Michael Phillips: The movies’ greatest action scenes, from the silent era to ‘John Wick 4′

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