Jackie Chan is one of the greatest stuntmen ever, mostly for his willingness to hurl himself into extreme danger and his ability to keep delivering his lines afterward – not to mention basically inventing the Kung Fu comedy genre. The man even has the Guinness World Record for the most film credits in a single film with 12 in Chinese Zodiac (2012). He's suffered enough injuries that he's been blacklisted by insurance companies, and he and his stunt crew pay for medical expenses out of pocket.
Christopher Nolan, meanwhile, is rapidly cementing himself as one of the greatest directors of all time, not only for making ridiculously cool, interesting, and thought-provoking films, but also for leaning back toward the visceral punch of practical effects in a time when green screen and CGI are king. Nolan even went so far as to fill scenes with cardboard cutouts of people in Dunkirk (2017) instead of generating them with a computer.
A good team of stuntmen or women can make or break even the most low-budget flick. Add a director who's willing to put in the extra effort to pull off practical stunts with their crew, and ... well, you can unlock an entirely new level of awesome.
Remember all the crazy helicopter stunts in the TV show Magnum P.I. (the original, not the 2018 remake)? Practical stunts like that are few and far between these days. It's often cheaper or safer to just paint out some wires and slap a Marvel Universe background onto some green screen and rotoscope something flashy in.
Last year, I wrote about the first million-dollar aerial stunt ever made in the movie Cliffhanger (1993) when Sylvester Stallone footed the bill to have a stuntman zipline from one plane to another while in flight. Some of the stunts and effects in this list absolutely dwarf that amount.
Here, in no particular order (except for the last one, as that's my absolute personal favorite) – is my list of the best practical stunts in movie history:
Inception (2010) – The Crazy Gravity Hallway Fight
Though Christopher Nolan wasn't the first to pull off this kind of stunt, he sure did it with the most gusto in my opinion. Two identical hallway sets were built to execute this single fight scene. One was oriented vertically for the zero gravity sequences and the other was a giant, 100-ft (30-m) centrifugal rotating set that could spin 360 degrees.
What we got was stuntman Mark Mottram and actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a two-and-a-half-minute-long epic fight scene scaling the walls, floor and ceiling. Talk about dedication to the craft!
The rotating set technique was used as far back as 1919 in Victor Fleming's When the Clouds Roll By to make a surreal dream sequence. It was director Stanley Kubrick who really made it famous in 1968 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The scariest example of the use of a rotating set I can recall is Poltergeist from 1982. I watched it as a kid. It didn't help me sleep.
The Matrix (1999) – Bullet time
A stunt that's likely been copied a million times over in the last 26 years still gets acclaim from me for being one of the coolest tech-backed stunts ever made, even if it wasn't "death defying."
One hundred and twenty cameras were arranged in a circle around Keanu Reeves, capturing every angle in sequence as Reeves does a seemingly impossible backbend (on wires) while flailing his arms over his head. In post-production, each frame was stitched together with a little bit of CGI (okay, a lot of CGI) to get that slow-motion backbend as his character, Neo, dodges a volley of air-distorting bullets.
It became one of the most iconic shots in the history of cinema – copied, parodied, and even inspiring a major theme in the video game Max Payne, where "bullet time" plays a huge role in the action. Over a quarter century later, The Matrix is still pretty cool. And for the record, I'm skipping the John Wick series because, frankly, those movies are just one long, butt-kickin' stunt.
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015) – The Plane Hang
A 2018 Vanity Fair article posited that the distance Tom Cruise runs in a movie directly correlates with how well it's received. The more he runs, the more money the movie makes at the box office and the better Rotten Tomatoes score it has. No joke. Real time and effort went into uncovering this. Granted, Cruise is a fine runner with amazing posture and arm strikes. I can't really think of anyone who makes running from bad guys look cooler.
But in recent years, Cruise has built up a hell of a portfolio as the best-paid stuntman in Hollywood, like some sort of mega-budget Jackie Chan. We've watched Cruise and his giant brass cojones risk his billion-dollar body in so many outrageous scenes by now that the actor has become a bigger action hero than any of his individual characters.
Recently, he did a dirt bike jump off a 4,000-ft (1,220-m) cliff in Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (2023). It's considered to be one of the most dangerous stunts ever attempted – and he did it eight times that day to catch that perfect shot. Subsequently, several perfectly good Honda CRF 250 dirt bikes met untimely deaths. I mean, I guess that's cool and all ...
But what about hanging off the side of a plane as it takes off and lands!? Now that's a gnarly stunt. Cruise was strapped to the side of an Airbus A400M Atlas military transport aircraft and rode it from take-off to 5,000 ft (1,524 m) and back down – eight times (there must be something to Cruise and the number eight). He wore a full body harness to make sure he wasn't yeeted off the plane traveling at least 136 mph (219 km/h). I say "at least" because that's the stall speed of the A400M. Its cruise speed (see what I did there?) is 485 mph (780 km/h).
The rest of his safety gear included custom contact lenses that covered his entire eye. You know, because he was riding on the outside of a plane. Bugs and stuff.
Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning just came out in theaters and while I've not seen it yet, I'm betting there's a plethora of thrilling stunt work in it that might get its own article. I've already seen a few short behind the scenes segments on it, and I can't wait to watch it!
Just a few days ago, Tom Cruise set a Guinness World Record for 16 jumps where his main chute was set ablaze before he'd cut away to his reserve for a stunt in The Final Reckoning. Check out the behind the scenes on that one!
Project A (1983) – The Clocktower Fall
Not all stunts are as exotic or as safe as riding on the wing of a military transport plane. Some are just good old-fashioned, send-it-and-hope-for-the-best scenes. Jackie Chan's Project A clocktower debacle is pretty unforgettable. It may not have cost much to perform – basically the price of rolling film and actor/staff pay for the day – but the real cost became apparent in the insurance premiums that subsequently skyrocketed for productions Jackie was involved in after this super sketchy stunt.
The setup is Jackie dangling from a clocktower about five or six stories up before falling through two cloth awnings and plopping to the ground. Pretty straightforward. He and his stunt double, Mars, did it at least three times to make sure it looked good.
Two of those shots end up in the final cut of the movie – which looks kind of odd when you see two very different replays in a row. It's hard to be mad though; you're seeing two different versions of a stunt you can barely believe was tried once, listening to yourself making involuntary "oof" noises as Jackie and Mars land on their heads in ways that most mere mortals would not survive.
You don't see the third cut with Mars until the usual "bloopers in the credits of Jackie Chan movies" at the end. That guy that gets super wrecked on a botched stunt as he ragdolls through the air and hits the deck in the most painful-looking way? Yeah, that's Jackie's stunt double, Mars, on the first take that didn't go to plan. Clever editing made it look like it was Jackie that pops up in pain afterwards.
Tenet (2020) – The Plane Crash
I have to go back to Nolan once more. Honestly, this entire list could just be "the very best Christopher Nolan stunts," as there are so many fantastic stunts he's directed (or maybe I'm just a fan-boy). We could talk about the scene where Bane hijacks a plane mid-flight from another plane at 15,000 ft (4,572 m) in The Dark Knight Rises (2012) or even the stunt where they flip an 18-wheeler truck without CGI in the same movie. Or how he tried to recreate the Trinity bomb explosion in Oppenheimer (2023) without CGI. Or the practical effects in the sci-fi flick Interstellar (2014), like growing an entire cornfield just to drive through it while chasing a radio-controlled MQ1 Predator-looking replica drone.
But who crashes a 747 into a building on purpose? This stunt has to go on the list. Also, because Tenet is one of my favorite movies of all time.
Initially, Nolan thought about using a miniature set and plane for the stunt, but as it turns out, buying a retired Boeing 747 and crashing it into a building was cheaper. And way more rad.
The setup was crashing a plane into an airport structure to use as a distraction so the two main characters could break into the airport. They used a couple of tow trucks and a cable to pull the decommissioned – but nearly-half-a-million-pound (roughly-quarter-million-kg) – airframe at a relatively slow speed into a building before a few minor explosions took place.
Sure, it wasn't the typical fast-paced, blow 'em up kind of stunt that usually tops these kinds of lists. It was a slow-burn kind of stunt, where you can see it all unfolding before your very eyes knowing what was about to happen, but not believing it really will.
And don't even get me started on time running forward and backward simultaneously, the ensuing fight scenes, and the weirdest car chases you've ever seen. Tenet is an absolute masterpiece.
Fast and Furious 6 (2013) – They had a Tank
The Fast and the Furious franchise featured a heap of incredibly silly and impossibly far-fetched CGI stunts – but there were also some absolute bangers that they actually did for real.
In F&F 6, they had a tank. To be precise, the F&F filmmakers took what was a World War II relic, the Chieftain Main Battle Tank, and completely redesigned it to look modern and to burn rubber, so to speak. It was capable of speeds up to 60 mph (96 km/h) versus the 30-mph (48-km/h) top speed it had from the factory.
For nearly 10 minutes on screen, the tank simply obliterates car after car along a freeway. Three hundred cars were destroyed in the making of Fast 6 at a rate of five to six cars per day of filming. A fair few of those were flattened by the 55-ton machine. Call it juvenile and nobody will argue – but tell me it's not jaw-dropping too!
We can't mention car destruction without a shout-out to The Blues Brothers, which flung no fewer than 104 cars to their deaths, several at a time, in a hilarous and ridiculous chase scene toward the end of the movie.
And for what it's worth, the "Good Ol' Boys" of Hazzard County weren't terribly nice to their moonshining getaway-mobile the General Lee. The Dukes of Hazzard aired from 1979-1985 and it's estimated around 309 Dodge Chargers bit the dust during filming. There were so many pancaked cars in that show that the carnage is almost desensitizing. Editors even started recycling old jump footage to save on cars. Only about 17 of them were left in various states of disrepair after the show ended. Some have even collected some pretty high memorabilia prices in auctions. Check out this compilation of General Lee "Yahoos!" and watch how many cars get destroyed.
But the reigning volume champion in terms of automotive carnage is Michael Bay's Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon. No fewer than 532 cars were trashed to achieve this turkey of a film's 35% freshness rating on the Tomatometer.
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) – The Astro Spiral Jump
The corkscrew car jump over a Thai river required months of "precise calculations and engineering." Raymond McHenry of Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory was the mastermind behind the Astro Spiral Jump, as it was called. In its day, it was a technological marvel. McHenry used advanced computer simulations to calculate the exact parameters for the jump, including ramp design, speed, and vehicle specs. Personally, I'm too young to know what a 1974 "advanced computer simulation" looks like. Was it still punch cards back then?
The AMC Hornet was modified for a centralized driver seat with a really long steering column to make sure the car was balanced. The angles of the takeoff and landing ramps were precisely calculated so that the car would do a perfect barrel roll through the air at exactly 48 mph (78 km/h).
It ended up being so precise that they nailed it on the first try. In post-production, the filmmakers added that silly slide whistle effect dubbed over the otherwise really cool jump – which they later regretted (understandably).
The Guinness Book of Records has that jump officially penned as the very first Astro Spiral jump ever performed on film.
Desperado (1995) – "Cool guys don't look at explosions"
I think this deserves an honorable mention – not because it's one of the greatest stunts of all time, but mostly because recent rhetoric from the Joe Rogan Podcast with director Robert Rodriquez suggests that Rodriquez was responsible for inventing the now-ubiquitous "hero walks calmly away from an explosion without looking back" shot.
While totally awesome, it's simply not true. I distinctly remember in one of my favorite childhood movies when Fred Ward as Remo Williams (1985) did that very same "walk-away-from-explosion" shot ... however, actors Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas are considerably more attractive, I must admit. Fred looked, well, a little goofy and the explosion wasn't nearly as impressive.
In truth, the Desperado shot was accomplished because Rodriquez was desperate and didn't have much of a budget. It was supposed to have a few body parts flying about in a hand grenade explosion, but there were no body parts on hand. The FX guy offered up a propane fireball though! So explosion it was! And the main reason for not looking back to see an impressive explosion? Rodriquez instructed his actors not to look as it might be really hot and he didn't want them to get hurt. Either way, a legendary shot was captured.
The General (1926) – The Train Chase:
This list wouldn't possibly be complete without a proper throwback (not that it is complete ... there are simply too many cool stunts in movie history to list them all). A throwback to the silent film era, 99 years ago, when Buster Keaton was the man. And by the man, I mean he set the record for the single most expensive stunt to ever be performed in the silent film era, crashing a real train into the Row River in Oregon. The price tag? About $42,000. That's about three-quarters of a million dollars in today's money.
The setup took a bit of prep. Keaton and crew built a 215-ft-long (65.5-m) wooden trestle across the river. They then built a dam downstream to raise the water level to "cushion" the locomotive's fall. Before filming, the crew sawed through part of the bridge and rigged it with explosives to ensure a dramatic collapse and then set it on fire. Six cameras were all in place and recording when the 26-ton steam engine with a dummy in the driver's seat met its watery demise in front of thousands of onlooking Cottage Grove, Oregon residents.
It was about a year later when The Jazz Singer (1927) began the transition to the "talkies" era of film. There were no cool stunts in The Jazz Singer.
And you may or may not agree with this one, but my top pick goes to *drum-roll* ...
Top Gun: Maverick (2022) – Every Single Plane Sequence:
Maybe it's my child-like fascination with fighter jets. Maybe it's my nostalgia for how much I loved the first Top Gun (1986). Or maybe it's because when I was about 10 years old, as I stood on a small suspension bridge over the Kern River in California, a Grumman F-14 Tomcat (literally, the most badass plane ever to exist in the history of humanity ... the other best one that didn't exist was the VF-1 Valkyrie, especially in GERWALK mode, and inspired by the F-14) carved through the canyon at hundreds of miles per hour about 50 ft (15 m) off the deck, blasting a wave of hot air across me as it screamed overhead ... a moment that lasted mere seconds in real life, but lives forever in my memories ... maybe that's why I've watched every single piece of behind the scenes, making of, or documentary cuts for Top Gun: Maverick. Not to mention, having watched the actual movie at least half a dozen times.
The stunts performed were actually about 15 months in the making, just to outfit a pair of F/A-18 Super Hornets with IMAX cameras. Not to mention, "normal people" simply aren't suited for aerobatics and high-g antics and retaining their lunch, so to speak. The actors went through a rigorous three-month training program starting off with seat time in Cessna 172 Skyhawks. They then moved on to the Extra EA-300, an aerobatic plane capable of some spicy maneuvers. The last step before full-boogie-F/A-18 was the L-39 Albatross, a Czech-made, high-performance turbofan jet trainer.
Director Joseph Kosinski had the unusual role of directing actors that he wouldn't even see for an hour or two at a time while they were off flying about. A lot of preparation, shooting and debriefing took place to get the masterpiece you saw (hopefully) on the big screen.
It's pretty hard to match flying these 64-million-dollar machines loaded with a quarter of a million dollars or more in camera equipment at speeds upwards of 700 mph (1,127 km/h) through locations like Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest near Groves Lake in Nevada and the Feather River Canyon in northern California.
Not all the shots were F/A-18 Super Hornets though. A pair of L39 trainers, painted grey and marked with tracking markers – often those black and white circles seen in motion capture – were flown in high-risk shots through canyons at low altitude. In post-production, the L39s were CGI'd to look like F/A-18 fighter jets. Even the F-14 Tomcat was an L39 in disguise for the in-air sequences.
"They painted them grey, everywhere on the aircraft, then they put computer points on the aircraft in different places," Alicia Rock, owner of Northgate Aviation told CBS Action News Now in Chico, CA, where the planes were hangared. "The computer could attach to those points and they can basically turn it into anything they wanted."
Even after learning the disappointing news that it wasn't an actual F-14 in a dog fight with an F-35, I still think that the stunts performed in Top Gun: Maverick rank as some of the best stunts ever made, giving me goosebumps every single time.
You might be wondering why the title says "top 9" yet you just saw 10 ... The Matrix bullet-time scene doesn't really qualify for "practical" in my opinion. But it's too cool to not include.
Hope you enjoyed the list! Let me know what I missed in the comments. And don't say the bus jump in Speed (1994).
