The Best Stuntwork of 2014

by Gabriel Valdez

Let’s talk about stunts, the forgotten category long left hanging in the wind by an Academy that has failed to award an element of filmmaking as old as film itself. And then they wonder why people think the Oscars are boring.

There will be a separate article for best choreography of the year, but I want to focus on stunt work for the time being. This is an article awarding the most singular achievements in stunt coordination this year.

Stunts can include everything from someone sent flying out of a building to being lit on fire, from precision driving to retraining an actor how to move like a different species. Stunt teams do some of the most difficult work on film, often to little or no credit.

I’ll be avoiding CG stunts. A performance can be aided by CG, motion captured, even take place in a set created through visual effects, but a stunt still has to be a performance. I won’t list anything here that’s entirely created through visual effects.

3. FURY

Hayley Saywell, stunt department coordinator
Ben Cooke, stunt coordinator

Fury, aside from being one of the most egregious awards show oversights, pulled off a rare trick. For a mid-movie tank battle, it employed a real German Tiger tank. It was the first time since 1946 that one was used on a film set. Mock-ups were used to develop the battle choreography. On lend from the Bovington Tank Museum for exactly one day of shooting opposite the American M4A2 Sherman tank that played the film’s namesake, the crew had to practice the sequence to the point where they knew what every member was doing every second of each shot. They had to recreate in their mock-up the exact control scheme and sense of response a Tiger tank has so that there were no surprises in the choreography once they were shooting.

It’s the rare mechanical stunt whose complexity won’t be realized by most viewers. On top of all that preparation, the sequence required the crew pave unseen paths in a muddy field, keep to a tight schedule, and keep an eye on mechanical issues.

Fury is filled with other stunts as well, but this tank battle – the above clip only represents a brief moment in the entire sequence – is the showpiece that demonstrates one of the best displays of coordinating a battle scene in recent memory.

(Read the review)

2. NEED FOR SPEED

Pamela Croydon, precision driving team coordinator
Lance Gilbert, stunt coordinator

That clip is all practical. None of the stunts in it are CG. Look, Need for Speed is a very average movie, but the sheer amount of stunt driving crammed into it is pretty audacious.

In an age when Fast and Furious is making money hand over fist with ridiculously CG driving sequences, Need for Speed focused on making everything practical. To do so, it employed no less than 38 stunt and precision drivers. It shows in the end result. Whatever else one says about this film, what you’re really paying to see – the chase and race sequences – are second to none.

(Read the review)

1. DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Charles Croughwell, Marny Eng, Terry Notary, stunt coordinators

This doesn’t look like it involves much stuntwork. It’s just a bunch of CG, right? Not exactly. When you watch Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and realize that each of those CG apes spilling out of the woods is being played by an actor: climbing rigging, leaping, and bounding across sets in coordination with each other (often using prosthetic extensions to do so), it becomes one of the most overwhelming stunt accomplishments in recent history.

Motion capture has to have an actor performing the role in order to work. To coordinate dozens upon dozens of actors playing apes requires extensive movement training, complex staging, climbing coordinated between dozens at a time, and a brand new and unique fight choreography based on another species. The list of accomplishments here is stunning. It begins to blur the lines between stunt work, acting, movement training, motion capture, and fight choreography, and it does so to brilliant and moving effect.

(Read the review)

In the lead-up to the Oscars, we’ve named several Best of 2014 Awards, with a special focus on some categories the Oscars don’t include:

The Best 3-D of 2014

The Best Diversity of 2014

The Best Original Score of 2014

The Best Soundtrack of 2014

The Most Thankless Role of 2014

How China Keeps Bruce Willis Alive – The Changing Face of Global Box Office

Analyzing which movies succeed and flop isn’t as easy as it used to be. Take The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, one of a dozen garden-variety supernatural young adult movies made after the success of Twilight. The film cost $60 million to make (advertising additional), and it only made $31 million back in the United States. After opening weekend, it was singled out as a cautionary tale for other studios. Revisiting the film after a drawn-out international release reveals, however, that it tripled its take when foreign box office was considered. Add in home release sales and rental, and City of Bones made a tidy profit. A sequel is even in development.

Google “Need for Speed flops” and you’ll see publications ranging from major industry analysts like Forbes to popular online magazines like Uproxx declaring the film a major bomb that threatens DreamWorks’ entire yearly financial outlook. True, Need for Speed did thud into U.S. theaters with a lackluster $17 million opening weekend. This caused an industry-wide race to be the loudest voice turning its flop into a cautionary, knew-it-all-along warning about why movies based off of video games will never be profitable.

Then a funny thing happened. A week later, the film’s topped $130 million worldwide, with weeks left in theaters and many major territories yet to open. A huge hit in China, Need for Speed will make its $66 million production budget back in that country alone.

We typically look at the top movies of a week or a year through American eyes only. The relaunch of RoboCop, for instance, had a $100 million production budget. It’s made only $57 million domestic. Considering the advertising involved, it lost at least $100 million in the U.S. It will be remembered by entertainment journalists as a complete flop. And yet…its worldwide haul sits at $237 million and growing fast.

You might ask yourself why they keep making Die Hard sequels when it’s clear that U.S. audiences have passed the point of diminishing returns on the franchise. Because 80% of the last entry’s $300 million haul came from overseas, that’s why.

In fact, Bruce Willis has achieved only modest success in the U.S. the last five years. He is not a sure domestic draw anymore, but he remains at the top of casting lists because he’s so popular in Australia, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and Western Europe. It is virtually impossible to make a Bruce Willis film without making money. He guarantees that, even if a movie under-performs at home, it will make a sizable profit.

Films like Need for Speed and 2013’s Hansel and Gretel: Witchhunters are the mid-budget models for post-holiday releases going forward. American audiences don’t flock to the theater January through March, when Winter is at its worst, but many foreign audiences do. After a disappointing January weekend in which Hansel and Gretel opened a weak slew of movies, it was declared a financial failure. It eventually hit $225 million worldwide. For a film that cost $50 million to produce, that meant a huge financial success and, like City of Bones, a sequel in development.

A week ago, Need for Speed was a complete financial disaster of a film. The concept of its challenging Fast and Furious as a franchise was a joke. Now, it’s one of the hottest international properties, and a sequel has to be on the table.

The United States alone does not dictate box office success anymore. It hasn’t been that way for more than a decade, but it’s become especially apparent in recent years as other countries build more theaters and their own film industries. Studios now engineer films with international release strategies, and add extra footage to movies like Looper to tailor them for foreign audiences. The 2010 remake of The Karate Kid was cleverly re-edited for Chinese theaters so that it wasn’t about a transplanted American boy learning kung fu after being beaten up by Chinese bullies, but rather about a displaced American troublemaker who instigated fights himself and – through kung fu – learned to adjust to his new country.

If the industry has changed, why haven’t the journalists, analysts, and bloggers who cover it? It’s time to stop deciding whether a film is successful from a box office standpoint after the first U.S. weekend. Cautionary tales are great to write and all, but people who tell them every week have a bad habit, not a useful perspective. They’re no longer looking at the full picture.

I’d also like to add…RoboCop, After Earth, Hansel and Gretel: Witchhunters, A Good Day to Die Hard…can we please stop saying American audiences have bad taste? If we do, it’s pretty clear we’re not the only ones.

Box office statistics for this article are drawn from the top two websites on the subject – Box Office Mojo and Box Office Guru.

Great Action, Lousy Plot — “Need for Speed”

Need for Speed is a movie about illegal street racing that follows a convoluted story of revenge. Simple developments are over-explained while gaping plot holes are casually swept under the rug. Its story is not told well. So the movie is bad, right?

Not so fast. The stuntwork is top of the line, ranging from straight-up racing and dazzling crashes to 80 mph refuels and taking “riding shotgun” too literally. The stunts are all practical, meaning that professional stunt drivers actually performed them in real cars. None are created by CGI. This lends Need for Speed a breakneck energy that only the very best action movies can rival. And what else do you go see a movie about street racing for, if not the stunts? So the movie is a success, right?

Need for Speed is neither good nor bad. Every scene in a car or following one is superb. Every scene with feet planted firmly on ground drags. Since the movie splits its time half-and-half, it alternately demands and loses your attention. Most of the non-road moments are dealt with early on, so if you can make it through a lengthy setup, the payoff is worth it.

Tobey is a street racer who runs a failing garage for high-end cars. His old rival, Dino, is now a successful racer who is married to Tobey’s ex. Tobey is played by Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) whose pathos makes up for Dominic Cooper (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) playing Dino as so unabashedly evil that I’m disappointed he never gets to nefariously twirl a mustache. Dino hires Tobey to finish building a legendary Ford Mustang, but the two can’t set their rivalry aside. Instead of splitting the sale, they race for the entire pot of $2.7 million. The race ends tragically: Tobey is sent to prison for a vehicular murder that Dino commits.

It’s difficult to feel too bad for Tobey, however. We’re introduced to him nearly driving over a homeless man during a race. The movie plays it for laughs – he only runs over the man’s worldly possessions. Hilarious, right? During Tobey and Dino’s race, Tobey is forced into oncoming traffic. It’s exciting, yet our hero is running innocent commuters off the road and causing high-speed collisions. Even if Tobey’s conviction isn’t precisely on the money, it’s hard to feel as if he doesn’t deserve it.

The Fast and Furious franchise at least has the good sense to couch its disaster-filled car chases in Robin Hood-style robberies of dictators and gangsters. This gives us the excuse that all the senseless collateral damage is about the greater good, not some individual racer’s ego. The saving grace of Need for Speed is that this cast pushes through it all with so much bright-eyed vigor that it’s infectious. This is in large part due to Imogen Poots. She plays Julia, a luxury car expert who becomes Tobey’s romantic interest. It’s easy to root for Paul and Poots, who really look like they’re having fun, rather than the scummy characters they play.

Most of the film takes place after Tobey’s release from prison. He races cross-country to join the DeLeon, a mythical race put on by Monarch. Other characters keep insisting nobody knows who Monarch is, even though he’s a billionaire, hosts an internet show that consists of a close-up of his own face, and seems to have given his super-secret home phone number to every single person on Earth. It’s OK, because in the long history of characters whose existence in their own movies makes no sense, there is one actor who’s made this nonsense his specialty – Michael Keaton (RoboCop). He pulls off Monarch with the heated, nonstop ADD of a veteran actor who’s having the time of his life slumming it in a B-movie.

Why will winning the DeLeon give Tobey his revenge? It’s never said, but it’s worth a lot of money. Dino is kind enough to provide a reason by joining the DeLeon at the last second. He also leaves evidence of Tobey’s wrongful conviction and his own guilt unprotected on his computer’s desktop, where his wife can access it in approximately 10 seconds. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy, after all.

Few films achieve the cosmic balance between good and bad that Need for Speed does. In a way, it reminds me of the bus from the 90’s Keanu Reeves movie Speed. The infectious acting and stuntwork are enough to keep you on board. Any dialogue taking place under the speed limit, however, and the plot explodes. Need for Speed is rated PG-13 for disturbing crashes, nudity, and language.