During the climax of the movie “The Bourne Identity”, Matt Damon playing Jason Bourne actually rides a corpse down several floors (5 or 6?) of an apartment building to the main floor, using the coprse to break his fall.
Forgetting the fact that he shoots someone on the way down, is it possible to do this and survive? Granted, he seems a little worse for the wear after doing it. The fall seems to have at least knocked the wind out of him and perhaps broke his leg.
I used to date a girl who lived in a 6 floor walk up and even using a 250 pound corpse as a cushion, I think the fall from her apartment landing to the main floor would have killed me.
Movie physics != real life physics. In particular, writers seem oblivious to the effects of gravity on good guys. Take, for example, the almost inevitable movie cliche of a damsel/hero falling from a height and being grabbed by the wrist or grabbing a handy protruding object after falling for ten or twenty feet. In real life, the grabber would be left holding an appendage, or the grabbee would continue to plummet, only with a badly broken hand and dislocated shoulder to distract him/her from his/her other immediate problems.
That being said, I suppose a body would yield some protection in a gross and disgusting way as the rib cage collapsed, much like an air bag would. The difference being that an air bag is relatively yielding, and doesn’t contain sharp fragments of bone. There’s also the problem that the extremities wouldn’t get much protection at all, and, assuming you had two bodies of approximately the same size, the skulls would collide, causing at the very least a concussion and a need for some facial reconstructive surgery.
Based on this (http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/unlucky.html , second one down, tandem skydivers), I’m going to say that yes, Bourne could have survived. Could he have leapt up and continued to pummel the bad guys? Pretty unlikely.
Actually, he didn’t-so maybe the producer/director/writer was thinking ‘real’ instead of ‘cinematic’ for a change. Bourne was knocked unconscious at impact, and the only thing he did afterwards in the scene was crawl out of the building, then slowly hobble away down the street. Fortunately, the remaining bad guys … well, that’s just too much of a spoiler and not really relevant, so I’ll shut up now.