From Keanu Reeves to Quentin Tarantino: Edgar Wright’s five favourite action scenes

Posted On October 18, 2024October 18, 2024

He may have never directed an action movie by the strictest definition of the term, but Edgar Wright knows his way around a set piece or two, with his entire filmography being informed by his unabashed love of genre cinema.

Lo-fi debut A Fistful of Fingers was an ode to the spaghetti western and his lifelong adoration of Clint Eastwood before his homage to flesh-eating hordes of the undead through the lens of a romantic comedy put him in the company of his heroes when Shaun of the Dead became an international sensation.

Hot Fuzz openly referenced and paid doe-eyed tribute to the golden age of the buddy cop comedy, while Scott Pilgrim vs the World used video games as the jumping-off point for a comic book adaptation that proved the filmmaker was no slouch when it comes to staging a kinetic set piece.

Baby Driver was his most overtly action-orientated film to date, although that might be about to change when he follows in the daunting footsteps of Arnold Schwarzenegger by mounting his own version of Stephen King’s dystopian literary thriller, The Running Man.

It’s been an eclectic career so far, but what might come as a surprise is that of Wright’s five favourite action beats of all time, only one of them has been directly referenced in his work. That would be the foot chase from Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break, where Keanu Reeves’ Johnny Utah fires his gun in the air in frustration after allowing Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi to escape when he had a clear shot.

Nick Frost and Simon Pegg certainly got a kick out of recreating it, but it’s hard to imagine the ‘Three Flavours Cornetto’ trio being able to replicate the majesty of Wright’s other selections. “I have to go for the end of The Wild Bunch,” he told Empire, settling on one of cinema’s most influential shootouts.

Fittingly, John Woo was massively inspired by Sam Peckinpah and his classic western, with Wright also settling on “the hospital corridor scene” from Hard Boiled, a jaw-dropping one-take exercise in controlled chaos. “The bar shootout in Desperado” brought him up to four, and he rounded out the list by choosing a showstopping showdown helmed by an auteur who played an on-camera role in Robert Rodriguez’s gun-toting adventure.

“Number five would be The House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill Vol. 1,” Wright decided, with Tarantino’s sword-wielding finale a fitting exclamation point on a movie that, up until that point, had been exactly the roaring rampage of revenge that was promised, never mind in the aftermath of Uma Thurman forcibly separating Lucy Liu from her scalp.

Every single one of them is a classic action beat in its own right, making it abundantly clear that Wright has a solid understanding of what it takes to create a top-tier bout of onscreen carnage.

Edgar Wright’s favourite action scenes:

• The foot chase (Point Break, Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)
• The final shootout (The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
• The one-take hospital battle (Hard Boiled, John Woo, 1992)
• The bar shootout (Desperado, Robert Rodriguez, 1995)
• The House of Blue Leaves (Kill Bill Vol. 1, Quentin Tarantino, 2003)

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