The 22 greatest movie stunts ever, ranked

While not as high-octane as some of the other entries on this list, Bruce Campbell pushes his body to the limit as Ash Williams in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II. His performance drew inspiration from the physical comedy of silent movie stars as well as the Three Stooges, blending slapstick with the threat of real injury. Campbell’s fight against his possessed hand, which concludes in the infamous chainsaw scene, toes the line of self-abuse, and maybe even pushes past it. It’s the kind of stunt that only hungry young actors eager to make their mark on the film landscape pursue with such abandon, and the results made Ash Williams a genre icon and Evil Dead II a staple of horror extremism and absurdity.

Few modern directors have an eye like Christopher Nolan when it comes to blending practical and visual effects. While certainly not one of cinema’s most dangerous stunts, the rotating hallway fight in Inception has emerged as an iconic movie moment because of its tactile practicality and design that left audiences wondering how it was achieved. Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas constructed a 100-foot hotel corridor that spun 360 degrees. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who performed the stunt, spoke about the process in 2010 and said “It was six-day weeks of just, like, coming home at night battered ... The light fixtures on the ceiling are coming around on the floor, and you have to choose the right time to cross through them, and if you don’t, you’re going to fall.”

The most iconic scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, director Ang Lee’s wuxia martial arts classic, is a bamboo fight in the trees between Zhang Ziyi’s Jen Yu and Chow Yun-fat’s Li Mu Bai. The actors actually performed their stunts with CGI only being used for wire removal. There is ethereal beauty and graceful precision to Zhang and Chow’s movements, proving that the art of stunt work doesn’t have to be deadly to be effective. The work here undoubtedly brought renewed attention to martial arts and Asian cinema to American audiences.

For the scene in John Wick: Chapter 3–Parabellum in which Wick fends off a motorcyclist while on horseback, horse master Tadd Griffith ensured that Keanu Reeves had the proper training to perform the stunt that sees him hanging off the side of the horse to shoot at the assassin. The scene upped the ante for the John Wick franchise, wowing fans and adding another impressive feather to Reeves’ cap as an actor comfortable with performing his own stunts. Reeves detailed the experience on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, where he noted the safety system in place had the horse connected to a rig behind a truck, all of which put him at ease and allowed the sequence to be “fun.”

It’s hard to pick just one Jackie Chan stunt to include on a list of the best, so we didn’t. The actor/martial artist has truly defied expectations with the lengths he’s gone to provide some of the most jaw-dropping action to ever hit the screen. The first and least of them on this list would be a best effort for almost any other performer. In Lau Kar-leung’s The Legend Of The Drunken Master, also known as Drunken Master II, Chan’s Wong Fei-hung is pushed onto a bed of flaming hot coals. Chan crawls backward across the coals and gets up to fight again. Chan, a perfectionist, filmed the scene twice, believing the first take didn’t have the right rhythm.

In GoldenEye, a new Bond era took off with an opening sequence featuring 007 performing a 720-foot bungee jump off the Contra Dam in Switzerland, also known as the Verzasca Dam. The stunt, performed by veteran stuntman Wayne Michaels, set the world record for the highest bungee jump from a fixed structure. In an interview with Empire in 2015, Michaels reflected on the stunt: “I got to the end of the rope and they could hear me go ‘uurgh,’ which echoed down the valley. The force was so great on me that, physically, it hit me quite badly. Then to have to take this gun out and get it in shot in a matter of milliseconds was quite hard work!”

In the The Young Master’s nearly 15-minute final fight between Jackie Chan’s Dragon Lung and Hwang In-shik’s Master Kam, Chan takes a bone-crunching amount of physical abuse. Chan’s second film as director saw him going up against Hwang, a real-life 10th-degree black belt in Hapkido. While it’s always exciting to see Chan as an unstoppable force, he’s arguably best as an underdog for the way he takes a hit, falls on his back and neck in such a way that paralysis seems likely, only for him to get up again and keep fighting. Chan would go on to make stunts a bigger part of his films with his following release, 1982’s Dragon Lord, but The Young Master showed audiences both his prowess as a leading man and his seemingly boundless energy and physicality.

While the movie has become a hidden gem that’s rarely discussed, Burt Reynolds’ Sharky’s Machine is notable for the highest free fall stunt ever performed for a commercial film. In the movie, stuntman Dar Robinson launches himself through a window pane and falls 220 feet from Atlanta’s Hyatt Regency Hotel. A dummy is used in the wide shot for the actual footage seen in the film, and Robinson’s onscreen contributions are limited to him crashing through the window. Robinson is known as one of the greatest stuntmen of all time. He died tragically at 39 years old while performing a stunt for 1987’s Million Dollar Mystery, where he drove a motorcycle past its breaking point and off a cliff. One of his final film credits was Lethal Weapon and the film is dedicated to his memory.

One of the earliest and most impressive death-defying stunts was performed by Buster Keaton in the silent comedy Steamboat Bill Jr. Following a cyclone, several buildings collapse around Keaton’s William Canfield Jr. The façade of one building falls towards Keaton and the open attic window fits neatly around his body, preventing him from being crushed. Despite its seeming simplicity, the stunt was complicated. The building façade weighed two tons, and if Keaton had been off by more than an inch or so, he would’ve been crushed. An arguably unnecessary risk, Keaton also found it his most thrilling. Talk about knowing your mark!

To capture the aerial battles in Wings, director William A. Wellman had to meticulously plan everything down to a tee. Shot at Kelly Field in San Antonio. Texas, Wings required nearly 300 pilots and 350 infantrymen during its shoot. 2d Lt. Clarence S. Irvine served as an advisor on the film and also developed an airborne camera system to capture close-ups of the dogfights, while also performing in the aerial battle scenes. While many of the performers in the film were in the military, flying for the movies proved to be a different challenge. From weather conditions to the timing of the explosions, the success of Wings relied on multiple, simultaneous ground and air stunts. The results wowed audiences and Wings became the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, forever cementing the fact that the Oscars owe a great debt to stunt work.

Another of Jackie Chan’s most iconic stunts saw the actor slide down the 24-story Willemswerf Building in South Africa in the 1998 film Who Am I? The side of the building is only a few degrees from being vertical, making the slide a feat of balance and velocity. While Chan did wear a safety harness to perform the stunt, the one-take stunt is still impressive as he manages to run down part of the building and slide backward, before landing on his feet on the edge of the building above street level.

Casino Royale, director Martin Campbell’s reboot of the James Bond franchise, provided an opportunity for the long-running series to reimagine its action sequences for a new age, one that had become accustomed to the hand-held quickness of the Bourne films. Campbell and stunt coordinator Gary Powell spent six weeks rehearsing with freerunner Sébastien Foucan, who portrays Bond’s target in Madagascar, for the tense chase through a construction site. Stuntmen doubling for Daniel Craig, along with Foucan, were secured with safety harnesses as they leaped from cranes 100 feet off the ground. But beyond the heights, the scene is notable for Foucan’s precision, which isn’t just limited to scaling tall objects. The sequence relied on perfect timing, multiple set pieces, and dodging plenty of extras, while serving as a showcase for a brand-new Bond. The result is widely considered to be one of the best Bond action scenes and the best of Craig’s tenure as the character.

Here’s a real deep cut for you all. About 90 seconds before the end of the 1921 silent short Now Or Never, silent movie icon Harold Lloyd runs on top of a train, moving from car to car, but gaining no distance as his back is towards the mouth of a tunnel. Lloyd, famous for his chase sequences, is considered one of Hollywood’s earliest daredevils. He’s best known for the iconic scene of him hanging from clock hands over a busy street in Safety Last! (1923), an effect largely achieved by perspective. But the train run in Now Or Never may be his best stunt, one achieved entirely on his own legwork

The Dark Knight Rises allowed Christopher Nolan to direct his own Bond-esque opening sequence. It involves Bane (Tom Hardy) and his mercenaries hijacking a CIA plane in midair. Nolan filmed the scene over the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, utilizing real and prop planes, and stuntmen—overseen by stunt coordinator Tom Struthers—descending from one plane to another via cables. While the exterior action is done practically, the interior action was created with a simulator that allowed Nolan to rotate the interior of the plane as necessary. While Nolan frequently plays coy about how he achieves his effects, preferring to maintain the illusion of movie magic, the details that have been revealed about this sequence tells of a perfect blend of practical and digital effects that wowed audiences, especially those who saw the footage in IMAX.

As fantastic as GoldenEye’s bungee jump opening is, one Bond film has it beat. In The Spy Who Loved Me, directed by Lewis Gilbert, Bond ski jumps from Canada’s Asgard Peak, and free falls from the 6,611 feet mountain, until he reaches the valley where he saves himself by pulling the ripcord and revealing a Union Jack parachute. It was a moment that made audiences at the premiere, including then-Prince Charles, stand up and applaud. The stunt, performed by Rick Sylvester, ended up being delayed for two weeks, with Sylvester and the second-unit crew forced to camp on the mountain until weather conditions improved. When the stunt was finally performed, Sylvester skied over the top of the cameraman’s line of vision, preventing the master shot from being captured. Of the three backup cameras, only one managed to capture the jump from beginning to end, and that footage went down in stunt and Bond history.

Sometimes it pays to live dangerously. The Renny Harlin-directed Sly Stallone action-thriller Cliffhanger holds the world record for the most expensive stunt ever performed. Stuntman Simon Crane, who would coordinate the opening bungee jump in GoldenEye two years later, was paid a whopping $1 million dollars to descend on a rope from one plane to another at an altitude of 15,000 feet. It’s a standout stunt in a film full of death-defying high-wire acts. Funnily enough, despite the extreme mountain climbing at the film’s center, Stallone feared heights, and the climbing done outside of the soundstage was performed by doubles Ron Kauk and Wolfgang Güllich.

Tom Cruise had already stunned audiences with his free solo climb in Mission: Impossible II. So Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol saw the actor taking it to the next level by climbing the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai. While the film makes it appear that Ethan Hunt is free solo climbing the building with special gloves, Cruise was connected to wires at all times. Still, scaling the 2,722-foot structure was no walk in the park. The cables had to be attached at specific points on the tower so that the glass wouldn’t shatter. Cruise trained for months on a wall built of glass, lit with lamps that simulated the heat of the actual tower. The harness that kept Cruise from falling cut off circulation to the lower half of his body, making it more difficult for him to keep his footing. And because the footage was shot on IMAX by helicopter, Cruise only had about 30 minutes to perform the climb. The result was the most exhilarating M:I stunt at the time and saw Cruise reach a new level of dedication to the craft.

One of the most thrilling stunts ever performed can be seen in John Ford’s Stagecoach. Rodeo rider Yakima Canutt performs a “transfer” in which he jumps from his horse to a horse-drawn carriage, falls beneath the horses, is dragged, and emerges beneath the carriage’s wheels. Steven Spielberg later recreated the stunt with stuntman Terry Leonard, doubling for Harrison Ford, in Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981). To this day, it’s hard to believe Canutt made it out of the stunt alive, let alone performed it numerous times. Canutt doubled for John Wayne and co-starred alongside the actor throughout his career, which would have been notoriety enough. But 20 years after Stagecoach, he topped himself. Find out how later on this list.

Believe it or not, Tom Cruise did not know how to fly a helicopter before Mission: Impossible—Fallout’s climatic stunt that saw Hunt flying through mountainous terrain at a high altitude and then performing a corkscrew dive while chasing after his adversary, August Walker (Henry Cavill). Not only did Cruise have his chopper to worry about, but he also had to be aware of the other choppers filming the scene. There was no room for error. In true Cruise fashion, the actor went to flight school before shooting began, training for months in simulators before taking on the real thing, and earning his helicopter pilot’s license in the process. The result is an exhilarating sequence that sees Cruise flying entirely on his own, with cameras mounted in the cockpit. The daredevil sequence is taken to the next level when Cruise dangles from the chopper, dropping down in a rehearsed sequence that still took his fellow castmates by surprise.

Two decades after he wowed audiences in Stagecoach, Yakima Canutt took on the task of overseeing the stunts in the 1959 Biblical epic, Ben-Hur. The iconic chariot scene is widely considered one of the best action sequences ever captured on film, and the scale and danger of it—hundreds of stunt men, horses, camera cars, and Italian extras—led to the urban legend that the sequence resulted in at least one death. Thankfully, no one met their demise filming the sequence. The race, which required 200 miles of track, took three months to film, and 7,000 extras in total were utilized in the scene. The famous moment in which Charlton Heston’s Ben-Hur is thrown from his chariot and clings onto the front before climbing back on happened entirely by accident. Canutt’s son, stuntman Joe Canutt, was tossed into the air during filming and walked away with minor injuries. While the footage was originally believed to be unusable, it was refashioned into Ben-Hur’s daring save.

Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise’s partnership is unparalleled when it comes to delivering jaw-dropping stunts. While Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation’s underwater scene—where Cruise held his breath for three minutes in a single take—is a close runner-up, the sequel’s plane scene takes the honors in this film. Rogue Nation sees Ethan Hunt climbing and hanging off the outside of an Airbus A400M Atlas at over 5,000 feet in the air. Cruise performed the stunt eight times, without getting off the plane, until the perfect shot was achieved. It’s an unparalleled level of commitment that wavers between craft and crazy.

While it doesn’t involve horses, flying vehicles, or bungee cords, there’s arguably no stunt more beautifully performed than Jackie Chan’s pole slide from several stories in Police Story’s climatic mall fight that results in an explosion of light bulbs and sugar glass. It’s not simply the stunt itself that makes the scene so legendary but the fact that Chan was sick at the time, pumped full of medicine, and filming another movie, Heart Of The Dragon during the day while Police Story shot at night. The lights on the pole were so hot that Chan suffered second-degree burns on his hands. His landing also resulted in a back injury and a dislocated pelvis. The film was a blockbuster success and many consider Police Story to be one of the greatest action films ever made, with the pole slide frequently being highlighted.