The movies’ greatest action scenes, from the silent era to ‘John Wick 4′ – Chicago Tribune

With director Chad Stahelski’s massively successful opening week of “John Wick: Chapter 4” dominating a nervous film industry at the moment, the time is right to argue about the movies’ century-plus tradition of action cinema.

Cathartic or punishing, guns or knives, a waking dream or a threatening nightmare in motion, memorable action scenes were made for the medium. We all have our favorites. One person’s lost ark is another’s throne of blood.

Let’s have New York magazine and Vulture film critic Bilge Ebiri take it from here. Ebiri, one of my National Society of Film Critics colleagues, is a true action aficionado, with a particular enthusiasm for the art and craft of stunt work. In 2019 he wrote a Vulture piece agitating for the creation (not yet fulfilled) of a “best stunts” Academy Award. I spoke with Ebiri the other day, after he’d seen “John Wick: Chapter 4” a second time, to help me work through the reasons someone (me, for instance) might like the third, smaller-scale “John Wick 3” better than the new, bigger, longer, more outlandish adventure in assassinating assassins before they assassinate the other assassin.

In our conversation, we explore action scenes of all kinds that mean something to us personally. Ebiri’s benchmarks start with “Life of an American Fireman,” an almost seven-minute 1903 silent film from Edwin S. Porter, whose photoplay “The Great Train Robbery” changed movie tastes permanently later that same year. His key action beats include Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” Steven Spielberg’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — and, as Ebiri notes, even something like a not-good movie that saves itself from itself, sometimes, with a single, insane showcase for destructive mayhem. In other words: Michael Bay.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Bilge, you’ve written a lot about stunt work in the movies, and its huge significance to the action genre. I’m still wrestling with how I came away from “John Wick 4” with a few really good sequences in my head — the Osaka hotel melee, the best of the Paris scenes including the Arc de Triomphe carousel of carnage, the already-famous Rue Foyatier staircase attack. Yet the smaller-scale highlights of the previous one, “John Wick 3,” I guess that’s more my speed.

A: You’re not wrong about “John Wick 3” I re-watched all of them last week, including seeing “4” again. I mean, I like “John Wick 4” a lot. A lot. I had a similar reaction to you; in many ways “John Wick 3” is doing all these things better. But I love “4” because that last hour is incredible. The advantage of “3” is that each action scene has its own style and approach; one is a two-person fight involving books — no shooting in that one. Another is just daggers flying, and glass. Each sequence highlights a different weapon, a different set of objects. And there are times when “4,” especially in the first half, when it feels more like, OK, he’s just going to be shooting a lot of people. In the head. And that takes us back to the first big action scene in “John Wick 1.”

Once the Paris traffic melee kicked in, though, I was all-in. It’s just so crazy, and incorporates so many of the stunts we’ve seen over the course of the series. In “4,” as you see in earlier “John Wicks”, there’s even a nod or two to Buster Keaton.

Q: Keaton’s my idea of America’s supreme action hero. You know?

A: Oh, yeah. Of course. He’s arguably our first great action filmmaker.

“Raiders of the Lost Ark” was a formative experience for me. I was 8 when “Raiders” came out. I grew up in Turkey until I was 7. We don’t even have a word for “babysitter” in Turkish, so my parents took me to whatever movies they went to. We moved to the U.S. in 1980; that first year, it was just me and my mom. She took me to see “The Empire Strikes Back.” I didn’t know any English then, so she was whisper-translating to me while we were watching. But by the time “Raiders” came out, a year later, I’d learned English and that movie just blew me away.

I watch “Raiders” all the time, and the scene that jumps out at me is that truck chase, which is incredible. And it makes no spatial sense whatever! (laughs) They’re in the desert but suddenly the guy’s flying off a huge cliff, and it’s like, where did that cliff come from? I remember seeing a making-of segment on “Entertainment Tonight” or something similar, and that was when I first learned about what a stuntman does. “Oh! There are people who do this sort of thing for the movies!” I was 8, and ever since then, I’ve been fascinated by that whole world.

I’ve always enjoyed talking to stunt professionals because they tell you really specific things about how scenes are done. Directors never talk about specifics. You ask them about a scene, and they’re like, “Oh, well, you know, it’s all about character.” Stunt professionals are different, they’ll say, “OK, the guy was strapped to this thing, and there was a cable there, and the breakaway glass went there.” I love that kind of stuff. Cinematographers will do that, too. They aren’t afraid to get technical, and they have no media training (laughs).

Q: Where do you start historically with action scenes that mean a lot to you?

A: We mentioned Keaton. But a generation earlier, you have to start with Edwin S. Porter’s “The Life of an American Fireman.” It’s the movie that introduces intercutting between sequences to create suspense.

The movie I like to cite as (the beginning) of modern action is “Seven Samurai.” In that one, Kurosawa introduced slow motion (into action), and I think it’s the first time we see the interweaving of what we commonly know now as Sam Peckinpah-style slow motion. There’s a scene in “Seven Samurai” when one of the warriors kills somebody and you see the guy falling in slow motion. Then the scene continues in regular speed, and then cuts back to the guy falling in slow motion again. From that, you go straight to Arthur Penn in “Bonnie and Clyde” and to Peckinpah in “The Wild Bunch.” That extends all the way to John Woo and Hong Kong cinema in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And then American filmmakers copied the Hong Kong filmmakers.

Q: If I had to pick a single action sequence by Kurosawa, I’d go with the watch tower scene from “Throne of Blood,” with Toshiro Mifune and that onslaught of arrows.

A: Yeah!

Q: Didn’t Walter Hill, another master of screen action, credit everything he learned from watching Kurosawa?

A: He did, yes. The thing about “Seven Samurai,” as great as something like that great climactic battle is — it would mean nothing if we didn’t care about the people. That sounds like horse—t, the kind of thing filmmakers always say in interviews. But it’s true! When I was thinking about great action scenes in movies I thought to myself “Well, I gotta have something from “Die Hard.” The weird thing is, I don’t remember specific action scenes from “Die Hard” that are particularly exceptional. What I remember mainly is Bruce Willis (and Alan Rickman). It’s the way I feel about “In the Line of Fire,” Wolfgang Petersen’s film with Clint Eastwood. That’s severely underrated. There are a lot of well-directed scenes in that picture, but it’s all about the characters, John Malkovich’s and Eastwood’s.

Q: It’s a generalization, but those films of the late ‘80 and early ‘90s belong to the last pre-digital effects age. This is one thing I struggle with, or against. Sometimes the digital effects futzing gets in the way of really good staging and stunt work.

A: The digital component to action movies is interesting. I’ve talked to a lot of VFX artists over the years. They’re in the same boat as stunt professionals — they’re the disrespected professionals who actually make the whole thing run. Get rid of them, and you don’t have a film industry anymore. The VFX artists’ contention is that bad VFX is the result of bad filmmaking because too many directors don’t know how to deal with it. … But there are exceptions. “Top Gun: Maverick” uses VFX seamlessly.

Q: The long COVID delay on that film’s release may have been the luckiest break it caught; they had more time and spent a few more million making the flying look as good as possible.

A: Right! And look at “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Tons of practical stunt work, amazing stuff. They spent years making those cars and trucks and figuring everything out. That was the best thing to happen to that movie — the fact that it took 11 years to make it! I don’t know if there’s a single shot in “Fury Road” that doesn’t have VFX in it, but that’s a great example of (computer-generated imagery) being used in tandem with practical footage to create something spectacular.

For practical stunts, you have to talk about John Woo’s “Face/Off,” which is not a film I loved when I first saw it. The boat chase in that film is incredible, and there are so many shots in it where you can see it’s clearly not John Travolta and Nicolas Cage on the boats. Some people criticized it for that. I probably did, too. But now I think it’s pure genius. When you see actual stunt people doing it, you’re telling the audience: We really did this.

Q: Let’s talk about Michael Mann, because it’s always worth talking about Michael Mann. Do you have a favorite scene of his that, for you, captures his mastery of action filmmaking?

A: Two scenes. One is the shootout in the middle of “Heat.” I don’t think of “Heat” as an action movie, really, or even that sequence as an action sequence because it’s not conventionally thrilling. I think that scene is terrifying. Some action scenes, you can just pop on the screen to re-watch for the pleasure of it, including some scenes by Michael Mann. But the “Heat” shootout is too scarring for that.

We sometimes talk about how our fondness for action movies and shoot-em-ups aligns with the gun culture in the United States. But I always say if violent movies directly resulted in violent people, there’d be nobody left in Hong Kong! There are other factors to consider. I don’t put it all on the movies.

Anyway, back to Michael Mann. I’d also point to the last 12 minutes of “The Last of the Mohicans,” which is a chase, and a fight, and a lot of beautiful music. Incredibly romantic, incredibly sad, beautifully performed with zero dialogue. That’s one of the greatest sequences ever.

Q: One scene I come back to a lot, and it has exerted a heavy, dubious shaky-cam influence on lesser movies, is the Tangier fight sequence in Paul Greengrass’ “The Bourne Ultimatum.” Just after Bourne crashes through the window across the alley, from the moment he’s taking on the assassin Desh to the moment Desh dies in the shower, it’s 109 seconds made up of 122 separate shots. That really shouldn’t be visually coherent. But for me, it works for a lot of reasons, not least of which is there’s a real sense of difficulty. No zingers, no bloodlust. It kind of makes the audience eat it, and there’s at least some sense of emotional or psychic aftermath. It sobers the audience up.

A: Right. A similar scene, not in pacing, God knows, but in effect, is the killing at the farmhouse in Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain,” when Paul Newman is going through hell trying to kill Gromek. It really puts the lie to every other killing scene like it. I know what you mean by Grassgrass’ intentions. He really isn’t out to give audiences an easy thrill. He comes out of a British documentary tradition, and yet his action vernacular became a part of so many action movies that followed, even if most of his imitators weren’t very good.

The “Bourne” movies, the best ones, I think were designed for people who weren’t necessarily action heads. But the action fans came along for the ride.

Q: Give me an example of an action movie, or even just a scene, you find morally reprehensible.

A: Huh! That’s a good question. I don’t hate the “Equalizer” movies, but they have a sadistic quality I don’t like. They’re different from the “John Wick” movies, which are so stylized and unreal they have a picture-book quality. I don’t get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach watching them. “Taken,” for me, is like “The Equalizer” but worst. On the other hand, I’m a fan of some of the later Liam Neeson action films, like —

Q: “The Grey”? Please say “The Grey.”

A: “The Grey”! But for the morally reprehensible action genre, I really don’t like some of the 1980s action movies that refought America’s battles from the 1960s and ‘70s: “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” “Rocky IV,” “Rambo III,” the “Missing in Action” movies, “Invasion U.S.A.,” “Red Dawn.” I remember this stuff from my childhood. A lot of these movies were hugely influential in terms of action, and a couple of them are iconic nowadays, but I was always bothered — even as a kid — by the way they exploited the vengeful political atmosphere of Reagan’s America. I just had zero use for this stuff, and I haven’t been able to get on the ironic-revisionist train that now tries to tell me “Rocky IV” is some sort of masterpiece.

Q: Can you think of a scene in an action film that basically saved the movie’s ass?

A: So many! But “Bad Boys II” — noxious film but the car chase is incredible. That movie has so much not to like, but the car chase is, like, OK: This is why we need to keep Michael Bay around.

Q: Let’s close this way: I’d argue that “The Great Train Robbery” gave birth, with one pistol aimed directly at the audience’s collective face, to the entire action genre. What do you see as the implications of that moment?

A: It’s the fundamental deal we make with any action sequence, really. Terrify us. Make us feel like we’re in danger. But also let us know we’re safe.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune