What action movie sequence should have killed/ seriously injured someone?

[Accelerator]

I'm talking things like leaping off buildings, grabbing a ledge while falling, or taking on beatings which should have sent a person to the hospital.

[Thrudd]

Basically every action movie sequence ever.

[Knaight]

I'm seconding the "basically every action movie sequence" position. That said, special notice goes to the ridiculous, ridiculous chase scene in Ong Bak. Is it my favorite sequence? Absolutely. Is jumping through a looped spool of barbed wire during a chase actually a great way to get seriously injured? Also yes.

[Tvtyrant]

I'm talking things like leaping off buildings, grabbing a ledge while falling, or taking on beatings which should have sent a person to the hospital.

I got injured doing 50 pushups at the start of quarantine, and again this Saturday riding my bike on a hot day without water. People die falling off chairs on the regular, so I'm going to go with "any scene where people do something athletic in any film ever."

A great example is in The Other Guys where Mark Wahlberg punches a man off a motor cycle. That likely would have severely injured both of them, in a film parodying dumb action tropes like walking away from explosions or jumping off buildings.

[Traab]

Any martial arts mass combat scene should end with the hero beaten to a bloody pulp. Seriously, jackie chan, bruce lee, jet li, doesnt matter, they are all going to be beaten to a bloody heap by that squad of two dozen goons because irl they dont attack you one at a time or in a pattern that lets you smoothly transition from punch to block to deflect to knockout blow. Also, real people tend to not fall down after one hit in a fight. Oh knockouts absolutely DO happen, but not like you see in martial arts fights. So while you and your first opponent are trading blows, the other dozen are hitting you on every exposed surface they can reach. Because you cant just punch them in the jaw then move on to the next guy.

[hungrycrow]

Any martial arts mass combat scene should end with the hero beaten to a bloody pulp. Seriously, jackie chan, bruce lee, jet li, doesnt matter, they are all going to be beaten to a bloody heap by that squad of two dozen goons because irl they dont attack you one at a time or in a pattern that lets you smoothly transition from punch to block to deflect to knockout blow. Also, real people tend to not fall down after one hit in a fight. Oh knockouts absolutely DO happen, but not like you see in martial arts fights. So while you and your first opponent are trading blows, the other dozen are hitting you on every exposed surface they can reach. Because you cant just punch them in the jaw then move on to the next guy.

Jackie Chan at least does what you should do: run away and use the environment and improvised weapons to stop them from just cornering you and attacking all at once. Of course in real life you wouldn't be able to rehearse the fight for three months, so eventually you'd slip up one of your fancy acrobatics and quickly get surrounded.

[Accelerator]

Well, then I guess I should change the title.

I'm writing a story, and I"m trying to draw in contrasts between the 'real' world, and the world of 'heroes'. Basically, I'm searching for examples where heroes do things that would cripple a normal person, and I want to specifically draw attention to it.

[Peelee]

After reading the titl, my immediate thought was to jump in and comment, "all of them. Every single one. You can trip and if you fall wrong you can die, the insane stuff they do in movies is leagues beyond that."

Anyway, I wanted to make a note on this in particular:

I'm seconding the "basically every action movie sequence" position. That said, special notice goes to the ridiculous, ridiculous chase scene in Ong Bak. Is it my favorite sequence? Absolutely. Is jumping through a looped spool of barbed wire during a chase actually a great way to get seriously injured? Also yes.

First off, seconding the love for Ong Bak. If anyone hasn't seen a Tony Jaa movie, I highly recommend fixing that. But, more importantly, Jackie Chan was pretty blunt about his death-defying stunts: he openly admits anyone can do what he does on-screen; it's just a matter of getting it right. The dude is a perfectionist, and with his Golden Harvest production company, he can keep trying to film a shot over and over until he gets it right. That's why those movies tend to be better than the handful of mainstream Hollywood movies he's done*, because they don't want to have to have 40, 50, however many takes it requires to get a stunt, for each stunt. They'll just get a good-enough shot and use editing or effects to make up for it. The outtakes at the end of his movies? There are loads more where they come from, he can basically pick and choose the most entertaining outtakes to put in, because he fails a lot for each success in the finished product. He is the film-star version of Bruce Lee's man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.

This is the long-form version of what Knaight said; you can jump through a looped spool of barbed wire in a movie, but dang if that isn't the worst possible idea if you don't have fifty chances to do it and a mountain of safety equipment for the times you fail.

*For one notable exception off the top of my head, The Foreigner was just fantastic. The man was abjectly terrifying in that movie. It had a lot in common with First Blood, just these otherwise quite competent armed forces being destroyed by a ghost. Holy crap The Irishman was good. If you haven't seen it go see it, go now, stop reading this I promise you it's not as good as that movie was.

ETA:

Any martial arts mass combat scene should end with the hero beaten to a bloody pulp. Seriously, jackie chan, bruce lee, jet li, doesnt matter, they are all going to be beaten to a bloody heap by that squad of two dozen goons because irl they dont attack you one at a time or in a pattern that lets you smoothly transition from punch to block to deflect to knockout blow. Also, real people tend to not fall down after one hit in a fight. Oh knockouts absolutely DO happen, but not like you see in martial arts fights. So while you and your first opponent are trading blows, the other dozen are hitting you on every exposed surface they can reach. Because you cant just punch them in the jaw then move on to the next guy.

One of the many reasons Jackie Chan is my all-time fave for martial arts movies is he does get hurt, in-character. He usually uses that for comedic effect, but he loves to point out that yeah, you can't really shrug stuff like that off**.

Of course, he then continues battling, but hey, it's a movie.

**The best example of this is the final fight in City Hunter, when he looks for weapons to defend against the steel bars can't find any, and defiantly raises his arms as defense. That movie had a huge amount of problems, but also had was able to match the lows with equally numerous and soaring highs, like that scene.

[Accelerator]

Basically every action movie sequence ever.

Any particularly good examples?

[Bohandas]

Well, then I guess I should change the title.

I'm writing a story, and I"m trying to draw in contrasts between the 'real' world, and the world of 'heroes'. Basically, I'm searching for examples where heroes do things that would cripple a normal person, and I want to specifically draw attention to it.

Like in literally different worlds or different groups within the same world. For the former check out Last Action Hero for the latter check out Exalted

[Dienekes]

Any martial arts mass combat scene should end with the hero beaten to a bloody pulp. Seriously, jackie chan, bruce lee, jet li, doesnt matter, they are all going to be beaten to a bloody heap by that squad of two dozen goons because irl they dont attack you one at a time or in a pattern that lets you smoothly transition from punch to block to deflect to knockout blow. Also, real people tend to not fall down after one hit in a fight. Oh knockouts absolutely DO happen, but not like you see in martial arts fights. So while you and your first opponent are trading blows, the other dozen are hitting you on every exposed surface they can reach. Because you cant just punch them in the jaw then move on to the next guy.

Eh. Thing is, I’ve seen a couple bar fights and you can look up fights and see, this doesn’t actually always happen. There is a ridiculous amount of posturing in fights and it isn’t all that uncommon to see members in a group context standing around and/or getting in each other’s way in an actual fight. Especially if they’re untrained.

Mind you, I’ve never seen a group of trained bodyguards work together. That probably has a dynamic much closer to what you’re describing.

[Peelee]

Well, then I guess I should change the title.

I'm writing a story, and I"m trying to draw in contrasts between the 'real' world, and the world of 'heroes'. Basically, I'm searching for examples where heroes do things that would cripple a normal person, and I want to specifically draw attention to it.

Quick and dirty example, punching the face. Good odds you'll break your hand because the front of the skull is not shaped in a comfortable way for fists. Or, if you instead hit the top of the skull, it's a really hard bone, like hitting a wall. There's a reason head injuries skyrocketed in boxing only after they got super padded gloves.

Movies, if a punch is thrown, 90% chance it's going to the face. 0% chance its going to break the puncher's hand.

First person who responds with 1992''s Gladiator gets punched in the face by Brian Dennehy.
ETA:

Like in literally different worlds or different groups within the same world. For the former check out Last Action Hero for the latter check out Exalted

Accelerator, watch Last Action Hero. It's perfect research for what you're looking for.
I may also be biased in favor of anything written by Shane Black.

[hungrycrow]

Knocking someone unconscious. In movies they'll wake up later with a headache. In real life that means a serious concussion.

Jumping or being thrown through glass is a good way to get stabbed by a hundred broken glass shards.

[Tvtyrant]

People almost never get eye injuries in movies. Car accidents where the windshield breaks, chemicals, fist fights. It is very easy and common to get eye injuries in RL.

[Peelee]

People almost never get eye injuries in movies. Car accidents where the windshield breaks, chemicals, fist fights. It is very easy and common to get eye injuries in RL.

Safety goggles should really be for more than just laboratories and high-risk endeavors.

[KatsOfLoathing]

Jumping or being thrown through glass is a good way to get stabbed by a hundred broken glass shards.

This one, big time. Windows are both a lot more durable and a lot more dangerous than any Hollywood action movie wants you to believe. TV Tropes has a whole trope dedicated to it. Most instances of people jumping through glass windows in films and TV would probably result in A) not hitting it hard enough and just bouncing off, bonus points for breaking whatever body part hit the glass first, or B) getting about two dozen deep cuts from all that glass slicing into your skin, and possibly bleeding out not long afterwards.

Ironically, a recent action movie I recall that didn't play this myth straight is Incredibles 2. Elastigirl breaks a window by throwing a chair at it rather than jumping through it at one point, and at another the Screenslaver opens a window before jumping through it.

[NotASpiderSwarm]

For an exception to the above, car chases are pretty reasonable. A lot of the times, they actually have professional drives doing those tricks/corners, with some editing to make it look cooler. Now, an amateur doing any of that would die instantly, and even professionals are only doing those tricks because it's a controlled environment with every step pre-planned, but they're at least usually possible to attempt and survive.

[Zarrgon]

Die Hard:

1.The glass cutting poor John's feet....ok, most of us have stepped on broken glass right...it HURTS. Like "you can't walk on it" and that is just one peice. John steps on dozens of them, quickly...and likely digs them into his feet. Then we get like ten seconds where he pulls out the glass and bandages his feet. I really doubt he would be able to walk after that....

2.John drops the chair of C-4 down the elevator shaft and then "jumps away" when he sees the explosion race up towards him (at the speed of light you know). Ok...kinda simple, you can't "jump away" from an explosion. By the time he saw it...he would have felt it too....

3.Jumping off the exploding roof while tied up to a, er, fire hose... Um, this is simple "fall of the building to your death".

4.John is under the table, bad guy is on top of the table with a machine gun. A machine gun that, er, can't shoot through the table top...though John does it with a handgun like seconds later.


Any action movie:

*People take cover from gun shots behind a car. Ok, depends on the gun, bullet, angle and car.....but in general cars make for poor cover. Even more so car doors(car doors are NOT made of one inch armor plate).

*The explosion that knocks you down. Ok, if you are close enough to an explosion that it knocks you down....you are not getting back up as your dead. A crazy example is Fairgame: Cindy Crowford walks out of her house and on her deck over looking the lake...then her house explodes and she is tossed way out into the lake and lives unhurt.


For a fun Twist....a couple actors, like Keenu Reeves and Tom Cruise really DO some of the stunts their character does. In the vast majority of Tom Cruse movies, that is really Tom himself doing the stunt. And sure it's a stunt and "safe"...but still, like Mission Impossible 5: Tom really did hang on to the outside of a plane as it took off (sure he had a harness)...but still he was hanging on to a plane for real!

[Kitten Champion]

Die Hard:

1.The glass cutting poor John's feet....ok, most of us have stepped on broken glass right...it HURTS. Like "you can't walk on it" and that is just one peice. John steps on dozens of them, quickly...and likely digs them into his feet. Then we get like ten seconds where he pulls out the glass and bandages his feet. I really doubt he would be able to walk after that....

2.John drops the chair of C-4 down the elevator shaft and then "jumps away" when he sees the explosion race up towards him (at the speed of light you know). Ok...kinda simple, you can't "jump away" from an explosion. By the time he saw it...he would have felt it too....

3.Jumping off the exploding roof while tied up to a, er, fire hose... Um, this is simple "fall of the building to your death".

4.John is under the table, bad guy is on top of the table with a machine gun. A machine gun that, er, can't shoot through the table top...though John does it with a handgun like seconds later.

It's really nothing compared to the later Die Hard entries. Once you get into Live Free or Die Hard - or Die Hard 4 - he goes round the bend. The part where he's chased by a fighter jet while driving a semi and manages to escape getting cut to ribbons by its vulcans, destroys the jet's engines, climbs atop of said jet while it's flailing around mid-air, and jumps off just before it explodes and slides down a convenient bit of concrete, feels like something Captain America might be able to do and not a fundamentally mundane middle-aged human cop.

Still, that's nothing compared to the cartoon shenanigans the Fast & the Furious franchise has gotten into. That scene where they drive a car from one skyscraper into another one dozens of meters away is particularly jarring, but any given action scene makes you question "why aren't these people super-dead? They're just glorified drift racers and auto mechanics"

[Peelee]

For an exception to the above, car chases are pretty reasonable. A lot of the times, they actually have professional drives doing those tricks/corners, with some editing to make it look cooler. Now, an amateur doing any of that would die instantly, and even professionals are only doing those tricks because it's a controlled environment with every step pre-planned, but they're at least usually possible to attempt and survive.

Do not underestimate the mighty Scion!

Die Hard:

1.The glass cutting poor John's feet....ok, most of us have stepped on broken glass right...it HURTS. Like "you can't walk on it" and that is just one peice. John steps on dozens of them, quickly...and likely digs them into his feet. Then we get like ten seconds where he pulls out the glass and bandages his feet. I really doubt he would be able to walk after that....

I'd be amazed if he got all the glass out, as well. A single drinking glass falls and after spending minutes cleaning it up, you can step and get a tiny shard of glass you couldn't even see in your heel. When you walked all over shattered glass, there's definitely some you won't find until you put pressure on the foot only to discover fresh new pain.

2.John drops the chair of C-4 down the elevator shaft and then "jumps away" when he sees the explosion race up towards him (at the speed of light you know). Ok...kinda simple, you can't "jump away" from an explosion. By the time he saw it...he would have felt it too....

Aye, those shockwaves are no joke.

3.Jumping off the exploding roof while tied up to a, er, fire hose... Um, this is simple "fall of the building to your death".

I'm always amused when falls from great heights are stopped short of the ground. Like, neither the height nor the ground are really the problem, it's the sudden change in speed that's the problem. Spider-Man catching Mary Jane 30 stories down a 60 story building is like a truck's front fender "catching" Mary Jane a few feet off the ground after she fell off a 30 story building. Not too helpful there, Pete.

It's really nothing compared to the later Die Hard entries. Once you get into Live Free or Die Hard - or Die Hard 4 - he goes round the bend. The part where he's chased by a fighter jet while driving a semi and manages to escape getting cut to ribbons by its vulcans, destroys the jet's engines, climbs atop of said jet while it's flailing around mid-air, and jumps off just before it explodes and slides down a convenient bit of concrete, feels like something Captain America might be able to do and not a fundamentally mundane middle-aged human cop.

The Last Boy Scout is the best Die Hard movie. And, as a bonus, it has the one funny Wayans brother.

Oh, hey, look, it's Peelee shilling a Shane Black movie, what a surprise.

[NotASpiderSwarm]

It's really nothing compared to the later Die Hard entries. Once you get into Live Free or Die Hard - or Die Hard 4 - he goes round the bend. The part where he's chased by a fighter jet while driving a semi and manages to escape getting cut to ribbons by its vulcans, destroys the jet's engines, climbs atop of said jet while it's flailing around mid-air, and jumps off just before it explodes and slides down a convenient bit of concrete, feels like something Captain America might be able to do and not a fundamentally mundane middle-aged human cop.

I will point out, that chase is bull. He does the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do with a tipping semi and somehow that fixes the flip.

Such a bad movie.

Still, that's nothing compared to the cartoon shenanigans the Fast & the Furious franchise has gotten into. That scene where they drive a car from one skyscraper into another one dozens of meters away is particularly jarring, but any given action scene makes you question "why aren't these people super-dead? They're just glorified drift racers and auto mechanics"

The first movie of that franchise was about stealing DVD players. Now they just had a car chase vs a Russian nuclear sub. It's full-on D&D power creep.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Die Hard:

There was a YouTube channel dedicated to analyzing exactly what injuries John would have received in all of the movies and when, let me see if I can track it down...

EDIT: First movie, movies 2-5. He actually likely would have survived the second one.

[Bohandas]

People almost never get eye injuries in movies. Car accidents where the windshield breaks, chemicals, fist fights. It is very easy and common to get eye injuries in RL.

Or more accurately, they never get eye injiries during the action of the movie. There's plenty of characters with eyepatches or with that scar that starts on one side of the eye and continues on to the other side.

I'm always amused when falls from great heights are stopped short of the ground. Like, neither the height nor the ground are really the problem, it's the sudden change in speed that's the problem. Spider-Man catching Mary Jane 30 stories down a 60 story building is like a truck's front fender "catching" Mary Jane a few feet off the ground after she fell off a 30 story building. Not too helpful there, Pete.

Actually, Spiderman's probably a bad example here, since he's usually swinging in an arc from a relatively elastic silk cord, rather than going sideways or upwards or stationary like Superman usually is

[understatement]

I'm always amused when falls from great heights are stopped short of the ground. Like, neither the height nor the ground are really the problem, it's the sudden change in speed that's the problem. Spider-Man catching Mary Jane 30 stories down a 60 story building is like a truck's front fender "catching" Mary Jane a few feet off the ground after she fell off a 30 story building. Not too helpful there, Pete.

Or the part where they land in water or on a car and somehow walk away alive...seriously. Those people should be a bag of body mush from the fall.

[Kitten Champion]

It's funny to mention Spider-Man, he's the one Superhero I can think of where one of his most famous story-lines depended upon not magically succeeding in saving someone from falling merely by catching them before they hit the ground.

[factotum]

I'm always amused when falls from great heights are stopped short of the ground. Like, neither the height nor the ground are really the problem, it's the sudden change in speed that's the problem. Spider-Man catching Mary Jane 30 stories down a 60 story building is like a truck's front fender "catching" Mary Jane a few feet off the ground after she fell off a 30 story building. Not too helpful there, Pete.

This is why, in the original Superman movie, you still see the background moving for a second or two after Supes catches Lois Lane falling off the building--because the guys who made that movie realised that stopping her dead in her tracks would be no better than her hitting the pavement, so she slows down gradually. Would still be a fair bit of a jolt, just a survivable one.

Surprised no-one has mentioned the infamous "Indy in a fridge" scene from Crystal Skull yet--that guy is dead after hitting the ground, regardless of the fridge. In fact, that seems to be something movies often also get wrong--they have someone in super-armour fall off a building and survive hitting the ground, but it's not the impact that kills you in that case, it's the sudden deceleration, which the armour is going to do nothing to mitigate. It might survive the fall, its occupant won't.

[Morty]

It's not really any less probable than many other action movie staples, but for some reason whenever I see a punch-out drag on for a few minutes, it strains my suspension of disbelief. It feels excessive after a while, even aside from how both/all participants should have no teeth left by the end of it.

[Bohandas]

Or the part where they land in water or on a car and somehow walk away alive...seriously. Those people should be a bag of body mush from the fall.

Well they should be dead at any rate, but plausibly still in one unmangled piece. Like the notorious photo of the suicide of Evelyn McHale, where the car she landed on is all broken and smashed but she doesn't even look dead

[Yora]

I recently saw someone compare The Fifth Element to the recent Die Hard movies, and concluding that it's action scenes are much more realistic.

As much as I love the stunts in Fury Road, there is one scene in which Joe flips his car at full speed without wearing a seatbelt and Rictus standing on the back, and they both are completely unharmed. Not even bruised or dazed. Nothing.

Coming back to people getting thrown by explosions, I think you could always replace the shockwave with the front of a truck to estimate how bad it hurts. It's not like being picked up by a strong wind. It's a supersonic shockwave delivering all its kinetic energy to your body before it can even start to move.
There's a Will Farell movie where he gets knocked to the ground by an explosion and then complains how it hurts much more than in the movies. And I am pretty sure he is just knocked over without being thrown into the air, so his pain could be completely realistic.

[Knaight]

Let's talk explosions, real fast: Specifically it's usually not the fireball that's dangerous (though there are "explosions" that are basically just high temperature gas expansion which can still be really dangerous, e.g. backdrafts) but the actual blastwave.

The trope where the hero and explosive both blow up in the water and it's safer? That's abject nonsense. Compressibility is a good thing in the fluids between you and things that go boom, and air is way more compressible.