Random Craziest Stunts In Action Movies That Were Completely Real (25 items)

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  (#23) Stone

  • Hugh Keays-Byrne, Roger Ward, Vincent Gil, Ken Shorter, Sandy Harbutt, Dewey Hungerford, Bindi Williams, James Bowles, John Ifkovitch

  Stone is a little-known 1974 Australian motorcycle movie. Those in the know remember a jaw-dropping scene in which a biker is tapped by a car and winds up driving off a cliff and into the bay below. There's no CG or camera trickery here - stuntman Peter Armstrong actually drove off a cliff and into the ocean. 

  So who's more bad-ass, bikers or stuntmen emulating bikers? Watch this scene to find out.
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  (#8) Death Proof

  • Rose McGowan, Rosario Dawson, Kurt Russell, Quentin Tarantino, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Eli Roth, Marley Shelton, Jordan Ladd, Vanessa Ferlito, Tracie Thoms, Nicky Katt, Zoe Bell, Michael Parks, Jonathan Loughran, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Electra Avellan, James Parks, Elise Avellan, Michael Bacall, Omar Doom, Monica Staggs, Eurlyne Epper, Tina Rodriguez, Amanda Rivas, Manuel Cantu, Steven A. Webb, Violet Saenz-Arocha, Darryl K. Phipps, Marcy Harriell, Kelley Robins, Angela Ware, Julitta Pourciau, Marta Mendoza, Chris King, Melissa Arcaro, Jamie L. Dunno, Tim Murphy, Helen Kim

  The meaning behind Death Proof's title becomes clear in a scene in which Kurt Russell's character, Stuntman Mike, explains that his muscle car is reinforced to keep the driver alive through any and all crashes, and is, therefore, "death-proof."

  It's somewhat ironic then, that real-life stuntwoman Zoe Bell, a fixture of Quentin Tarantino's movies, took an acting role in the film, only to eliminate the option of using a death-proof car for the chase scene, since she spent the entirety of it riding on the car's hood.
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  (#6) The Dark Knight

  • Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Morgan Freeman, Eric Roberts, Anthony Michael Hall, Michael Jai White, William Fichtner, Cillian Murphy

  In one of the most thrilling scenes in Christopher Nolan's masterpiece The Dark Knight, Joker, driving a full-size big rig, is chasing an armored police truck through the streets of Gotham. Batman cuts in front of the Joker, releasing a steel tension wire in the truck's path, which causes the rig to flip trailer over cab and land upside down.

  What you might not know is that stuntman Jim Wilkey remained in the rig's cab the entire time.
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  (#3) Steamboat Bill Jr.

  • Buster Keaton, Ernest Torrence, Marion Byron, Tom McGuire, James T. Mack, Tom Lewis

  In the Holy Trinity of practical action pioneers, Buster Keaton is the god at its center. In Steamboat Bill, Jr., he risked being crushed by a house for laughs. 

  There have been tons of movies that have copied this famous scene from the silent era, in which a man standing in front of a falling structure is left miraculously unscathed thanks to a well-placed hole. The difference is, the house in Steamboat Bill, Jr. actually did fall, and Keaton had the guts to stand underneath it and hope nothing went wrong. Any tiny change in the way the house fell would have flattened Keaton. 
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  (#11) Premium Rush

  • Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jamie Chung, Dania Ramirez, Michael Shannon, Aaron Tveit, Aasif Mandvi, Alexis Krauss, Danielle McKee, Paul Thornton, Peter Conboy, Wai Ching Ho, Hoon Lee, Anna Kuchma, Brian Smyj, Brian Koppelman, Henry O, Rosemary Howard, Anthony Chisholm, Steven Weisz, Ashley Austin Morris, Marc Bicking, Naeem Uzimann, Steven J. Klaszky, Jian, Aija Terauda, Michael-Leon Wooley, Mark J. Parker, Lyman Chen, Sebastian La Cause, Jade Wu, Jennifer Wiener, Nick Damici, Gustavo Cunha, Mario D'Leon, Jeremy McLain, Darlene Violette, Matthew Rauch, Amy Hohn, Douglas C. Williams, Lauren Ashley Carter, Charles Borland, Sean Grady, Ruth Zhang, Henry Kwan, Shirley Dluginski, Ron Maestri, Christopher Place, Victor Chan, Ted Sod, Paul Jude Letersky, Rick Zahn, Jerry Walsh, Derek Edward Miller, Kelvin Whui, Keenan Leung, Jeffrey M. Marchetti, Wolé Parks, Tet Wada, Kenny Wong, Jimmy P. Wong, Jonathan Root, Tony Cheng, Shing Ka, Boyce Wong, Michael Morana, Wayne Stephens, Bojun Wang, Sabrina Lott, John Mancini, Lam Yung, Nancy Eng, Hui Yuk Lung, Kate Manning, David R. Bowen, Jason Iannacone, Sean Kennedy, Wally Ng, P.J. Sosko, Richard Hsu, Huang Gian Jin, Scott Chan, Carsey Walker Jr., Li Jing Xian, Zhao Mao Chen, Kevin Bolger, Fernando Rivera, Djani Johnson, Kym Perfetto, Kin Shing Wong, Grim Reaper Q.

   

  Bicycling may not seem like a dangerous activity, but try doing it at top speed in the middle of busy Manhattan traffic. This is the life of a New York City bike courier, as portrayed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Premium Rush.

  For much of the movie, streets were closed to all automobile traffic save the stunt drivers, who knew how not to mow over any of the cyclists. However, during one scene, a diplomat decided to drive through the coned-off set, cutting off Gordon-Levitt's pathway. The actor veered left to avoid the diplomat, crashed into a taxi, and went through the cab's back window. He wound up with 31 stitches for his trouble, but not before he had the director catch some footage of his profuse bleeding.

   
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  (#12) Mad Max: Fury Road

  • Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Nicholas Hoult, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton

  Fury Road is an action junkie's delight - a movie-length, gunfire-ridden car chase through the apocalypse, all achieved with practical effects. One of the most difficult set pieces to achieve was the polecats sequence, in which warriors fixed atop flexible poles mounted on vehicles attempt to snatch the sister-wives out of Max's rig on the downswing.

  To review: guys on poles attached to speeding vehicles swinging down onto other speeding vehicles.

  To achieve this fever-dream stunt, poles were specially engineered, stuntmen were trained by a Cirque du Soleil performer for months, and the drivers had to be trained to operate the vehicles without endangering the psychos dangling 40 feet above their vehicles on wobbly sticks. Luckily, it all paid off, and the sequence, which involves one of the greatest exploding vehicles ever, is a thing of majesty. 

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