What is the greatest action scene in modern cinema? John Wick fighting his way up the 220 steps of the Sacré-Coeur in John Wick Chapter 4? Either of the bus fights in Nobody or Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings? Ethan Hunt
scaling the Burj Khalifa in Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol? The explosive one-take opening of French action-drama Athena? The motorcycle swordfight in Korean thriller The Villainess? The crazed pole vaulting in Mad Max: Fury Road? Pretty much any of the smackdowns in The Raid or The Raid 2?
All good shouts, but there’s a oner in Extraction 2 that might just surpass them all. In it, Chris Hemsworth’s mercenary Tyler Rake escapes from a prison in Georgia. He first fights his way down a maze of stone corridors. Then across a prison yard. Then his waiting vehicle is pursued by multiple armoured jeeps at high speed. And then he boards a speeding train and fights in it and on it as helicopters swoop and land atop the hurtling locomotive, unloading fire and goons. OK, it’s actually several extended takes invisibly stitched together, but the choreography and intensity are astonishing, and nearly all of it was done for real.
‘We had a strong North Star of having as much in-camera as possible,’ nods Hemsworth, back as Rake after fighting, knifing and shooting his way through half the population of Dhaka ‘We landed a helicopter on a moving train. Six guys jumped out of the helicopter, and the helicopter then took off. I’m climbing up and down inside the carriage, to outside, on top of it. In my experience, 99% of the time, that would all be done on green screen. And it wasn’t in this instance. The variables were exponential and it was risky. But as an audience member myself, I just love it. I don’t care how good the special effects get - you can’t replicate that.’
