Have you ever witnessed an "action movie moment" in real life?

In My Humble Opinion
21

The first one to leap to mind happened one Sunday as I was visiting my favorite beer store to pick up that day’s supply. As I was pulling into the parking lot I saw a big dude walking down the middle of the styreet in my direction with what looked like a .44 Magnum, waving it in my general direction and yelling at another guy who was running through a yard toward the beer store. The dude with the gun fired a couple of shots and it scared me enough that I burned off a couple dollars worth of rubber getting away from there. I dread even today going down that street, and I quit buying beer there.

There are others I could mention, but that’s the most vivid.

22

I was driving westbound on U.S. 441 in Florida. An eastbound pickup truck lost control, hit the median, went airborne and tumbled end-over-end across the oncoming lanes before landing upside-down in the opposite ditch. I watched this all unfold through the windshield as if in slow motion, and for a moment it did truly seem as if I were watching a movie until my brain said, “Holy shit, this is real!”

The driver emerged apparently unhurt, but clearly in shock. My friend and I called the FHP and stayed with the driver keeping him calm until help arrived. It was pretty friggin’ surreal.

23

Wow, I saw pretty much the same thing, only on I-405 near Seattle. Other witnesses thought my VW bug was going to get squashed, but I maneuvered around it, somewhat casually. :eek:

24

Sorta, but mine was a bit of a cheat. While being driven into Chicago to hang out at my best friends’ father’s workplace (we were single-digit age, and dad couldn’t get a last-minute babysitter), we saw a car plummeting through space.
A year or so later we realized it was the car drop from The Blues Brothers.

25

Probably not surprising that most of these are car-related…
I witnessed a car flip in broad daylight, after inexplicably hitting a barrier on a Boston highway. Two guys were ejected and laid bloody and dazed on the pavement. A third was bloodied and unconscious in the passenger seat. A silver handgun was resting beneath the guardrail.

My girlfriend pulled a silent six-year old from the backseat. He hadn’t been belted and yet was unscathed ( and in complete shock). Two of the three adults in the car died, including the kid’s father.

The worst part of the whole ordeal was the rubbernecking and an asshole who was taking cellphone pics with a huge grin on his face. Disgusting.

26

I also almost died in a jeep driven by a drunken Bolivian on the world’s most dangerous road. We were at the top of an overpass and it began snowing heavily. The jeep slid backward and almost off a precipice. The driver had been drinking the local liquor during the 12-hour trip and I was in shorts having just come from the jungle. The axle was also broken, but we managed to push the jeep back onto the road and get him alive. I’ve heard a new road has been build which presumably has saved a lot of lives.

27

While we’re on the subject of cars, driving on the interstate one time I did see a car in the opposite lane go out of control and swerve around and hit several cars. I couldn’t get a closer view because I needed to watch for slow traffic and flying debris.

But there was one thing I didn’t expect. Several seconds after the car crash, behind me comes a car crossing perpendicular to the highway. Evidently someone had driven off the road, overcorrected, and crossed both sets of asphalt at a right angle. That was sort of freaky.

:::Hijack::: A similar thing happened when I hit a scavenger bird on a highway. It bounced into the air and I looked behind me to see if it could fly off or if it was most sincerely dead. After around 5 seconds I thought it must have had the motive power to fly away injured at least. But then bam! it fell with a thud in back of me. It must have had only the strength to half-heartedly hover in the air for a couple seconds before falling.

28

If a high speed car chase counts then yes.

29

Just about a year ago, I had a movie moment, although it wasn’t of the explosion/car chase variety. But it was certainly a cliche from a movie come to life, and that movie COULD have been an action movie.

I was working as a subcontractor on an outdoor project when an exceptional cold snap settled in. Unrelated to the cold, the guy I was working with had called his office (the main contractor on the project) a day or so earlier and asked for a couple of people to come help us, in order to maintain schedule. For one of them, the first really cold day was her first day in the field with us. I was introduced to her when she showed up at our outdoor work location, where she was bundled up in heavy winter clothes due to the cold.

After a while we went inside for a break to warm up. She pulled off her wool hat and ski mask… and revealed a face too beautiful for this world amidst a cascade of gorgeous blond hair that fell down past her shoulders. Naturally, the rest of her appeared to be completely spectacular, too, once the heavy coats came off. As I already knew, she was even a scientist, and it turned out she’d gone to an Ivy-league school. My second thought, immediately following “Oh, lordy, she’s amazing” was “This is totally from a movie.”

30

Oh, I’ve got a really really good one for a different movie genre- horror.

One of my best friends in 5th grade was killed (as was her mother) by an escaped mental hospital patient. I had been on the phone with her earlier that evening.

31

I was at a friend’s house several years ago in San Francisco when we heard an extremely loud boom, so we went outside and saw black smoke a block or so away. There was a house on 19th Ave that had blown up in the air off its foundation and landed at an angle wedged between the neighboring houses. The iron gate had blown across 19th Ave and landed on the sidewalk across the street. Several houses were damaged and on fire. We sat and watched the entire police / fire response, quite the scene.

We found out later that the guy had a bunch of illegal fireworks in the garage.

32

Adding to my earlier post …

I’ve seen a couple Holywood quality spectacular car crashes as they occurred.

In one of them we got to the scene seconds after he’d end-over-ended to a stop in the freeway median. The car was a 1980-something red Monte Carlo with a red velour interior. Which was completely awash in thick red liquid when we got there. We gingerly extricated the driver then noticed the gallon paint can in the back seat which had lost its lid during the aerobatics.

The guy was actually a bit bloody from a split forehead, but he & the rest of the scene looked like something from a slasher horror flick dialed up to spoof proportions. Picture the *Scarface *scene where he chainsaws his rival but with quarts, not ounces, of red stuff sprayed about.

I’ve seen two fatal civilian airplane accidents, but they didn’t look like anything you’d see in an action movie. In both cases the lone pilot was the sole fatality.

33

I’ve busted down a door to find a suicide hanging victim inside.

Well, “busted down” is probably an exaggeration. We did have to disable the night latch with this though.

Easily the worst day of my life.

34

Holy shit. Hard to imagine. But last spring there was a house in this state which was flipped upside down by a tornado.

I did witness an explosion once, but not directly. I heard the boom and saw debris flying hundreds of feet into the air, but the building was several blocks away and out of sight.

It wasn’t a mob hit, or a CIA surgical strike, or Martians taking over the world. It was a gas leak. Fortunately no one was killed. Miraculous, actually.

35

I’ve seen a minor-league gun fight. Nobody was actually shot, as far as I could tell, but there was shooting, a man running down the road holding a gun and a load of other people running after him. A boy ran out from the gate to my estate holding a baseball bat, with his mum trying to pull him back, saying ‘don’t do it Aaron, he’s not worth it!’

Seen several car chases. They’re quite common, aren’t they? Only seen one really high-speed one on the motorway, that I can recall, - about ten wailing cop cars after one speeding sports car in a motorway lane that had emptied of cars as soon as they heard all those sirens approaching. But I don’t use motorways much.

Seen an explosion, but it doesn’t really count because it was a controlled, intentional one. Still, seeing a 24-storey block of flats go BOOM and crumble into dust was exactly like a movie scene.

Never someone whacked in the street as in killed, but… A man was walking along the pavement, doing nothing out of the ordinary, and another man ran up behind him with a big heavy plank of wood and whacked him around the head with it.

Clearly he expected the first man to crumble unconscious, like in the movies, and, when he didn’t, the attacker’s look of surprise was beautiful. Then the first man just turned with barely even a flinch and chased him across the road, cars braking to stop hitting them, tyres squealing, and a fight over the bonnet of one car before the attacker managed to run away.

Also a huge gang of guys attacking a shop owner with a samurai sword - they had the sword, not him. Seen some other violence, of course, but nothing dramatic enough for an action movie.

I was also in one; clinging onto the drainpipe on an inch-thick ledge next to a high window while a man with a knife leaned out and slashed at me with a knife. (We left my Dad the next day in a way also dramatic but not in an action-movie way).

No treasure-tellers in my life, sadly. :frowning:

36

Been in one. Was a chaser, not a chasee.

Whacked as in beat up? Yes. Whacked as in murdered? No.

I’ve been on the crime scene of a couple of homicides, including an ax murder.

No, but I felt one. Several years back, there was an explosion in a salt dome. I was living about 60 miles away from it and we felt the shock wave.

I’m still waiting for that one.

37

I have been in car chases. Seen many dead bodies. Almost shot someone (he dropped the knife). Tried and failed to resuscitate many people. As a combat engineer I have caused many big explosions. Flew helicopters. Drove and fired tanks. Heard many a shot fired in anger.

But most days are pretty boring.

38

huh!:eek: The author asks : “Would you have the guts to drive on this road?” . I probably wouldn’t have the guts to walk on it while traffic is interrupted.

39

In what situations does a combat engineer fly helicopters and drive tanks?

40

I saw part of a high speed chase being filmed for the old Streets of San Franciscoo TV series. Does that count?

I saw a guy with an axe chasing another guy down a street in Klamath Falls, OR many years ago. I still don’t know what that was about.