Quentin Tarantino names cinema's greatest-ever action scenes

Quentin Tarantino hasn't directed anything that could be called an action movie in the conventional sense, but he still knows his stuff.

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(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)

Film » Cutting Room Floor

Sat 5 April 2025 16:45, UK

Even though he hasn’t directed anything that could be called an action movie in the conventional sense, Quentin Tarantino still knows a thing or two about crafting a grandstanding setpiece that wouldn’t look out of place in a mega-budget blockbuster.

Whether it’s the climactic shootout in Django Unchained, the titular soldiers unleashing hell in the finale of Inglorious Basterds, Death Proof seeking to emulate the car chases the filmmaker grew up admiring, or the jaw-dropping House of Blue Leaves battle in Kill Bill, Tarantino has proven he can handle action.

That makes sense when several of his formative influences, from Sam Peckinpah and John Woo to Sergio Leone and Steven Spielberg, have all been responsible for their fair share of eye-popping and action-packed sequences that have gone down in cinema folklore as iconic.

However, someone like Tarantino trying to boil his extensive genre knowledge down to a select few sequences that he’d call the best ever doesn’t sound like the easiest thing in the world, given his reputation for turning even the most innocuous of questions into a stream-of-consciousness rant.

Still, he gave it his best shot when Vanity Fair picked his brains ahead of Pulp Fiction‘s release in 1994, with the soon-to-be Academy Award winner starting off with the final shootout in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the truck chase from George Miller’s The Road Warrior, the opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and the warehouse chaos from Hal Ashby’s 8 Million Ways to Die.

“What’s so great about those sequences is that you forget you’re watching a movie,” he said. “You forget you’re breathing. You’re just, like, ‘Wow.'” This being Tarantino, though, he wasn’t done there. The restaurant shootout from Michael Cimino’s The Year of the Dragon and the unforgettable chainsaw assault from Scarface was quickly added to the list. He may not have mentioned it at the time, but if Jackie Chan’s Police Story 3 is good enough to be shown to aliens, then it makes the cut.

Special praise was reserved for two films that had a particularly monumental impact on the auteur. Tarantino named his short-lived distribution company after William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones’ psychological revenge thriller and spent months dressing like Chow Yun-fat’s Mark Lee after being blown away by a heroic bloodshed masterpiece.

“In Rolling Thunder, William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones go to a Mexican whorehouse and create a war,” he explained. “You really want them to get revenge. It’s the same way in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow. You really hate the bad guys, and you really want the good guys to kick some ass. But in Rolling Thunder, they kick more ass than you could ever imagine.”

Clearly, Rolling Thunder‘s last stand was at the head of the pile, based entirely on how Tarantino described it: “Most movies let you down in that way, but this is ass-kicking nirvana,” he exclaimed. “That scene will change your life. Absolutely fucking change your life.”

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John WooQuentin TarantinoThe Good The Bad and The Ugly

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