Ah, set-pieces, the building blocks used by action filmmakers to craft their works of pure butt-kickery. Thanks to a combination of countless talented filmmakers, charismatic performers, invaluable crew members, and Tom Cruise's general desire to die for real for our entertainment, it's been a great decade for action. Here, we're celebrating the best, most bone-crunchiest set-pieces from 2010 to 2019, Inception to Avengers: Endgame with stops for films like John Wick and Mad Max: Fury Road along the way.
Two notes: 1) We didn't rank these set-pieces, because sometimes you just wanna watch the cars go boom without anyone yelling at you, ya know? 2) We were pretty loose with the definition of what counts as an action set-piece. I believe my exact directive for my colleagues was "if it whips ass in some way, it counts." May you carry this advice into all things, friends.
For even more Best of the Decade goodness, check out my ranking of every comic book movie of the decade, plus Adam Chitwood's ranking of the 2010s' best scores.
Inception - The Spinning Hallway
If Fred Astaire had been in action movies instead of musicals, it would look a lot like the hallway fight from Inception. Christopher Nolan was able to use his dream-within-a-dream conceit to really mess with reality, and his fantastic 2010 movie never does it better than when the hotel level of the dream loses gravity and poor Arthur is forced to not only improvise, but fight off projections while bouncing off the walls, ceiling, and floors. The camerawork required to get this scene right is absolutely bonkers, but Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister somehow managed to pull it off, and it remains just as thrilling now as it was when it debuted at the beginning of the decade. – Matt Goldberg
Breaking Bad Season 3 - Attack of the Twins
Not much could make you clench quite like the most tension-filled moments of Breaking Bad and right at the top of that squirm-inducing pile is Hank Schrader’s (Dean Norris) parking lot run-in with the Juárez Cartel’s twin assassins (Luis and Daniel Moncada). While other notable entries in the recent Golden Age of TV reveled in surprise deaths, Breaking Bad loved to shock by putting a main character right in the crosshairs of certain doom and then, somehow, pulling them to safety. That’s exactly what happens here. There are like, 15 separate moments from the moment the twins arrive to the final life-saving trigger-pull that you think Hank is a goner. Any sound close to an ax being dragged across concrete still gives me the chills. -- Vinnie Mancuso
Fast Five - The Vault Heist
The Fast and Furious franchise has always been a high-energy jolt of fun, but 2011’s Fast Five took things to a new level and set the template for the rest of the franchise to come by introducing The Rock, going overseas, and absolutely ghosting on the laws of physics. Nothing sums that new spirit up better than the infamous vault heist. We’d seen the family heist all kinds of things over the years (long gone were the days of street racing and basic electronics theft,) but this time, they dead-ass strapped a giant vault to the back of two cars and went racing through the streets of Brazil. Dom (Vin Diesel) and Brian (Paul Rudd), natural, driving in tandem with an absurd pendulous weight dragging behind them, tearing up the city as it goes, making impossibly sharp turns – science be damned! Almost a decade later and Justin Lin’s Fast Five remains a benchmark of the serious, joyous and action-packed with an all-timer central set-piece. – Haleigh Foutch
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol - The Burj Khalifa Climb
By now, the Mission: Impossible franchise has settled into its place as a showcase for Tom Cruise to almost kill himself for real. But the scene that really kicked off the trend came in the fourth film, director Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol, in which Cruise’s Ethan Hunt scaled the side of the tallest building in the world, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. In trademark Tom Cruise fashion, the actor strapped his own damn self in 1,700 feet up the tower’s 2,700-foot peak to nail the shots of a desperate Ethan using magnetic gloves to climb from floor to floor. The height itself is dizzying—that slow pan straight to the ground is still some of the most I’ve ever moved in a movie theater seat—but what makes the scene is the way Bird and cinematographer Robert Elswit start the tension at an impossible height and just. keep. topping it. As each magnetic glove fails Ethan, the scene turns into a ticking clock 163 stories from the ground. Absolutely stomach-turning in the best possible way and arguably the best set-piece in the entire franchise. --Vinnie Mancuso
The Raid: Redemption - Mad Dog vs. Rami and Andi
Director Gareth Evans’ The Raid: Redemption is the type of ultra-fluid action movie that makes you realize the only difference between a fight scene and a dance number is the thuds and thumps. The choreography from Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian introduced a large part of the western audience to Pencak Silat, the full-body fighting style originating from Indonesia, and it’s only fair that the two violence artists saved the best brawl for themselves. Toward the end of The Raid, rookie special forces agent Rama (Uwais) discovers the grimy room in which the brutal gang heavy Mad Dog (Ruhian) has been torturing Rama’s estranged older brother, Andi (Donny Alamsyah). Mad Dog, a psycho with a sense of flair, lets Andi go for the sport of it, and what follows is a 2-on-1 melee that devolves into a violent whirlwind of fists and feet that Evans manages to contain in-camera. The choreography, timing, and physicality is, simply put, insane, and up there as one of the greatest no-frills, no-weapons, no-mercy fight scenes of all time. --Vinnie Mancuso
The Dark Knight Rises - Crashing This Plane, With No Survivors
If you spent your first IMAX viewing of The Dark Knight Rises trying to figure out just what the hell Tom Hardy was even saying as Bane, you unfortunately didn’t notice that the opening to Christopher Nolan’s Batman three-quel is one hell of a technical marvel. We’re introduced to Hardy’s burly masked bad guy as he bamboozles CIA agent Bill Wilson (Aidan Gillen) into giving up nuclear physicist Dr. Leonid Pavel (Alon Aboutboul) aboard a moving plane. Bane’s cronies descend upon the aircraft from another plane, eventually crashing it [extremely garbled voice] with no survivors. Nolan has been quoted as saying the scene is his proudest achievement “if you’re talking pure mechanics”, and that’s no surprise. The noted old-school filmmaker pretty much pulled off the mid-air plane heist for real while filming it with IMAX cameras, hanging stunt performers from wires hundreds of feet off the ground and actually dropping the main hull of a C-130 military transport to the ground. --Vinnie Mancuso
The Avengers - Battle of New York
The Avengers was a make-or-break point for the MCU, not just in terms of combining characters from disparate movies, but also in delivering that extra spectacle fans expected from putting all those good-looking superheroes in the same movie. The Battle of New York is an epic, surprising, even messy climax for this iconic superhero film, but what really makes this action set piece soar are the character moments. Writer/director Joss Whedon ensures that each hero gets a significant beat in the final battle (from “I’m always angry” to Cap directing New York’s finest), and the whole thing is peppered with Whedon’s terrific sense of humor. It’s fun, which stood in stark contrast to some doom-and-gloom final battles of the time, and it’s capped off with two marvelous pieces of iconography: the “one-shot” that zips from hero to hero doing battle, and the “Avengers Assembled” shot of all our heroes standing in a circle, looking at the faceless horde above, and resolving to bring this invasion to an end.
While this set piece would be eclipsed in terms of scale and herculean feats in future Marvel films, the first-ever assemblage of the Avengers still holds up today as a wildly entertaining feat of movie magic. – Adam Chitwood
Fast & Furious 6 - Tank Chase
Really, the Fast & Furious franchise can be divided into two parts: Before and after director Justin Lin got himself a whole-ass tank and plowed his way through reality into a heightened world of all-out, high-octane cartoon fuckery. Lin directs the absolute hell out of this insane finale sequence, in which villainous mercenary Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) attempts to rob a military convoy of a highly-dangerous computer chip, with Dom (Vin Diesel) and the rest of the fambly aiming to stop him. Not one to be out-gunned by muscle cars, Shaw commandeers a tank, smashing it into cars, barricades, and walls alike as cement flies and bodies hang in and out of every vehicle on the highway. It is a wild ten minutes, and it ends with one of the least likely leaping saves ever put to film. I love it in all its absurd, flaming glory. --Vinnie Mancuso
Ninja II: Shadow of a Tear - Bar Fight
Scott Adkins is a DTV action great of our generation earning a place alongside JCVD as a king of landing split-kicks, but after the uninspired standard fare that was 2009’s Ninja, it was one heck of a shock when the 2013 followup Ninja II: Shadow of a Tear surprise round-housed you in the face with its awesomeness. Now, of course, this is not a deep character study film, but it is an absolute force of killer fight scenes. There are so many you could pick, but my favorite is definitely big bar showdown that pits Adkins against a room full of rowdy bar patrons and feels like it was lifted straight out of the machismo action classics of the 90s. Adkins is an incredible athletic performer, sometimes almost balletic with his movements, and he spins-kicks and flips his way through the bar without breaking a sweat, flipping around in the air like he maid a bargain with gravity. It’s an absolute hoot. – Haleigh Foutch
Snowpiercer - Tunnel Fight
Nobody does class warfare quite like Bong Joon Ho. The Parasite filmmaker is riding high on his Hitchockian class thriller, but he brought a much more blunt and literal approach to the subject matter with his 2013 apocalyptic genre-hybrid Snowpiercer. Set on a train that never stops running through an apocalyptic frozen wasteland, the film follows a revolution by the starving citizens living in the squalor of the last train cars while the people upfront live in indulgence. Their fight for freedom takes them from train car to train car, with a hideous surprise waiting in each new chamber. But they get their worst greeting when they open the door to find a small army of masked men armed with axes, waiting to take on the underfed masses carrying only pipes and a passion for survival.
Director Bong constantly evolves the stakes of the battle, pitting his heroes up against an already outmatched battle before even more at them. First, there are the frozen-over tracks that threaten to derail them with each impact, but then the nastiest bit. With a long tunnel ahead, the armed men are equipped with night-vision goggles, leaving the opposition blind in helpless. Bong switches to green-tinged first-person goggle shots for the pitch-black massacre, until someone calls for fire and a rousing relay race ensues to bring the fighters the light they need to win the day – or at least not get totally annihilated. Bong makes a meal for the senses through the whole thing, playing with light, sound (those stabbing noises!), and speed to make sure you feel every brutal blow. In a testament to an impeccably-crafted scene, Snowpiercer’s big set-piece isn’t just entertaining, it’s all story -- you could literally clip the sequence out and present it as a thesis for the film. -- Haleigh Foutch
Pacific Rim - Hong Kong Battle
Usually, I prefer my action practical and in-camera as often as possible, but the Kaiju vs. Mecha genre has never looked more splendid than in Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim. Boasting typically spectacular effects from ILM, Pacific Rim brings larger-than-life creature feature smackdowns to the screen in glorious detail, and none more purely nerd-out delightful than the near-twenty-minute Hong Kong battle. Both monsters and machines get a chance to show off all their cool features in the epic set-pieces; from the whirly blades on Crimson Typhoon and rock-em-sock-em powers of Cherno Alpha, none of which are a match for the acid-spitting, EMP-blasting creatures from below the sea. It’s an unbelievable spectacle, rendered with the insane attention to detail that makes Del Toro’s work so singular. – Haleigh Foutch
X-Men: Days of Future Past - Quicksilver
Oh sure, we all dunked on the look of Evan Peters’ Quicksilver when his objectively outrageous character design for X-Men: Days of Future Past was revealed, but the joke was on us. Through the power of Peters’ charismatic and one flawlessly executed scene, the speedy superhero ended up being an unexpected highlight of the film. Short, simple and undeniably effective, Quicksilver’s big moment takes the “bullet time” approach to the hero’s super-speed and, set to tune of ‘Time in a Bottle’, he zips around a well-guarded room just in time to redirect some bullets, taste some stew, and save the day. It’s entertaining enough to watch him have a blast zipping around the room, laying his little traps and making small, methodical tweaks to the environment, but ultimately it’s all a big set up that pays off in the punchline when time immediately returns to full-speed and we watch the fallout from his small tweaks sweep the room. – Haleigh Foutch
The Raid 2 - Prison Riot
The Raid and The Raid 2 are packed with some of the best action scenes of the decade, but for me, the standout has to be the prison riot from The Raid 2. While other scenes may have more elaborate fight choreography or more brutal kills, the sheer technical difficulty of the prison riot puts it over the top. When doing fight choreography, everything has to be as perfectly placed and timed as possible, but the mud and the rain in the scene throw that precision out the window. For director Gareth Evans’ to do long take in the middle of this chaos is absolutely insane, and I can’t imagine how many times the actors fell or slipped just trying to go through their choreography. It’s an amazing set piece, but it’s a miracle it even exists at all. – Matt Goldberg
John Wick - In the Club
The entire first John Wick movie is a bloody work of art, but the title boogeyman’s relentless neon-lit spree through a pulsing night club is probably what cemented Keanu Reeves’ super-assassin as a modern-day action icon. Slick, stylish, and brutal, John carving his way through goon after goon—but always with a realistic amount of reloading!—on his way to find dog-murdering criminal Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen) is as frenetic an action scene as you can get, like the actual bass-bump of a club banger. From beginning to end, this set piece is as good an American homage to John Woo’s gun-fu since—and there may be some overlap here—1999’s The Matrix. --Vinnie Mancuso
Game of Thrones Season 4 - The Mountain and the Viper
The head cronch heard ‘round the world. The eighth episode of Game of Thrones’ fourth season ended with a trial by combat between monstrous killing machine Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane (Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson) and Oberyn Martell (Pedro Pascal), the nimble Red Viper of Dorne who had arrived just a few episodes earlier to become a charming fan favorite. The thing that makes this duel sizzle isn’t so much in the fight itself—although watching Pascal have a blast toying with his much larger opponent is charming as hell, much like everything he does is charming as hell—but in the tension of what’s not happening. (I yelled “just do it” so many times on my first watch I technically earned a Nike sponsorship.) Game of Thrones was always so great at making its major deaths land with maximum impact, and like in all the series’ best moments director Alex Graves builds a sense of hope right until the very last second, when he crushes it like, well, like a skull in the hands of Gregor Clegane. --Vinnie Mancuso
True Detective Season 1 - Who Goes There?
The fourth episode of True Detective’s first season taught me that I could hold my breath for six straight minutes. The thing about the robbery sequence that ends “Who Goes There” is that I fully believe it’d still be an all-time great piece of highwire tension even without the long-shot gimmick, thanks to how far we’d delved into the story at this point plus the dangerously electric energy Matthew McConaughey was bringing to the role of Rust Cohl. But woo boy, director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s decision to not take his camera off of a coked-up and deep undercover Cohl as he navigates an ill-advised heist in a Louisiana stash house elevates the six-minute scene to a pure heart-thumping adrenaline shot. It’s the type of immersive long-take that you don’t notice is a long-take while you’re watching from the very edge of your seat until you get a text from a friend asking if you just saw what they saw. --Vinnie Mancuso
Captain America: The Winter Soldier - Highway Showdown
The MCU is jam-packed with great action, from superhero team-ups to space battles and extra-dimensional warfare, but in terms of grounded, real-world action, it just doesn’t get better than Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The post-Avengers sequel recruited Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow to fight alongside Cap, introduced Anthony Mackie’s Falcon, and welcomed future franchise heavyweights Anthony and Joe Russo to the fold as directors. And it threw ‘em all into action in the film’s standout highway showdown. There are lots of killer set-pieces in this movie, including Nick Fury’s SUV escape and Cap’s elevator fight, but the most gripping and emotionally charged lands right in the middle of a crowded city street where an unsuited Cap, Black Widow, and Falcon square off against The Winter Soldier.
It’s the levels that make this one so effective – both the multi-leveled physical staging, which traverses the highs and lows of a freeway overpass and the well-stacked levels of tone and intensity throughout. After an explosive shootout, the Russos take it low and slow, pitting Natasha’s gadgetry, hand-to-hand skills, and spy tactics against the super-soldier. It only takes one quick showdown to send her running, and she still gets a bullet in the back. Stakes established. And then the scene really starts cooking. Cap gets in on the action, giving us the iconic vibranium arm vs. vibranium shield and a knock-down-drag-out between two impeccably matched opponents. And talk about an emotionally satisfying button; the sequence ends when Steve knocks of The Winter Soldier’s mask and realizes he’s been battling his old BFF Bucky Barnes this whole time. – Haleigh Foutch
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation - A Night at the Opera
Whether Christopher McQuarrie was influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much or not, the opera house sequence in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation stands as one of the most surprising and satisfying set pieces in the Mission: Impossible franchise to date. And that’s saying something. Trading in the Burj Khalifa for a swanky theatrical affair, this set piece is all about tension built through editing and filmmaking craft. The story is laid out in images, not in exposition, and we watch as Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt quietly gets his ass kicked above, behind, and around an ongoing opera, all the while Rebecca Ferguson’s unforgettable Ilsa Faust strikes a now-iconic sniper pose, preparing to strike. The tension builds and builds in concert with the music, and the quiet fighting gives way to a daring escape that doubles as a “first date” between Ethan and Ilsa. This is action informing character and story at its finest. – Adam Chitwood
Mad Max: Fury Road - Final Chase
Listen, I put “The Final Chase” up here because “The Whole Freaking Thing” would be unfair to the other movies on this list. Mad Max: Fury Road is, simply put, a full-throttle masterpiece, the result of Australian filmmaker/madman George Miller taking a few dozen apocalypse cars, some top-tier performers, and a crap-ton of explosives out into the desert to see what art some flames can make. And truly, the last stretch of Fury Road is adrenaline and gasoline put to film, as Furiosa (Charlize Theron), Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy), and the five escaped wives of a ruthless wasteland tyrant race back to the Citadel, pursued by Immortan Joe and his entire armored-truck army. The amount of stunt work and pyrotechnics on gorgeously dangerous display here is mind-boggling, and it starts with the massive Tanker truck explosion that involved [deep breath] 1,360 liters of fuel, 96 detonators, 280 meters of primer cord, five kilograms of black powder, and two kilograms of flash powder. Oh, and it blew up going 50 mph. What a day. What a lovely day. --Vinnie Mancuso
Daredevil Season 1 - The Hallway Fight
It’s one thing to stage an impressive fight scene, but it’s another to dramatically shift the way an audience looks at an entire universe. That’s what Netflix’s Daredevil pulled off in its second episode as blind vigilante Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) fought his way through a Russian crime lair to rescue a kidnapped child, the camera never cutting for all three bone-crunching minutes. It’s brutal, it’s violent, and most importantly it's the complete opposite end of the spectrum of the big-screen MCU’s CGI-heavy set-pieces where gods fly through the air. Matt gets his ass whooped for three straight minutes, gasping for breath and often struggling to gain an advantage, but the character is defined by his ability to always get back up. (And then straight up launch a TV into a Russian gangster’s face.) Daredevil’s one-take descent into a grimy New York hell set the stage for a much darker corner of the MCU, one which I’d gladly return to again if it meant action this intensely orchestrated. --Vinnie Mancuso