I just watched Breaking News a few weeks ago. It opens with an astounding 7 minute continuous gunfight scene and very few people are shot and the camera is shaky. I rewatched that opening 2-3 times before continuing on with the rest of the film.
And while you laughed, you must have missed the fin of the Lava Shark.
Again I get to post about my favorite. ICBNSTY.
The Lobby Scene from ‘The Matrix’.
I can’t believe no one’s said this yet.
Yeah, you can TOTALLY jump from one crane to another and land on your abdomen and get up and keep running! Totally!
Granted, you said “everything but the crane”, but just because there are no “special effects” doesn’t mean there are, for example, no stunt men. I’m aware of the sport, but even those guys on YouTube don’t go jumping around on cranes.
Popeye’s chase of Olive Oyl while she’s sleepwalking on the frame of skyscraper under construction. I didn’t believe it for a minute, but I enjoyed it just the same.
Well, I certainly can’t, because I’m a big, lumpy couch potato. Which probably explains why the scene didn’t strike me as “absolutely ludicrous.” What was so impossible about it?
Actaully, he said everything but the close-ups on the crane. The jumps themselves were real, although probably using stuntmen, not the actual movie stars. But if stuntmen can do it in real life, why couldn’t the characters in the fictional setting created by the movie also do it?
I’m probably taking this discussion far too seriously, but there’s a difference to me… I know with absolute certainty that, the way physics work, that bus in speed could not have done that. I do not, however, know enough about the way big dump trucks are constructed to be certain that one could not take that level of damage and keep driving. In fact, if that part was borderline feasible, it wouldn’t shock me. At least it looked beat up upon landing.
I’ve got to second this. I completely adored that movie, even though there wasn’t a single plausible thing in there. My favorite parts were the sections in the power plant. Every. Single. Thing. that was done regarding power/gas flows, is (going by my experience working at a power company working with systems for both) completely and totally ludicrous. My dad and I (Dad has worked with natural gas regulation systems for almost 30 years) just looked at each other and started laughing so hard that we almost cried.
That is truly a classic “holy shit!” scene. The thing is, it was filmed so well I wanted to go back and walk through the devastation it left behind, just to see what that big summbitch did. Does anybody know, was any of that real action, or was it mostly CGI? Especially the end of the chase – my God, what must it cost to totally wreck a crane like that!
In Transporter 2, the scene where he hooks the bomb off the bottom of his car by driving the left side over a ramp and spinning into a crane-hook that neatly snatches the bomb as it’s about to explode. The car lands on all four wheels, perfectly safe.
SOOOOOOO stupid and awesome.
The best part was how George Lucas jumped over the Lava Shark. Over and over and over.
I don’t know what the hell that was, but I busted a gut when the towel girl showed up and started showing her movez.
Oh, and another “I can’t believe it hasn’t been mentioned yet”: Kill Bill. While the scene where she takes on the Crazy-88 is the obvious “ludicrous” scene, my favorite involves her time in the hospital, when she comes to out of the coma.
“WHERE’S BILL?!?!”
“Please s-stop hitting me.”
I nominated any five minutes, selected at random, of Riki-Oh: The Story of Riki. This is a movie that features a villain who disembowels himself, grabs a loop of his own intestine, and then uses them to garrote the hero.
You can’t get any more awesome than that.
“Towel Girl” is Cynthia Rothrock, whom I believe is actually some sort of martial arts champion in real life. She’s done a lot of B action movies.
I didn’t know SCADA had a command for “Jam all the gas in a five-state region that way so a control room that has no gas pipes in it will explode!”
There was one plausible thing in the movie - traffic calamity after a city-wide four-way green, but the way they triggered it was comical.
*Speed * - very strangely, I had a dream about that bus jump scene last night. In this dream, Caltrans was working on that section of freeway and had to remove the pavement. *Mythbusters * got wind of this and got their hands on the kind of bus (a GMC New Look) that was used in the movie. Adam built his usual remote control gadgetry so they could drive the bus without being in it, and they wound up drilling the bus into the abutment, right at that “peak” where upper and lower parts of the windshield meet.
Before they smashed the bus, Adam popped the access panel out of the floor, exposing the transmission. They had Keanu Reeves at M5, and when they walked around the corner, Keanu saw the bus, went “Whoa” and then they had Keanu try to get any part of his body through the hatch and around the transmission, but he could only reach up to his elbow. Nevermind actually getting out of the bus that way.
I don’t care what anyone else says, I loved Matrix: Reloaded. Including the Burly Brawl.
Mad Max then proceeds to fly through the air while attached to suspender rubber bands, using a chainsaw, a long pike, and a whistle to defeat the giant, powerful but childlike MasterBlaster. Nail-biting excitement!
I came here to post that. I’m recommending that movie to anyone that is a bit odd and/or likes action movies.
I’d have to say the car chase in Bad Boys II…ridiculously awesome…
AND…“The Last Boy Scout,” my favorite buddy film…“It’s one of them plastic keys. The kind that shred!” Enter timely explosion of a shot gun shell filled with small explosives thrown into the fire place at a football stadium. Classic. Just classic.
And that doesn’t even mention the times Riki punches holes in people’s chests (as in, see daylight shining through the coffee can-sized tunnel) or splatters their heads between his hands like Jax in Mortal Kombat II. 