Vote up the fight scenes that cover a lot of ground.
Everyone loves a solid, traditional fight scene. However, fight scenes on unstable surfaces tend to stick out in the mind for various reasons. Perhaps they are completely implausible, like the midair fight between Natasha Romanoff and Taskmaster in Black Widow, or the time Legolas managed to leapfrog falling rocks in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Perhaps reality is being warped around the people trading blows, as in the final battles in comic book movies Thor: The Dark World and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Maybe things go a bit sideways for our heroes while they are on aircraft like in Crank or The Living Daylights.
No matter the specifics, some chaotic fight scenes just make you ponder the laws of physics a bit more than others.
What can you say about Crank? It needs to be seen to be believed. If Shoot 'Em Up is meant to be a live-action cartoon, then Crank and its even wilder sequel are live-action cartoons while viewed on an acid trip. The ballad of Chev Chelios (fantastic name, by the way) can only be described as manic and chaotic. Jason Statham's hitman is forced to keep his adrenaline running at all times to keep his heart beating after he is injected with a drug that slows the user's heartbeat to a crawl.
He spends the entire film picking fights, taking drugs, and having public sex to keep that ticker a-thumpin' - all while trying to find an antidote and get his revenge. During the finale, Chelios finally gets to snap the neck of the man who poisoned him in the first place. Unfortunately for old Chev, that neck snap comes while falling in midair after they tumble out of a helicopter. Chelios manages to call his girlfriend in midair - the lack of wooshing air further contributing to the overall lack of realism - before going splat on the blacktop below. Of course, there is a sequel, so he didn't die! Don't you just love the silver screen?
We know what you're thinking and, yes, we do have to talk about Thor: The Dark World. Sure, it is everyone's pick for the most forgettable MCU film in the ever-expanding franchise, but the 2013 sequel gets a worse rap than it deserves. There is some good stuff in there, we swear! Remember when they went back to it in Avengers: Endgame? That was fun, at least.
The big final fight between Thor and Malekith takes place during the Convergence, a cosmic event that happens every 5,000 years in Marvel Studios' universe. Why do all nine realms converge into alignment every five millennia? Because it allowed the production team to have an exciting third-act fight where the hero and villain get to fight on different planets at the same time. Honestly, we kind of just want to know what happened to all of those cars that got knocked into Svartalfheim during the battle. Are they still there? Did their owners get to file insurance claims? Would Malekith even know how to drive a car? Give us answers, Marvel!
In the grand scheme of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Natasha Romanoff is nowhere near the most powerful superhero of the bunch. Sure, she has all kinds of super-spy training and could take down her fair share of baddies in a fight, but she doesn't have any superpowers to speak of. For her part, Taskmaster's superpower relates to being able to mimic the fighting style of anyone she sees. So, that being said, how in the absolute heck do those two manage to have a fight on top of Red Room wreckage falling in midair during the climax of Black Widow?
The flick is a solid MCU outing, and the scene is pretty cool to watch, but it defies all logic, even for a comic book movie. The perception those two have to possess to not even get knocked out by a rogue piece of debris? They should've been more worried about figuring out how to survive the drop than battling the other person. Of course, they were both fine in the end... but that sequence is wild.
We're not here to litigate the quality of the prequel trilogy. It's been done to death and, frankly, there are things to admire and dislike about each and every entry into the Star Wars film series. A moment to celebrate from Revenge of the Sith, for example, is the lightsaber duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan. It may lack the musical bombast of "Duel of the Fates" from The Phantom Menace, but it makes up for that with the amount of extravagance on display.
Revenge of the Sith would end up being the final Star Wars film George Lucas ever got to make, and he really did go all out with that third act. Go watch the first-ever lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan and Vader from A New Hope and compare it to the lengthy, emotional fight on display at the end of Sith. Anakin and Obi-Wan are all over the place on Mustafar, with lava shooting up all around them. It's amazing they both didn't get burned to a crisp early on in the fight.
Is there anything more unstable than a bending tree branch? Though there are more than a few standout scenes from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - with Michelle Yeoh's multiple-weapon-mastery fight being a particular highlight - the one that has likely stuck in viewers' minds more than two decades later is the bamboo treetop scene. Chances are you've never seen a sword fight quite like this, and you probably never will again.
Watching Chow Yun-Fat and Ziyi Zhan sail from tree branch to tree branch (with the help of some very deft wirework) is a magical sight. Any filmmaker who tries to pull this trick off in their own film will undoubtedly be unfavorably compared to Ang Lee's classic. You wouldn't try to do a better version of the Star Wars Death Star trench run in your sci-fi space opera, would you?
This is an example of a climax that probably wouldn't have worked in a live-action Spider-Man movie. That isn't to say multiverse stories can't be told in live-action (hello, Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), but the stylistic action of the Miles Morales-versus-Kingpin fight from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse feels so incredible and chaotic precisely because it is animated. Move over, Eternals; if you're in the mood for some actual Jack Kirby madness, then Spider-Verse is the movie for you.
The pandemonium on display is excellent as the cartoonishly large Kingpin tries to eliminate the agile Morales. Miles succeeds in helping his Spider-buddies get back to their own worlds as the Kingpin's Super-Collider causes all kinds of comic-booky havoc around them. It's unique. It's neon. It's bubbly. This movie won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for a reason, folks.
