The five best movie training montages in cinema history

Posted On October 13, 2024October 13, 2024

Cinema, at its best, combines image and music to create something that has an emotional impact on the viewer. One of the purest ways to achieve this kind of alchemy is the montage—a series of images in quick succession that show a passage of time. Usually, these montages depict characters learning some kind of skill—starting out novices but becoming much more proficient by the end.

Throughout cinema history, there have been countless incredible montages. Sometimes, they’re motivational and stirring; other times, they’re meant to stoke the audience’s taste for murder and mayhem. Sometimes, they’re absurd and hilarious – and that’s OK, too.!

In selecting the five best montages, a couple of classics had to be left out. The sequence of the Ghostbusters capturing ghosts all over New York in the 1984 film didn’t quite make the cut—and not just because of the infamous ghost blow job scene.

Similarly, Daniel LaRusso practicing the crane kick and learning the purpose of “wax on, wax off” in The Karate Kid were also left out. Upon rewatching, it became clear they aren’t actually montages, despite how they might be remembered.

So, without further ado, here are the five best training montages in cinema history.

Five best movie training montages:

5. Rocky (John G Avildsen, 1976)

A list of the five best training montages in cinema history could never overlook Rocky Balboa—the undisputed king of rousing montages. The real challenge, however, is that the Rocky and Creed franchises could easily fill the entire list, and few would object. But in the interest of balance, only one will be selected.

The montage from Rocky III could have easily been chosen, where Rocky regains his confidence while training with his friend Apollo Creed. It’s just two sweaty, muscular men practising footwork in the ring and racing on the beach, all set to Bill Conti’s iconic ‘Gonna Fly Now’ theme. They finish by celebrating in the sea together in a moment of cheesy triumph.

Equally, we could have gone for the fantastic sequence in Rocky IV in which our hero trains to take on the terrifying Russian beast Ivan Drago by training in the bitterly cold wilderness of Siberia. This montage is so great that it actually transitions into a second montage, scored by John Cafferty’s soaring ’80s anthem, ‘Heart’s On Fire’.

However, the heart has to win on this one, and the original training montage from John G Avildsen’s 1976 classic takes the top spot. It’s nearly impossible not to feel inspired by this iconic sequence, imagining running through the streets of Philadelphia and bounding up the famous 72-stone steps to the Museum of Art. It’s pure cinema at its finest.

4. Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005)

“You have learned to bury your guilt with anger. I will teach you to confront it and to face the truth.”

If Liam Neeson spoke those words while standing on a frozen glacier, sword in hand, it would be hard not to follow him to the ends of the earth.

So begins the excellent training montage in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. It sees Neeson’s Henri Ducard/Ra’s al Ghul begin to show Bruce Wayne how to be an incredible ninja warrior. He talks of engaging 600 men at once and tells Bruce that invisibility is a matter of patience and agility. He reveals that theatricality and deception are powerful agents and that he will learn to become more than a man in the eyes of his enemies. The whole time, we see him sword-fighting with Bruce and getting guys to whack the young superhero-in-waiting with sticks. Oh, and then he blames Bruce’s father for his own death, saying he failed to act when confronted with a mugger. Controversial stuff from ol’ Ra’s – but undeniably thrilling to watch.

3. Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardolino, 1987)

To this day, when an entire generation hears Eric Carmen’s song ‘Hungry Eyes’, they immediately think of the dance training montage in 1987’s beloved Dirty Dancing. As the song plays, Jennifer Grey’s Frances “Baby” Houseman transforms from a shy ingénue to a fluid Mambo master, guided by Patrick Swayze’s often-shirtless instructor, Johnny Castle. However, as Castle himself points out, it’s not just the Mambo he’s teaching Baby—it’s a heartbeat.

To be perfectly honest, it’s one of the sexiest sequences ever put to film and is a great example of how montage sequences don’t just have to feature fighting or sports training. In this sequence, the perfect union of two bodies in a choreographed dance routine feels like the most important thing in the world – and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

2. Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998)

In Michael Bay’s amazingly looney Armageddon, Nasa decides to train a group of oil rig workers to be astronauts in a mere 12 days. Why? Because an asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, and only this ragtag bunch have the necessary skills to drill into the big hunk of space rock to plant a nuclear bomb which will blow the sucker up. How in the world could Bay show these regular Joes becoming believable astronauts in such a short time? That’s easy. A montage, baby!

Set to the dulcet tones of Aerosmith’s ‘Sweet Emotion’, we see the guys undergo weightlessness training when they’re dipped into a huge pool wearing their space suits. They’re brought up into the air in fighter jets to replicate the brutal assault on the senses that outer space will entail. Brilliantly, though, these salt-of-the-earth guys stay as charming and funny as ever, despite the mind-boggling danger involved in what they’re training for. Ben Affleck and Owen Wilson’s characters even argue over which of them is the Han Solo of the group and which is Chewy. Top stuff.

1. Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, 2004)

“If you’re going to storm Kim Jong Il’s palace single-handed, we’re going to have to make you a complete soldier in very little time.”

“How are we gonna do that?!”

In Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s smart/dumb masterpiece Team America: World Police, this exchange leads to the funniest training montage ever created. Skewering the entire idea of a training montage in an affectionate way, the sequence shows lead puppet Gary Johnston shooting, learning Kung-Fu, reading, running on a treadmill, and spinning round and round in one of those Nasa-like…spinning…thingies.

The whole time, Parker himself sings about how you need a montage to convince an audience that this kind of thing can actually be done in a short time. It contains gems like, “Show a lot of things happenin’ at once / Remind everyone of what’s goin’ on (What’s going on) / And with every shot, show a little improvement / To show that it all would take too long!” Genius.

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