR‘s review hailed “a big, seething SHOW, spectacular, exciting, colorful. It is a mighty pageant set against the fascinating panorama of billowing canvas, sawdust, bright-red wagons, calliopes and people who live the life of circus mummers because to them there is no other.”

It’s hard to tell who’s a stunt man and who’s an exploited “native bearer” in John Ford’s remake of Red Dust (1932), shot on location in Kenya (during a Mau Mau uprising), Tanganyika, Uganda, and what was then known as French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo. Three of the crew were killed in road accidents, but only assistant director John Hancock, an Englishman, seems to have been mentioned in the trade press. 

Ben Chapman and Ricou Browning played the Gill-Man, with Browning doing most of the underwater sequences for the amphibian, holding his breath for up to four minutes. THR wrote in its review at the time: “a good piece of science-fiction of the beauty and the beast school, the beast in this case being a monstrous combination of man and fish. It makes for solid horror-thrill entertainment”

Of all the classical Hollywood genres, westerns took the biggest toll on men and animals. In this Anthony Mann western, stuntman Frosty Royce was stricken with a heart attack while riding a horse on the ridge of Devil’s Backbone. Forty-three years old, twenty-three years in the business, he was finally forced to hang up his spurs.

At three and a half hours, Dino De Laurentiis and King Vidor’s VistaVision spectacle seems almost as long as Tolstoy’s novel, but the logistics are a marvel of second unit and stunt work. THR wrote at the time in a review that the production “is on a lavish scale comparable only to a handful of motion film pictures in history and it will stand up to comparison with the great ones.” Motion Picture Daily was in awe of “the maneuverings of thousands of men and horses, the depiction of the destruction of Moscow, the evacuation of the city and its occupation by Napoleon’s army, and the eventual disastrous retreat of the French over the thousands of miles of scorched and frozen earth.”

Set in a Japanese prison camp during WWII, David Lean’s epic was shot in sweltering Sri Lanka under conditions that cast and crew semi-jokingly compared to the original. A stuntman and a prop man were nearly drowned during the climactic bridge explosion. The end result was a movie that drew raves: “if ever there was a nearly perfect motion picture in every way, this Sam Spiegel production for Columbia is it,” wrote THR in a review calling it a “magnificent war epic” in the headline.

Before the banditry of Burt Reynolds, Robert Mitchum smuggled moonshine through the back roads of Appalachia and left Treasury Department agents in the rear-view mirror. After all, says Mitchum, a man has a right to make whiskey on his own land. “Carey Loftin’s ingenuity in rigging the exciting chases and motor crashes rates him high among Hollywood’s stunt men,” wrote THR, giving name credit to a player usually overlooked.

Yakima Canutt again, now in harness as stunt coordinator, trained 80 Yugoslavian horses and Stephen Boyd and Charlton Heston to master a sport not held in a coliseum since the Vandals sacked Rome in 455 AD or at least since the earlier MGM version in 1925. “The unprecedented $15,000,000 production cost is all there on the screen in a prodigious array of breathtaking spectacle, wonder, splendor, unforgettable sights and sound,” THR added in its review. “As many as 8,000 extras are on film at one time, not to mention hundreds of horses, camels from Africa, 50 ships built specially for the sea battle, 18 chariots and 300 different sets recreating the glory that was Rome, the grandeur that was Jerusalem. The magnitude of the physical and technical production is unsurpassed.”

Both Ben-Hur versions feature eye-popping horsemanship and charioteering, but the stunt race goes to the Wyler version not just for the widescreen, full-color spectacle but for not doing what the earlier version did: euthanize an estimated one hundred horses. Heston trained so earnestly with reins and whip that Canutt took him aside and said, “Chuck, you just stay in the chariot and you’re going to win the damn race.”

Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick’s non-biblical spectacle has magnificent stunt work throughout — the gladiator fights, the pitched battles — but the awesome shot of 8000 Spaniards playing Roman warriors, shot by Clifford Stine, is like watching a documentary from 71 BC. “It is a magnificent picture, spectacle to dazzle the eye, political conflict to tease the mind, intimacy to hug the heart,” THR noted in its review. “Because of its enormous cost (reportedly $12,000,000), Spartacus will not get its money back day after tomorrow. But it is a solid achievement, will be a smash attraction, and is a solid, long-term investment.”

Yakima Canutt and Charlton Heston again. Anthony Mann directed this reverent biopic of the eleventh century Castilian nobleman, enlivened by Canutt’s second unit work and an epic duel between Heston and Christopher Rhodes, shot over five days under the supervision of stunt coordinator Enzo Musumeci Greco. Critics carped that the most unlikely stunt in the film was how El Cid, dead but strapped to his horse, managed to lead the final battle.

The CineRama epic with three directors (Henry Hathaway did three sections, John Ford and George Marshall one each) includes buffalo stampedes, rafts spinning through river rapids, and a showstopping railroad wreck. It came at a price: stuntman Bob Morgan, husband of Yvonne De Carlo, was nearly killed in a mishap during the train sequence. 

The rolling hills of Bavaria are the launching pad for a 60-foot motorcycle jump in John Sturges’ WWII prison camp film. Steve McQueen, of course, is atop the Triumph TR6 Trophy in the medium and close shots and stuntman Bud Ekins makes the actual leap in the long shot. “I made it on the first pass,” Ekins was quoted saying to Cycle News Magazine in 1998, adding that he was paid $1,000 for the stunt.

Cy Endfield’s controversial depiction of the 1879 battle between 4,000 Zulu warriors and 100 or so dauntless Brits may well be problematic by today’s lights, but the spears-versus-rifles engagements are mounted with enthralling realism — and the Zulu tribesmen recruited for the film do their ancestors credit.

Director Ken Annakin’s zany period piece with a mouthful of a title harks back to the days of aviation before the Great War in 1910. “Such antique aircraft as Demoiselle, Bristol Box Kite, Avro Triplane and other flying oddities are the real stars of the picture,” wrote Box Office — though the other real stars are the magnificent men flying the “spit and baling wire” aircraft, including ex-RAF man and “old plane nut” Air Commander Allen H. Wheeler who quipped, “I’ve taken countless aircraft through the sound barrier but this is a bit more fun.” 

Producer-director-star Cornell Wilde puts himself through hell in this naked-and-afraid pursuit film shot on location Africa. Not for the squeamish.   

John Frankenheimer’s documentary-style race car film features radio-controlled Super Panavision cameras, car sick-inducing helicopter shots, James Garner driving at 140 mph., and somersaulting race cars courtesy of special effects man Milt Rice, who “devised an air cannon that could catapult a car (minus engine) 200 yards in 2 seconds,” according to an account of the filming and stunt work in American Cinematographer.

Of course this was a pick, see above. “One gasping 11-minute chase sequence packs more excitement than anything since the second Ben Hur chariot race,” raved THR at the time, of the iconic sequence. “Bullitt delivers the leader-to-leader bravura action that few films even dare promise without chucking reason or integrity. It is unlikely that the film can draw the monies required to move it to the profit column, but it should still be a walloping grosser and a popular hit.”

The best thing about John Frankenheimer’s stillborn melodrama is the breathtaking sky-diving, captured by Carl Boenish’s aerial photography and visual effects experts J. McMillan Johnson and Carroll L. Shepphird. For the film’s Hollywood premiere, the other kind of stunt was staged: three skydivers did a 3,500-foot free fall carrying smoking flares for a pinpoint landing in the Pacific Cinerama Dome Theater parking lot.

As with the biplanes called back into action for the postwar WWI aerial films, the postwar WWII spectacles are thrilling because the original ordnance could be called back up for duty and photographed in the material world. At the beginning of the Japanese-U.S. coproduction, there is a heart-stopping scene, based on a true event, where a flying instructor, giving an early morning lesson to a student, finds her plane in the midst of a swarm of Japanese zeroes that fly into frame.

The car chase in The French Connection is the obvious choice, but for a taste of the car wrecks, amphetamines, and gratuitous nudity that defined a rich substratum of 1970s cinema take a road trip with Richard C. Sarafian’s drive-in cult classic, introduced to a new generation by Quentin Tarantino.  

Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight risked life and limb riding the rapids in John Boorman’s nightmarish hunting trip into the backwoods. “I went out and got Burt — I paid him $50,000 — and then Jon Voight. The two of them were total opposites,” Boorman recalled to THR in 2018. “Jon hated signing autographs — he didn’t want to be disturbed by it. Burt loved it, said he could do it all day long. Voight analyzed everything to death, while Burt’s approach was to look at a scene and say, ‘How do I get through this without making a fool of myself?’”

Franklin J. Schaffner’s gritty prison film turns locations in Jamaica and Spain into a fair facsimile of the hell on earth that was serving hard time in French Guyana. The money shot is of Steve McQueen, doing his own leap from a cliff off Maui into the ocean. “Papillon sometimes seems a majestic silent film, filled with staggering images of jungle, prison, ocean and sky,” added THR in its review at the time.

“Fire is a dangerous co-star in a movie stunt,” said Paul Stader, the stunt coordinator on Irwin Allen’s kooky disaster film. Fortunately, thanks to new advances in Nomex, a flame-resistant synthetic material, “One stunt man can burn two or three times longer than ever before, and I only worry half as much about their safety.” Noted THR‘s critical appraisal, “The fire and explosion scenes depend on the mechanical effects of A.D. Flowers and Logan Frazee, the sound of Herman Lewis and the stunt coordination of Paul Stader, which includes the most convincing human bodies on fire ever executed for the camera.”

Set during the great age of barnstorming biplane aerial acrobatics in 1926-1931, George Roy Hill’s part nostalgic, part terrifying Robert Redford starrer recruited pilots who were not trained during the Great War to perform aerodynamic stunts first designed in the Jazz Age. “Hill is after authenticity in staging. There are no process shots,” THR wrote in its review. “The spectacular air stunts are done either by Frank Tallman and his Tallmantz Aviation stuntmen or by the actor themselves. There is no back projection behind Redford — he is really up flying.”

“Sky Riders conceives a familiar kidnapping-by-terrorists plot but with a clever twist — the rescuers reach the isolated mountain hide-out with hang gliders,” so noted THR‘s review of the 1976 tale. Director Douglas Hickox showcases a hang-gliding team led by Bob Wills and Chris Wills, with star James Coburn doing most of his own stunt work. The trade added, “Ousama Rawi’s photography is particularly notable as it captures the hang gliding sequences.”

Hal Needham turned stuntman again to pilot Burt Reynolds’ Trans Am over the Mulberry Bridge. As THR noted in its review, “there are a number of amusing sequences, which are combined with some exciting road action to provide a mildly entertaining — and totally mindless — film. Hal Needham, making his directorial debut after an illustrious career as a stuntman, makes the most of the action and progresses the film with a perfect light-hearted touch.”

Hear me out: the pluck of seventy-year-old Katharine Hepburn should not be overlooked. When shown her would-be stunt double, Hepburn scoffed (and you can just hear her saying it), “That man doesn’t even look like me!” THR described what followed: “Shunning the use of a stunt double, the redoubtable Katharine Hepburn steadfastly did all her own stunt work on the picture, which required her to hang midair over a body of water on an old ship’s anchor, climb up a rope ladder into a traveling hot air balloon, put out a fire by smothering it with her own body and, finally, descend in traveling balloon over the Hollywood Bowl with an audience looking on as the Los Angeles Philharmonic played the ‘1812 Overture.’”

Incendiaries explode in dreamy rhythm to the Doors and the helicopter pilots of the Philippine Air Force fly in cavalry formation to Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyrie” in Francis Ford Coppola’s excursion into the heart of darkness. THR observed at the time in its review, “as the film progresses to the GI show, the attack on the bridge and ultimately the arrival at Kurtz’s Cambodian compound, we become increasingly aware that we are seeing a very special kind of imagery — where lights, settings and people are all meticulously choreographed, almost as an opera, for their fullest visual impact; while at other times, in the film’s more intimate moments, that same enormous screen may be filled by a single head — Sheen’s, Brando’s — peering at us directly through the lens of the camera.”

Richard Rush’s wheels within wheels depiction of Hollywood illusion making (the stunts in the film are being mounted for a spectacle and also, of course, for The Stunt Man) stars Steve Railsback as the title character or maybe, in keeping with the film’s conceit, it refers to stunt coordinator Grey Johnson. “Frankly, I feel that Rush has done an extraordinary job of making all this work, walking the fine edge between madness and melodramatics,” wrote film critic Arthur Knight in THR at the time. “The scale of this movie-within-a-movie (a World War II picture) is just this side of epic; and the stunts as coordinated by Grey Johnson are not only rousing but we are frequently permitted behind-the-scenes glimpses of their planning and operation.”

The souped-up vehicular velocity of George Miller’s death races in the post apocalyptic outback, with Mel Gibson behind the wheel of the last of V-8 interceptors, was the perfect payoff to the car chase sweepstakes of the 1970s. “During this highway odyssey, which becomes a running battle on wheels, every form of motorized mayhem, collision and sideswiping is staged by Miller,” found THR in its review. “It takes one’s breath away for sheer thrills.”

The clash of medieval armaments in John Milius’ flesh and fantasy/swords and sorcery action-adventure looks deadly, but, remarkably, the only real bloodletting was a cut finger. “For Schwarzenegger, the title role is a perfect fit, one which could finally catapult him into the upstairs echelon of today’s cinematic adventure heroes,” wrote THR in its review. “He has a winning rapport with the camera, sporting exactly the right mixture of chiseled brawn with vulnerability, and he consistently exhibits star quality. Even with his torso covered. Welcome to the big time, Arnold.”

Shot before the Twilight Zone disaster, the helicopter stunts attributed to the title chopper were meticulously mapped out and executed with precision. Though there are process and rear screen shots aplenty, a real chopper — a retrofitted 1973 French five seat executive helicopter — was flown by Jim Gavin and a seasoned crew of pilots.

The race between James Woods’ 308 GT Ferrari and Jeff Bridges’s 911 SC Porsche in downtown Los Angeles was hailed at the time as “the best piece of stunt work since The French Connection.” Taylor Hackford directed and stunt coordinator Gary Davis mapped out the racing action, only slightly hamstrung by the fact that the deal with automakers prohibited any crashes. “So we had to spice it up with a lot of near misses without causing any wrecks,” recalled Davis. THR added in its review, “today’s Mean Streets may likely be Century City corridors.”

William Friedkin somehow manages to top the car chase in The French Connection with a white-knuckled merge into every Angeleno’s driving nightmare — turning the wrong way down the 405 (actually the Terminal Island Freeway near Wilmington, CA). The production’s technical side scored praise from THR in its review, which noted, “While it is meant as no slight to the performers’ excellent portrayals, the star of To Live And Die In L.A. is surely the technical credits. Indeed, Friedkin and his crew have created a vivid, harsh and beautiful picture of corruption. They have seared through the glamor to the underside of both human nature and institutional integrity.”

“Stunt” is still too paltry a word for the maneuvers performed by the F-14 pilots in Tony Scott’s need-for-speed Tom Cruise classic. “Supervisor of special photographic effects Gary Gutierrez, along with aerial coordinator Dick Stevens and Top Gun Commander Bob Willard deserve highest praise for their full-blown action sequences,” THR wrote in its review. “The high-flying fight choreography is sensational, and director Scott’s shrewd use of subjective shots literally puts one in the cockpit.”

Peter Weller needed two stunt doubles as the cyborgian crime buster in Paul Verhoeven’s anti-corporate vision of a too close for comfort surveillance state. “Most impressive are Robocop‘s technical aspects, including Rob Bottin’s fierce Robocop creation. William Sandell’s sterile Metropolis-like production design is a powerful visual slam,” noted THR at the time in its review. “Jost Vacano’s astute wide-angled lensing of the corporate villains, as well as his tilted compositions of the ultramodern structures, give Robocop a mesmerizing, expressionistic slant.”

Among the fabulous set pieces in Harrison Ford’s third outing in the Indiana Jones series is a race between two speedboats passing between two ships, with predictable results for the pursuers. “Massive and sweeping, this intricately textured old-style movie is a marvel of technical and spit-and-polish enterprise,” THR added in its review. “Director Steven Spielberg’s robustly articulate visualization, as well as the film’s magnificently evocative effects are, in Lucasfilmspeak, the ultimate Forces of Good here.”

Walter Hill’s follow up to the Eddie Murphy-Nick Nolte blockbuster is a narrative mess, so savor the on-the-road stunt work, especially the sequence where a bus flips over, still a novelty at the time. “Tech credits are solid,” noted THR in an otherwise tepid review. “High praise to director of photography Matthew F. Leonetti for the expansive lensing.”

James Cameron’s high-tech follow-up to the low-tech noir The Terminator — Arnold Schwarzenegger joked that the catering bill for the sequel would have financed the original — is remembered for introducing a slew of then-unprecedented digital morphing effects, but Cameron went back to analog for the stunning stunt involving a helicopter and the California transportation system. The clip has been circulating around social media lately, with the commentary track from Cameron. “You see this helicopter going under the freeway overpass?” he asks. “That’s a helicopter going under a freeway overpass.”  The pilot was Chuck Tamburro.

Things blow up real good in the third outing of Richard Donner’s buddy film, emblematic of the FX-driven action-adventure cops and robber chaos of its time. “Throughout, director Donner maintains full-tilt control, accelerating through torrid action scenes while masterfully braking for humor and personal moments,” THR found at the time. “While crammed tight, Lethal Weapon 3 is a brilliantly paced entertainment, topped off by scorchingly powerful technical work, mainly Jan De Bont’s searing cinematography.”

Yikes — the mountain climbing sequences (shot in the Italian Dolomites impersonating the Rockies) in Renny Harlin’s nail-biter are merely scary but the aerial transfer between two planes, with stuntman Simon Crane sliding on a steel cable, is positively Cruisian in its are-you-blanking-kidding-me audacity.

The perfectly titled revved up romance set aboard what is for many Los Angelenos an exotic setting — a city bus — never drops below 50 mph. The go for broke stunt was a 75-foot bus jump, with precision driver Bill Young not Sandra Bullock behind the wheel. “Director Jan De Bont (the cinematographer of Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October), making his feature debut, expertly builds tension and uncorks magnificent scenes of vehicular mayhem,” wrote THR in its review. “Honors are due the pedal-to-the-metal production team for the film’s terrific wide-screen imagery, great editing and excellent sound work.”

A choice that brooks no argument: the 220-meter bungee jump plunge from the top of the Verzasca Dam in Switzerland by stuntman Wayne Michaels that ignites the action in the seventeenth entry in the James Bond franchise. “With a dynamite opening reel that showcases the series renewed vigor, GoldenEye is two hours of well-executed thrills, high-tech mayhem and one-of-a-kind comedy,” wrote THR of the Bond entry in its review. “Violent, edgy, just a little bloodthirsty and teasingly sexy, director Martin Campbell’s film offers top-drawer action sequences.”

Worth looking at to check out the scene that nearly gave producer David Friendly a heart attack. “Before the stunt, we shot Denzel Washington’s character, bailing out of the car and walking off the tracks,” Friendly recalled to THR in 2014. “Then, with a dummy at the wheel, the car collided with the train. The blowback pushed the Mustang 50 yards back down the tracks, and while Denzel was supposed to be further away, the actor in him told him to be close enough to get him and the car in the shot. It scared the hell out of me.”

Not since Michael Curtiz’s Noah’s Ark (1928) had so much water been flooded onto so many under such velocity and pressure.  Unlike Curtiz, Cameron sent no one to the hospital. “Titanic‘s visual and special effects transcend state-of-the-art workmanship, invoking feelings within us not usually called up by razzle-dazzlery,” praised THR in its review. “Highest honors to visual effects supervisor Rob Legato and special effects coordinator Thomas L. Fisher for the powerful, knockdown imagery. It’s often awesome, most prominently in showing the ship’s unfathomable rupture. The splitting of the iron monster is a heart stopper, in no small measure compounded by the sound team’s creaking thunders.”

John Frankenheimer’s thriller eschewed fakery. “Every stunt, every car chase, every wreck was done live in the camera as opposed to digitally,” bragged MGM’s Larry Gleason. Frankenheimer hired some 300 stunt drivers to keep the traffic flowing.  

The wire walking martial arts ballets and the gravity-defying bullet time FX compete in red pill/blue pill fashion for pride of place in the only partially computer-generated wonder world conjured by Lana and Lilly Wachowski and fight choreographer Chad Stahelski. “Word-of-mouth will be giddy,” THR predicted in its review, “with young and mature males lining up for a technologically stunning movie that furthers the genre and features crowd-pleasing performances to go with the frequent scenes of gunplay and violence.”

When the calendar page turned over to a new century, low attention span editing, CGI, and in-camera speed adjustments began to define the car-centered action adventure. Fifty luxury vehicles whoosh by in Dominic Sena’s grand theft auto-esque heist film.   

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, whose clash of armies in Middle Earth were often staged in Real World Earth, saw stunt people and extras alike hobbling off the battlefield due to an over exuberant commitment to character. The indispensable performer was 4-foot two-inch stunt man Kiran Shah, who was responsible for the heroics of more than one full-sized actor playing a Hobbit. 

Honorable mention for the year: Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes reimagining. Because every stunt is more difficult in an ape costume, especially on horseback.

Any franchise that has inspired a theme ride at Universal Studios warrants an inclusion. Like William Friedkin, helmer Doug Liman wanted to go bumper to bumper with The French Connection with a Mini Cooper in the streets and stairs of Paris. Stunt coordinator Nick Powell defied the French rules of the road. Added THR in its review, “the Doug Liman-directed movie does capture the pulp verve of those 1960s Cold War thrillers directed by the likes of Guy Hamilton and Terence Young.”

Quentin Tarantino’s back-to-back homage to martial arts revenge films of the 1970s — do not call them “chop-socky” — features high-wire flying, flipping, and slicing, notably when the Bride deftly dispatches the Crazy 88s, with stunt woman extraordinaire Zoë Bell stepping into Uma Thurman’s jumpsuit for the more demanding maneuvers. “In the beginning, I was saying to Quentin, ‘We’re never going to get this in under two and a half hours,’” producer Lawrence Bender recalled to THR in 2023. “And he argued with me, and he said, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ We had these arguments, and finally he says to me, ‘You just have to trust me.’ I said, ‘OK, I trust you.’ And as the shoot went on and on and on and on and on, it became clear toward the end that there’s a possibility this could end up being two movies. We didn’t go into it as two movies.”

Doug Liman’s battle of the sexes fuels a pure popcorn film that makes no attempt to hide its reliance on rear screen projection for the driving scenes (a technique “as old as filmmaking itself,” admits cinematographer Bojan Bazelli) and use of stunt doubles (Eunice Huthart and future director David Leitch), but the compensation is the sight of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, both at peak gorgeousness.

Don’t try any of this at home, kids.

Elsewhere on the marquee, digital effects were supplanting and corrupting real world stunt work, but Quentin Tarantino was “all about old school” in his homage to Vanishing Point. Kiwi actress, stuntwoman, and absolute force of nature, Zoë Bell is strapped supine on the hood of a 1970 Dodge Challenger with Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) in hot pursuit in a vehicle that, he will discover, does not quite make him death proof.   

“The stunt work in The Dark Knight looks like it is happening on the streets and not in the computer,” commented THR at the time, and that’s because, for the most part, it was. Christopher Nolan would much rather crash a real Lamborghini, flip a real truck, or blow up a (mostly) real hospital building than cheat with software.  

Tony Scott’s remake of the 1974 subway-set heist film faced formidable logistic and stunt challenges, including, as American Cinematography noted, “noise, dirt, darkness, the 600-volt third rail, and the bureaucracy of New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority.”

Speed on train tracks — above ground this time — was, said director Tony Scott, “the most dangerous movie” he had ever made, mainly due to his insistence on live action stunts on a locomotive running 70 mph. “Chris Pine and myself are just sidemen for the train,” semi-joked Denzel Washington about his co-star and him.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s ice-cold crime drama is about a stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver for bank robbers who presumably cannot drive a stick.  Rather than careening through traffic in conspicuously flashy sports cars, he knows that sometimes the best way to escape from the cops is to drive the speed limit in vehicles with a familiar make.   

As with the Bourne franchise, it seems reasonable to limit the number of entries allotted for the various iterations of the Bond franchise, but the motorcycle race over the rooftops of Istanbul, with Robbie Maddison doubling for Daniel Craig, cannot be omitted. Sam Mendes directs it like a Fitzpatrick travelogue on speed. “Dramatically gripping while still brandishing a droll undercurrent of humor, this beautifully made film certainly will be embraced as one of the best Bonds by loyal fans worldwide,” praised THR in its review, “and leaves you wanting the next one to turn up sooner than four years from now.”

Yes, by 2013, the series had definitely reached its baroque phase, but the flip-car sequences by Dennis McCarthy, done in life not CGI, are forever jaw dropping.

Directed by former stuntman Chad Stahelski along with David Leitch, the first of the franchise has the requisite fisticuffs and gunfights performed by the experts. “If I’m doing it, it’s not a stunt,” said Keanu Reeves. “Stunt men do stunts.”

Added THR in its initial take, “Distilling a couple of decades of stunt work and second-unit directing experience into 96 minutes of runtime, Stahelski and Leitch expertly deliver one action highlight after another in a near-nonstop thrill ride. With a tendency to favor skillfully framed master shots over quick cuts from multiple angles, they immerse viewers in dynamic onscreen clashes that recall John Woo’s classic bullet ballets with an overlay of emotional intensity.”

Throw a dart at the Tom Cruise catalogue and you’ll hit a clip of some of the best stunt work ever recorded on film. In this one, he hangs from the side of a plane during takeoff. Seriously. “The formula of ingredients is familiar and time-tested, to be sure, but some cocktails go down much better than others, and McQuarrie and company have gotten theirs just right here,” THR wrote in its review. “The protagonists‘ dilemmas are quite extreme, the surprises come in all sizes and the ultra-smooth professionalism displayed in all departments early on encourages the sense that you’re in good hands, a feeling that ends up being justified.”

Mel Gibson’s World War II film is ostensibly in service to conscientious objection, but the vivid, visceral execution of the explosive combat sequences hits home harder than the recitation of the biblical passages. Noted THR in its review, “Gibson’s robust skill as a conductor of large-scale conflict — which goes back to Braveheart — is as sharp as ever.”

David Leitch, yet another former stuntman turned director, and Charlize Theron in stiletto heels, team up for a series of ludicrously inventive, non-stop wall to wall (and through walls) fight scenes and body blows. “A long sequence in the third act, in which Lorraine fights her way through an apartment house’s stairwell, is one for the ages, a bring-the-pain endurance test in which opponents seem nearly impossible to kill,” wrote THR in its review. “Theron punches through it with a fierceness to match Min-sik Choi in Oldboy or Matt Damon in the Bourne franchise.”

A reminder that stunt work is always a dangerous business: stunt woman Joi “SJ” Harris died in a motorcycle stunt gone wrong during production. The eventual tentpole, however, proved a critical and commercial smash, and THR‘s reviewer noted: “There’s action aplenty throughout the film, but Deadpool 2 doesn’t bog down in it as many overcooked comic-book sequels do. With Reynolds’ charismatic irreverence at its core, the pic moves from bloody mayhem to lewd comedy and back fluidly, occasionally even making room to go warm and mushy.”

James Mangold’s period piece is suitably nuts and bolts back at the shop and on the speedway, with the featured models, the supporting vehicles, and the cinematic technique staying true to the 1960s setting.  

Filmmakers have been rewinding film to make things go backwards since Thomas Edison: not Christopher Nolan, whose stuntmen performed their moves backwards and forwards in real space. He also blew up a real Boeing 747. “Tenet makes you feel floaty, mesmerized and, to an extent, soothed by its spectacle — but also so cloudy in the head that the only option is to relax and let it blow your mind around like a balloon, buffeted by seaside breezes and hot air,” THR noted in its pandemic-era review.

It helps if your stunt doubles can be hidden in a full body costume and mask, as Tom Holland good naturedly acknowledged when he thanked stunt men Luke Scott and Greg Townley. “From Luke’s crash into the stairs to Greg’s falling through the floor to me stubbing my little toe on the glider,” he said at the end of the shoot. “It’s been an adventure.”

In a year of Cameron (Avatar: The Way of Water) and Cruise (Top Gun: Maverick), Ryan Coogler’s sequel is the sentimental selection for its seamless blend of CGI and real-geography action, especially on, in, and under the water. 

No way to avoid making any list of Hollywood stunt work top heavy with the antics of Tom Cruise. The motorcycle-skydiving leap off a cliff into oblivion is widely considered to be on a par with anything concocted by Buster Keaton or Yakima Canutt, and you’ll get no dissent here. 

When a former stuntman (director David Leitch) makes an action rom-com about a stunt man, he can only go for broke, as when the real stunt man (Logan Holladay) does a record-breaking eight car roll doubling for the fake stunt man (played by Ryan Gosling).

Now if only there were a likely candidate for the best stunt work of 2025…

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Stan Brooks, Farran Nehme Smith, Alan Rode, and Paul Soucek for letting me pick their brains.