When great action happens to bad movies.
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00:00Now, even most awful movies aren't entirely worthless. I mean, there's usually something
00:04that can be praised, be it a decent performance, cool sliver of dialogue, or an idea that might
00:09have worked better with a different approach. And then there are those terrible films that
00:13manage to deliver a single thrilling action sequence amid a sea of otherwise atrocious
00:18filmmaking choices. And that's what we're here to talk about today. I'm Jules, this is WhatCulture.com,
00:23and these are 10 Incredible Action Scenes in Terrible Movies.
00:2610. The Forest Fight – Transformers Revenge of the Fallen
00:30The second Transformers film might well be the most unbearable of the lot, a cluster migraine
00:35masquerading as a movie that is jam-packed with humour both embarrassing and offensive,
00:40plus way too much talking and not nearly enough compelling action. The single saving grace,
00:45though, comes at almost exactly the one-hour mark, where Optimus Prime battles the combined
00:50might of Autobots Megatron, Starscream, and Grindr. The thrillingly kinetic fight kicks
00:55off in a gorgeous remote forest, and, as presented in a full-frame IMAX aspect ratio,
01:00delivers action with scale and clarity far in excess of anything else in the movie.
01:04The visual effects hold up incredibly well to this very day, offering up a real sense of weight
01:08to the duelling bots and palpable fear that Optimus will not come out on top this time,
01:13and eventually he doesn't. It's a sequence that proves what brilliance Michael Bay is capable of
01:17when the conditions are right, even if it's miserably plunked into the middle of an otherwise
01:21mind-numbingly awful movie.
01:249. Bond vs. North Korea
01:26Die Another Day
01:27Die Another Day sadly brought Pierce Brosnan's hit-and-miss tenure as 007 to an unceremoniously
01:33woeful end, overindulging in silly action, corny one-liners, and an inane plot to the point that
01:39it basically became a parody of itself. It's especially disappointing, as the film's pre-title
01:43sequence promises a considerably better and more seriously-minded movie, with James Bond facing off
01:48against a rogue North Korean army colonel and his seemingly never-ending fleet of goons.
01:53The sequence shows Bond outnumbered in a way that we've rarely seen before, forced to combine
01:57tech gadgetry with his scrappy cunning to blow up the base, hijack a hovercraft, and start chasing
02:02the colonel. It is a scene packed with ludicrously, explosively entertaining action beats, most of which
02:07is achieved practically in stark contrast to the rest of the movie, before climaxing with a rather
02:12unexpected result, and that is Bond being captured.
02:15And when you start your movie with Bond outmanoeuvring a giant flamethrower and using an Uzi to detonate
02:20mines, whilst piloting a hovercraft no less, you better have something insane ready to follow
02:24up with. Sadly, Die Another Day didn't, and once Madonna's title track starts up, it goes
02:29pretty much downhill.
02:308. Taking Out The Trash – Death Wish 3
02:33By any standard metric of evaluating a film, Death Wish 3 is totally awful. A textbook example
02:39of a franchise entering its shambling, zombified stage, as it continues to exist only because the
02:44box office grosses haven't dried up yet. On a moral level, the reactionary right-wing politics
02:49are so disgustingly on the nose as to be unintentionally comical, enough that the film
02:54has become something of an accidental, campy cult classic in recent years. But ironic enjoyment aside,
03:00there is one sequence in the movie that is utterly unimpeachable as action filmmaking goes.
03:04And that's the gonzo climax in which Charles Bronson's pool rallies the citizens of an overrun New
03:09York City to violently fight back against the creeps that are haranguing them. What follows
03:13is a glorious 15-minute orgy of cartoonish violence, beginning with Paul unleashing an
03:18oversized minigun on the street punks and only getting more absurd from there. After finally
03:23running out of ammo, Paul reverts back to his trusty hand cannon to keep mowing the bad guys
03:27down, intercut with the area increasingly coming to resemble an actual war zone as the punks blow up
03:32basically every building and vehicle in sight. It is an absolute bloodbath, with cops, criminals,
03:38and civilians all suffering massive casualties. Until the sequence concludes with its pièce de
03:42résistance, and that is Paul blowing up the gang's leader, Manny, with a bloody bazooka.
03:477. The Cliffside Ninja Fight – G.I. Joe Retaliation
03:51Though G.I. Joe Retaliation was a tad more tolerable than its pure jank predecessor,
03:56primarily due to the presences of both Dwayne Johnson and Bruce Willis, it was still ultimately
04:00a bland-nothing burger of a sequel that made no impact whatsoever. Yet there is a single scene that
04:05people still fondly remember a whole decade later, and that is the wonderfully thrilling
04:09Cliffside Ninja Fight, in which Snake Eyes and Jinx join forces to battle an unrelenting fleet
04:15of ninjas whilst carrying an injured storm shadow up a cliff. In terms of action design,
04:19it is both imaginative and technically impressive, focusing on the perilous, breathless thrill of
04:24heroes sprinting across a cliff face with swords while cutting their way through a ninja horde.
04:28It's a scene that feels more in tune with a kid playing with their G.I. Joe action figures than
04:33anything else in the series' three movies, and it's really the only truly worthwhile sequence
04:37in the entire bloody trilogy.
04:396. The Single-Take Shootout – London Has Fallen
04:43While Olympus Has Fallen, the first entry into Gerard Butler's dad thriller series,
04:47was a solid slice of B-movie fun, sequel London Has Fallen touted a much meaner and more
04:52misanthropic streak, as ultimately descended into outright xenophobia. But amid its ugly America
04:58is the best vibe, there is one set-piece that cannot be discounted, and that is the superbly
05:03slick single-take shootout in which Secret Service agent Mike Banning battles his way
05:07through the streets to save kidnapped US President Benjamin Asher. Alongside a Delta-slash-SAS
05:13extraction team, Banning gingerly pushes forward through the streets, mowing down dozens of
05:17anonymous goons in a single, seamless take. Even though the digital joins between the takes are
05:22incredibly obvious, it's clear that a ton of effort went into staging the sequence to be as
05:26immersive as possible, and it positively shames the resoundingly pedestrian action thriller that
05:32the rest of the film becomes. For around five pulse-racing minutes, it almost convinced us that
05:36London Has Fallen might be a good movie.
05:405. The Fake-Out Finale – The Twilight Saga – Breaking Dawn Part 2
05:44Twilight's final entry, Breaking Dawn Part 2, is an appropriately awful conclusion to a series that
05:50never quite found a fun balance of frothy team melodrama and campy thrills. The second part of this
05:56two-part conclusion is, for the most part, a leaden bore, packed with unintentionally cackle-worthy
06:01dialogue and drama, but that is saved for a climactic showdown that is far better than the
06:05movie really deserves. Because the Breaking Dawn novel ends on something of an uncinematic shoulder
06:10shrug, the filmmakers smartly came up with something new that ultimately wouldn't actually piss off the
06:15die-hard fans. And so Part 2 wraps up with a wonderfully bonkers battle as the vampires and wolves team up to
06:21fight the villains. For a PG-13 movie aimed at tweens, it's a shockingly violent war, with cherished
06:26characters being dismembered and even decapitated before our very eyes, though the vampire's ice-like
06:31composition makes the brutality a little more palatable for families. Fans were surely irate
06:36that characters who survived in the book were dying left and right, until the fight suddenly ends and we
06:40realise that it was actually just a vision being shown to the leader of the villains by Alice, which
06:45convinces him to walk away, and that's that. Make no mistake, Breaking Dawn Part 2 utterly stinks,
06:51but the filmmakers did the absolute best they could with a tricky situation, delivering a smart,
06:56surprisingly visceral compromise to the source material's non-ending.
07:004. The First Person Shooting – Doom
07:032005's Doom might be the better of the two live-action Doom movies produced to date,
07:07the other being 2018's wretched director video Doom Annihilation, but it is still a load of old
07:12bobbins for the most part. For starters, the hell setting from the video games was ditched for no
07:17discernible reason, and the bulk of the movie smacks of a generic sci-fi action romp with
07:21recognisable branding cynically just slapped over it. But there is a single sequence that captures
07:26the honest-to-god vibe of the video games, and that's when protagonist John Reaper Grimm is injected
07:31with a life-saving experimental serum, bestowing him with superhuman abilities as he takes on the
07:36monster's gallery filling the UAC research facility. And the scene's big hook is that it's executed from a
07:41first-person perspective as a single take in order to resemble the aesthetic of the games.
07:45It's goofy, for sure, but it boasts a creativity and technical ingenuity that suggests a real love
07:51for the source material, something that the script otherwise totally lacks. Seeing Reaper blast his way
07:56through infected humans and mutated monsters alike, including the monstrous Pinky, is a ton of fun,
08:01even if it's a sadly fleeting diversion in an otherwise piss-poor adaptation.
08:063. Doom's Rampage – Fantastic Four 2015
08:10From one doom to another now, with Josh Trank's ill-fated 2015 Fantastic Four reboot.
08:15Now, depending on who you believe, the film was either hacked to pieces by a twitchy fox,
08:19or Trank simply couldn't hack it as a big-budget filmmaker. But either way,
08:23the end result is a chaotic, tonally jarring mess that unfortunately totally fell flat.
08:27But there is one scene which hints at the film's darker potential, given that Trank has spoken
08:31extensively about his movie being inspired by the body horror films of David Cronenberg. And that
08:36comes near the end, where Doom is awakened and embarks on a brutal rampage through the research
08:40facility where he's being held. Cue Doom using his abilities to telepathically explode the heads
08:45of anybody who tries to prevent his escape. If you can get over Doom's undeniably silly design,
08:50it's a genuinely unnerving sequence which ranks among the more disturbing set pieces of any superhero
08:56film from the last decade. It may only last all of a hot minute, but what a minute!
09:002. The Chicago Chase – Jupiter Ascending
09:04Jupiter Ascending is one of the biggest mega-budget disappointments of the last decade,
09:08an ambitious dud from the Wachowskis that, despite its technical ingenuity,
09:12abjectly failed on a narrative and character level. And let's not even get started on Eddie
09:16Redmayne's Razzie-winning performance here, but there's one set piece so masterfully executed
09:20as to be worthy of The Matrix, and that's the eight-minute chase sequence in which Jupiter and
09:25Kane flee from an alien fleet in downtown Chicago. As the aliens attack, Kane scoops up a falling
09:30Jupiter with his rather nifty anti-gravity boots, soaring across the Chicago skyline whilst the
09:35alien weaponry decimates nearby skyscrapers. There's an incredible visual clarity to the
09:39sequence, despite its frantic intensity, enough so that we can fairly assume a good portion of
09:44the film's stonking $200 million budget was spent on it. As a dazzling VFX showcase and a reminder of
09:50what the Wachowskis are capable of, it's a wonderful sequence, yet coming so early in the first act
09:55as it does, it leaves the rest of the movie scrambling and failing to live up to it.
09:591. The Attack on Pearl Harbor
10:02Pearl Harbor
10:03Michael Bay strikes again, this time around with his flaccid attempt to out-Titanic-Titanic
10:08in his 2001 war epic Pearl Harbor. Clocking in at an excruciatingly overcooked 183 minutes,
10:15the late great Roger Ebert might have put it best when he said at the movie,
10:18Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941,
10:24the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40
10:29minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. And you know
10:34what, he's mostly right. The overwhelming bulk of Bay's film focuses on a toe-curlingly feckless
10:39love triangle between three characters you're barely encouraged to care about, and is set against
10:43the backdrop of a major piece of real-world history. Viewers have to sit through 90 minutes
10:48of exhausting melodrama before the Attack on Pearl Harbor finally happens, but when it does,
10:52it at least has the courtesy to be a damn doozy. Even Bay's toughest attractors will struggle to
10:57write this technically stunning sequence off in its entirety, a staggering 30-minute pyrotechnics
11:02display combining incredible practical stunt work and gorgeous VFX carnage. It's the only part of
11:08the movie that feels even remotely worthy of holding James Cameron's jockstrap, as soon enough
11:12we're back to business as tedious usual for the remaining hour. The Attack on Pearl Harbor was so
11:17thoroughly ripe for a splashy Hollywood treatment, but Bay suffocated the centerpiece amid a wealth
11:22of gooey, unconvincing romance. And there we go, my friends. Those were 10 incredible action scenes
11:27in terrible movies. I hope that you enjoyed that, and let me know what you thought about it down in
11:32the comments section below. As always, I've been Jules. You can go follow me over on Instagram,
11:35where it's at RetroJ, but the O is a zero. And you can come check out all the Warhammer
11:39miniatures that I've been painting. Yes, I am a nerd. But before I go, I just want to say one thing.
11:44Hope you're treating yourself well, my friend, with love and respect, because you deserve all
11:48the best things in life, alright? As always, I've been Jules. You have been awesome.
11:51Never forget that. And I'll speak to you soon. Bye.