Action movies are, by and large, built around their ridiculousness.
After all, anything that depicts the true nature of war, crime or violence often becomes far darker and more dramatic than your standard action flick.
By its very nature, the action genre is slightly cartoonish and over-the-top, which means that usually, we check our sense of disbelief at the door and settle in for an unrealistic, often nonsensical thrill-ride – and honestly, that’s okay.
It doesn’t matter if the feats we see achieved are physically or scientifically impossible. It doesn’t make any difference if all sense of realism disappears entirely, and it certainly doesn’t change anything that our action heroes can seemingly survive anything against all odds.
That said, it’s still pretty fun to poke holes in the action genre’s most ridiculous moments, isn’t it?
6. Freeway Chase – Bad Boys II
Michael Bay isn’t a man whose movies have any basis in reality, but at the helm of 2003 action blockbuster Bad Boys II, he went all out to make proceedings as insanely over-the-top as possible. However, one scene in particular toes the line between entertainment and ridiculousness more than most.
When they come up against a gang of the worst marksmen imaginable, cops Mike (Will Smith) and Marcus (Martin Lawrence) find themselves in the middle of a high speed chase, with the bad guys firing endless amounts of bullets that seem to hit nothing other than headlights and sirens. Aiming from a moving vehicle can’t be easy, though, so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.
However, perhaps the most blatantly unbelievable part of the scene is Mike’s superhuman reflexes. By constantly dodging oncoming traffic, wreckage, and even vehicles dropped from the back of the criminals’ truck, the cops walk away from the chase without a scratch.
It’s also worth taking a moment to consider the sheer amount of collateral damage. The truck wrecks several civilian cars in this scene – and that’s just the ones we see. There’s also a separate scene in which Mike and Marcus collapse an entire Cuban shantytown, and you’ve got to assume that the casualties were in the triple digits there.
Protect and serve, right?