Vulture's Stunt Awards
Stunts built Hollywood. The early years of the motion-picture industry were centered around fights, on shootouts, on slapstick pratfalls, and other feats of physical derring-do. If you could ride a horse, fire a gun convincingly, or take a spectacular dive without hurting yourself too badly, there was a job in the American film industry for you. Barely any real movie stars existed; the close-up hadn’t even been invented yet. (And when there finally were movie stars, like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Douglas Fairbanks, much of their initial fame and acclaim rested on their physical achievements.)
That history is just one of the reasons why it’s always felt absurd that stunt professionals have had to fight so long to gain awards recognition in the industry that, in some ways, they started. (Luckily, they’re good at fighting.) We created the Vulture Stunt Awards last year to help do our small part to correct this glaring injustice, and we were ecstatic about the response among both readers and industry professionals. This year, our second, saw a massive flurry of entries and participants. The voting body doubled in size. The submissions were broader and more international. People reached out to us all year long — ordinary folks as well as seasoned pros — making sure that a variety of movies and scenes were on our radar and offering suggestions on how to make these awards more representative and inclusive.
The Action Edition
The Action Edition
Understandable, perhaps, as 2023 was a big year for movies with big stunts. This was the year that we got John Wick Chapter 4, directed by former stunt professional Chad Stahelski, and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, a Tom Cruise extravaganza that announced itself more than a year before its release with a featurette showing us how Cruise, director Christopher McQuarrie, and their stunt team managed the greatest motorcycle-parachute cliff-jump in human history. (Shocker: That stunt won one of our awards.) We also got Extraction 2, also directed by a former stunt coordinator, a movie that cemented Chris Hemsworth’s status as one of our leading action lights by, well, setting him on fire. But you didn’t need to be an action film to wow us. Ferrari featured some of the most stunning racing footage put on film. Oppenheimer gave us one of the greatest practical movie explosions in history. Jennifer Lawrence opened a can of unforgettable naked beach whup-ass in No Hard Feelings. 2024 will surely be a big stunt year, too, with Road House, The Fall Guy, and Furiosa on the horizon.
One of the most fascinating trends of recent years has been a renewed interest in practical stunts. After decades of viewers assuming and expecting that everything is now “done with computers,” there has been pushback against some of the shoddy CGI work we see in alleged blockbusters and a newfound appreciation of real-life stuntwork. Of course, it’s always important to note that a lot of the practical stunts we love, including most of the ones we’ve just name-checked, also have plenty of digital-effects work done on them. Indeed, we’ve discovered that VFX artists are often the stunt professionals’ biggest advocates; after all, they’re the ones who see the raw footage of all these fights and falls and car-rolls. We here at Vulture HQ are not anti-VFX; we’re anti–bad VFX. (We’re also anti–bad stunts.)
We’re very excited to be giving out these awards again, and we’ll happily keep giving them out even after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally caves and allows a Best Stunts Oscar. And mark our words: They will. Reports are filtering out that progress is being made. (That AMPAS just recently announced a new Oscar category honoring casting directors suggests that one of the chief, oft-stated reasons for not having a Stunts Oscar — Waah, the ceremony’s already too long, there are too many categories, waah — is no longer viable.) Meanwhile, more and more industry organizations have been recognizing stunts in recent years. SAG has had a Best Stunt Ensemble award since 2007. The Emmys have been giving out a variety of stunt awards since the early 2000s, adding a new one in 2021. The Canadian Screen Awards announced a Best Stunt Coordination category that same year. Of course, as we’ve discovered, and are reminded again during the voting period for our own awards, the world of stunts is ultimately too varied, too huge, too interesting and crazy to ever truly be represented by one award in one category. Here are this year’s many Vulture Stunt Awards winners.
Best Stunt in an Action Film
Awarded to a specific sequence in an action film that exemplifies the work of a stunt-coordination team.
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The Nominees:
• The Equalizer 3 (Stained-Glass Ceiling scene)
• Extraction 2 (Opening Oner)
• Jawan (Highway Chase)
• John Wick: Chapter 4 (Stair Fight and Fall)
• Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning (Base Jump)
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The Winner: John Wick: Chapter 4 (Stair Fight and Fall)
Awarded to stunt coordinator Stephen Dunlevy, second unit director and stunt coordinator Scott Rogers, fight choreographer Jeremy Marinas, fight choreographer and stunt coordinator Laurent Demianoff, director of photography Dan Laustsen, assistant director of photography Johannes Sommerhäuser, director Chad Stahelski, stunt double Vincent Bouillon, and performers Keanu Reeves and Marko Zaror.
A great stunt obviously requires a sense of scale. This year’s nominees underscore how a single moment can crack a film wide open, whether through a mind-boggling feat (Ethan Hunt’s base jump in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning), meticulously planned set pieces (the shattered-stained-glass home invasion in The Equalizer 3), or setting-sprawling ballets (the speeding highway chase in Jawan, the fiery jailbreak in Extraction 2). This year’s Stunt Awards voters complimented Tom Cruise’s clifftop leap as “fucking madness,” praised “the logistical complexity” of Extraction 2’s never-ending oner, and gushed over the “originality” of Jawan’s speedy pursuit, every response united by an “are you seeing this shit?” energy — but no scene this year outpaced our expectations more than John Wick taking and tumbling down, and taking and tumbling down, the 222 stairs to the Sacré Coeur de Montmartre in John Wick: Chapter 4.
More than 50 percent of voters gave Best Stunt to this Sisyphean sequence, which places Keanu Reeves’s titular character at the bottom of a Paris landmark and challenges him to fight his way up. Shot over seven nights with 35 stunt performers, the scene cleverly combines Wick’s weariness at the waves of foes with a slapstick rhythm fueled by his repeated toppling. Director Chad Stahelski told Vulture he and stunt coordinator Scott Rogers asked themselves, “What would Buster Keaton do?” and, thanks to stunt performer Vincent Bouillon, we know. The endless somersault is an amazing feat, but it’s surrounded by other exceptional details. The hilarity of Wick throwing his out-of-bullets gun at an attacker; Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard’s delightfully eclectic electronic score; the gang’s-all-here exuberance of Donnie Yen and Shamier Anderson joining the brawl alongside Reeves. “It’s a true testament to what Western action can truly be when given the time and money to create something truly memorable,” one voter said, and they’re right.
Best Stunt in a Non-Action Film
Awarded to a specific sequence in a non-action film, defined as a movie not predominantly occupied by physical spectacle in the form of fights, chases, explosions, and other violence.
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The Nominees:
• Beau Is Afraid (Beau’s Run Home)
• Bottoms (Field Mêlée)
• The Iron Claw (Wrestling Montage)
• No Hard Feelings (Naked Beach Fight)
• Sick (Home Invasion)
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The Winner: No Hard Feelings (Naked Beach Fight)
Awarded to stunt coordinator John Cenatiempo, assistant stunt coordinator Alex Anagnostidis, director of photography Eigil Bryld, and performers Jennifer Lawrence, Abigail Hupp, Christopher Bailey, and Eason Rytter.
Christopher Nolan recreated the first atomic explosion, and it was spectacular (see more on that below), but of course we’ve seen nukes go off onscreen before. Multiple directors destroyed helicopters in motion to dazzling effect this year, but that’s a feat well established by Michael Bay. An accomplishment from 2023 that has less historical antecedent? One of the most famous women in Hollywood stormed across a beach entirely nude to beat up some kids.
There was no stunt more surprising this year — in part because it took place in a sex comedy, far from the action genre — and nearly no actor was as committed to the moment as the one involving Jennifer Lawrence in her birthday suit, administering beatdowns to some jerks on the shore. (One of our voters likened it to “Viggo’s ‘wang out’ mêlée” in Eastern Promises.) The former Mystique has a history with carefully choreographed and exposing fight scenes, but she approaches this sequence with the totally naked (literally) confidence of a no-longer-20-something hellion and executes it bluntly. (Lawrence has repeatedly told a story of how she got removed from an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue shoot because she was taking the mock football play too seriously, so she’s got the grappling chops.) As Action for Everyone co-host and Stunt Awards voter VyceVictus put it, she performed “the most perfect suplex performed on film since Donnie Yen in Flashpoint.”
“Is this the best naked fight choreography in a non-Russian-themed film?” film critic Travis Johnson asked when he submitted his ballot. The answer is yes, and not just because of the out-of-nowhere sensation the No Hard Feelings fight provides. It’s also an excellent example of combat as storytelling. We know Lawrence’s character is rough around the edges. We know she’s got a hardness to her. But when you watch her barrel out of the ocean to throw down and then cap off the fight by shouting, “And stay the fuck out of Montauk,” she feels like a girl you’ve known since high school and knew never to cross.
Best Fight
Awarded to a hand-to-hand combat sequence that is not a shootout, though it can involve weapons.
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The Nominees:
• Creed III (Donny and Dame Ascend to the Astral Plane)
• John Wick: Chapter 4 (Caine Cooks in the Kitchen)
• The Killer (Brute Fight)
• The Roundup (Ma Dong-seok versus Hong Joon-young)
• Sniper G.R.I.T. (Lady Death versus Everybody)
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The Winner: John Wick: Chapter 4 (Caine Cooks in the Kitchen)
Awarded to performer Donnie Yen, director Chad Stahelski, fight choreographer Jeremy Marinas, stunt coordinator Stephen Dunlevy, second unit director and stunt coordinator Scott Rogers, and director of photography Dan Laustsen.
2023 was packed with hand-to-hand combat onscreen, from reliable ringer Ma Dong-seok pounding fools into dust in the latest installment of The Roundup to David Fincher jumping way outside his comfort zone to film one of the most sickening fights in years to upstarts like Luna Fujimoto creating an astonishing one-take fight as Lady Death in Sniper: G.R.I.T. And then there was Donnie Yen. Yen is a living icon of Hong Kong cinema — a successor to Jackie Chan and Jet Li whose crossover was a question of when, not if — but the West was too slow to appropriately appreciate him. A brief if not entertaining role in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story aside, the 60-year-old performer finally got his Hollywood flowers in the latest installment of the John Wick franchise. In a cast full of martial-arts legends (Hiroyuki Sanada, Marko Zaror, Scott Adkins) it’s Yen who runs away with Chapter Four, as the blind assassin Caine. And no scene exemplifies Yen’s lightning-quick talents quite like the Kitchen Fight.
What makes this fight so special isn’t just that it’s a celebration of Donnie (who can punch fast, kick faster, and barely registers exhaustion beyond an exhale that only seems to charge him up) or the Hong Kong action scene (just look at the way the kitchen is lit, the red light and steam mimicking the greatest nighttime street fights), it’s that it accomplishes all of that homage in a wild, inventive sendup for how loony the John Wick franchise can be. As author of the book Action Movie Scouting Report and Stunt Awards ballot caster Shea Serrano puts it, “A thing I adore about the John Wick series is that they always manage to have at least one thing in each movie that you’ve never seen before. In this case, it was Donnie Yen in the kitchen using sensors like a fucking karate sonar bat to kill all those bad guys.” These are life-and-death stakes, sure, but watching Yen zip through the kitchen dispatching goon after goon telegraphs a chaotic joy, with roots in the Great Stone Face bits of the silent era. Yen can play comedy with the best of them. In a fight filled with razor-sharp hits, the moment that will live forever is Yen pummeling a nameless henchman into oblivion, catching him in a headlock and slowing down to wind his fist up like Bugs Bunny to land the knockout punch. There’s really only one reaction to the gesture, and that’s from film critic and fellow voter Katie Walsh, who left us with a prayer: “Donnie Yen, forever and ever, amen.”
Best Shootout
Awarded to any sequence involving guns at relatively close range.
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The Nominees:
• Ballerina (Jang Ok-ju Invades the Grow House)
• The Channel (Bank Heist)
• Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant (Ambush on the Mine)
• John Wick: Chapter 4 (Overhead Gun Fight)
• Silent Night (Final Shootout)
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The Winner: John Wick: Chapter 4 (Overhead Gun Fight)
Awarded to stunt coordinator Stephen Dunlevy, second unit director and stunt coordinator Scott Rogers, fight choreographer Jeremy Marinas, director of photography Dan Laustsen, director Chad Stahelski, and performer Keanu Reeves.
77.4. That’s the percentage of this year’s Stunt Awards voting bloc that threw their support behind the Dragonbreath shootout in John Wick: Chapter 4, making its Best Shootout win the most dominant of the year. Fellow nominees Ballerina, The Channel, Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, and Silent Night all had their own passionate supporters. But it was the explosive effects and immersive video-game feel of the Dragonbreath sequence that made it this year’s literal and figurative Stunt Awards blowout.
The final 45 or so minutes of John Wick: Chapter 4 are a bevy of set-piece delights that flow seamlessly into each other as Wick fights for his life in Paris — the battle at the Arc de Triomphe, the Sacré Coeur de Montmartre stairs duel. Each scene has its own unique tone (frenzy at the traffic circle, slapstick on the 222 steps) but they ultimately adhere to that signature John Wick shooting style: long takes, minimal edits, a head-on perspective that puts us at the same level as Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Shamier Anderson, and the dozens of stunt performers who make these sequences sing.
The Dragonbreath sequence, however, feels different. It doesn’t just alter the firmly established look of John Wick’s gun fu style with visual-effects-enhanced explosive rounds that provide bursts of fire. It transforms how we experience these films on a more fundamental level, with an overhead perspective director Chad Stahelski adapted from the 2019 video game Hong Kong Massacre. “There was a visual there that shouldn’t have made sense but did. It was part video game, part anime, part cinematic experience,” he told Vulture. Making that top-down, extra-wide approach work in Chapter 4 required weeks of painstaking collaboration between the film’s cinematography, production-design, stunt-coordination, and visual-effects teams so that they could load the oner with as much color and as many bodies as possible. The result is, according to stunt coordinator Scott Rogers, “entertaining” and “ludicrous” — or, as one of our voters put it, “an unholy union that really can’t be topped.”
Best Vehicular Stunt
Awarded to any sequence involving motorized vehicles.
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The Nominees:
• Fast X (Rome Car Chase)
• Ferrari (Mille Miglia Race)
• Jawan (Highway Chase)
• John Wick: Chapter 4 (Arc de Triomphe Scene)
• Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning (Rome Car Chase)
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The Winner: John Wick: Chapter 4 (Arc de Triomphe Scene)
Awarded to stunt coordinator Stephen Dunlevy, second unit director and stunt coordinator Scott Rogers, fight choreographer Jeremy Marinas, fight choreographer and stunt coordinator Laurent Demianoff, director of photography Dan Laustsen, director Chad Stahelski, stunt double Vincent Bouillon, and performers Keanu Reeves and Marko Zaror.
As John Wick: Chapter 4 races around the Arc de Triomphe, Keanu Reeves spends ten minutes alternately inside and outside of cars. He’s destroying henchmen in every way possible: with guns, fists, the front of cars (by running people down), the doors of cars (by ramming them into fixed objects). There’s an attack dog at one point. As the chaos of the vehicular stunt unfolds, Reeves takes as much punishment as he dishes out, getting pulverized across the frame. In his Stunt Awards ballot, director Casey Tebo called the scene, “a kaleidoscope of action that exploded like a paint bomb of adrenaline! It was a masterpiece of action filmmaking, a scene that will stay etched in your memory long after the credits roll.”
A masterpiece of filmmaking that necessitated an international cadre of driving pros. Stahelski told Vulture that his film team constructed a complete 3-D model of the Arc de Triomphe for rehearsals, recreating the setting down to the inch at the Tegel Airport in Berlin. It came complete with two towers decked out in lights to replicate the iconic traffic circle. The lanes of the practice area mirrored the specs of the Arc roadway, demarcated with color coded traffic cones to make sense of everyone’s marks; drivers were assigned a color so they would never deviate from their driving tracks, plus everyone communicated via walkie talkie. Special markers were put down for Reeves and stunt performers so they knew exactly where to stand amid the vehicles — drivers knew to avoid those markers so as not to run anyone down. They rehearsed over and over again, first with the drivers, then the drivers and the camera team, and then those two units together plus Reeves, over a span of months.
Stahelski considered every worst-case outcome, ensuring that when time came to film at the actual location, his over-preparation would will into existence the most choreographed environment possible. The Arc sequence was shot over three weeks. The final result was about 50 cars going 40-50 mph around the traffic circle, with 20 stuntmen on the ground plus Reeves. As screenwriter and Stunt Awards voter Russell Hainline said when he cast his vote, “There’s a real location, real actors, real cars — and clearly some amount of CGI — but I can’t tell what’s what … That’s the mark of great FX.”
Best Aerial Stunt
Awarded to any sequence that takes place predominantly in the air.
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The Nominees:
• Extraction 2 (Helicopter Shootout)
• Godzilla Minus One (Plane Circling Godzilla)
• Kandahar (Helicopter Fight)
• Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning (Base Jump)
• Pathaan (Jet-Pack Fight)
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The Winner: Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning (Base Jump)
Awarded to stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood, assistant stunt coordinators Christopher Gordon and Scott Armstrong, director of photography Fraser Taggart, director Christopher McQuarrie, and performer Tom Cruise.
Months before Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning hit theaters, Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, and their enormous crew started releasing behind-the-scenes footage of the stunt that promised to induce more acrophobia than the Burj Khalifa scale of Ghost Protocol. And it wasn’t just a tease; the footage seemed to capture the act — our biggest movie star driving a motorcycle head-first off a cliff into freefall, over and over and over again — from every conceivable angle, playing alongside trailers like a highlight reel that had run away with itself. As Jason DeMarco, senior vice-president of Action and Anime at Warner Bros. Discovery and Stunt Awards voter wrote, “I mean the BTS of this is almost more thrilling than the movie because you know this crazy bastard Tom Cruise ACTUALLY DID THAT SHIT. The only person I can compare his commitment to is Jackie Chan.“ By the time Dead Reckoning hit, surely, there was no way the cinematic version of the base jump could live up to our expectations.
In a series that plays with sleight of hand, the base jump is a genuine magic trick. Leading up to the stunt, viewers are put through a slapstick car chase, an AI-hosted party thumping with Hitchcockian levels of tension, the death of a beloved character, general emotion wringing. You’re lulled into the rhythms of what’s always been a deeply sad franchise, so much so that anticipation of the bananas stunt falls deep into the recesses of your mind. Then we’re at the climax. Most of our primary players are aboard a train. Tom Cruise, however, isn’t. A thought starts to slowly creep back, “Wait a minute, they still haven’t —” Cruise takes off on a motorcycle, winding around mountainous bends, the train chugging along beneath him. You’ve seen what’s about to come, and yet, nothing, not even the perfectly orchestrated silence, can prepare you for the crescendo; he has one chance to land on the train and that window’s closing. A collective hush hits the theater as Tom Cruise, suspended in time, takes a leap of faith.
Every stunt has a plan, no matter how small. Every glass-shatter, fight, and explosion is a result of months and months of preparation by people at the peaks of their field. A Tom Cruise stunt is no different (in that same BTS video, a crew member describes Cruise as having performed 30 jumps a day, totaling 500 skydives), but it always arrives with an additional megaphone introduction: “The theatrical experience still means something, dammit!” Cruise’s last decade has been a race to save what he loves most (cinema, the movie star, the action franchise), and he increasingly seems willing to sacrifice his body to do it. As film critic and Stunt Awards voter Clint Worthington wrote on his ballot, “Tom Cruise defies gravity just as he defies death in every picture; it’s no accident he leaps off the physical manifestation of the Paramount logo.”
Best Practical Explosion
Awarded to any sequence that involves any reactive substance that amounts to an explosion.
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The Nominees:
• Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant (Truck Explosion)
• Extraction 2 (Chris Hemsworth’s Flaming Fist)
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Pipeline Blows Up)
• Killers of the Flower Moon (House Explosion)
• Oppenhemier (Trinity Test)
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The Winner: Oppeheimer (Trinity Test)
Awarded to visual-effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, director of photography Hoyte Van Hoytema, and director Christopher Nolan.
Now, here was a close one. The flaming fist of Tyler Rake from Extraction 2 almost took this category, and it’s not hard to see why. “A prime example of a cool-ass image that is just fundamentally badass,” wrote one voter. Another exclaimed: “They legit lit Hemsworth’s arm on fire!” But in the end, Oppenheimer’s Trinity Test, the practical explosion to end all practical explosions, won the award. Director Christopher Nolan’s distaste for CGI-heavy spectacle is well-known, and his insistence on making this explosion fully practical has been thoroughly documented. But it really is a staggering achievement. A cinematic depiction of the first time in history that humans achieved nuclear fire, the Trinity test in Oppenheimer is awe-inspiring, terrifying, dangerous, and also contemplative. It has to be. The first half of the film builds up to it, and the second half of the film is haunted by it. “Recreating a nuclear detonation — the first nuclear detonation — practically is simply ambition that verges on hubris,” wrote another voter, then added, “It’s not hubris, though, because they fucking pulled it off.”
To achieve the effect, Nolan’s effects teams set off seven different explosions. For the explosion we see in the film, special-effects supervisor Scott Fisher used a combination of TNT (for size), gasoline (for the fire), and aluminum powder (for the big bright initial blast), and had groups of actors at varying (albeit totally safe!) distances from the blast so that Nolan’s cameras could capture their genuine reactions. They also set off a couple of additional explosions so that VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson, whose team was largely responsible for the glimpses of the subatomic world that Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer envisions throughout the movie, could capture close-ups of the explosion, with the sparks and the transcendent clouds of fire that give the film that added sense of metaphysical terror. “The silent explosion,” remarked another voter. “The light overwhelming and swallowing the scene. Benny Safdie’s overly sunscreened face. Magnificent.”
Best Overall Action Film
Awarded to the best film for stunt work overall.
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The Nominees:
• Ballerina
• Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
• Extraction 2
• Fist of the Condor
• Jawan
• John Wick: Chapter 4
• Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning
• Pathaan
• Silent Night
• Shin Kamen Rider
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The Winner: John Wick: Chapter 4
Look, these are the Stunt Awards, and it makes perfect sense that Best Overall Action Film goes to a movie that oozes stunts from every blood-filled pore of its cinematic body. In one voter’s words, “John Wick 4 has every kind of stunt imaginable BUT ALSO is an amazing capper and a 4th (!) film in a series that doesn’t feel bloated … The fact that every other action movie is being called a ‘John Wick clone’ today says all you need to know about the influence and impact of this work.” Now, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning certainly put up a good fight, and Tom Cruise (star of last year’s big winner, Top Gun: Maverick) will surely be back. But John Wick 4 was not only the most financially successful entry in its franchise — a franchise whose first entry, let’s not forget, was initially headed for straight-to-video — it also brought a now-iconic saga to its surprisingly shattering conclusion.
The film was also a throwing of the gauntlet. A lot of sequels try to up the ante simply because they have to justify their existence, but John Wick 4 manages to put a new spin on that; its set pieces are not just spectacular, they’re existential. We sense throughout the film that Keanu Reeves’s John Wick is fighting not just to survive, but to reclaim his soul. Whether it’s the gory melee in Tokyo, the insane ring of ultraviolence around the Arc de Triomphe, or the extended, Sisyphean struggle up the steps to Sacre Coeur, there’s a mythic kick to the hero’s journey. And the particular achievement of director Chad Stahelski and his team here is their ability to combine this otherworldly quality of John’s quest with old-school, real-world beatdowns that feel visceral, immediate, and true. Or, as another of our voters put it: “The sheer scale and variety of stunt work and choreography on display is staggering with each set piece being double the length of a normal film’s finale.”
Best Achievement in Stunts Overall
Awarded to the best overall stunt professional (or duo) in 2023.
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The Nominees:
• Kefi Abrikh (Furies, The Princess)
• Vincent Bouillon (John Wick: Chapter 4, Freelance, Sniper: G.R.I.T.)
• Stephen Dunlevy (John Wick: Chapter 4)
• Saori Izawa (Baby Assassins 2, John Wick: Chapter 4)
• Jeremy Marinas (Blue Beetle, Fast X, John Wick: Chapter 4, Silent Night)
• Rachel McDermott (Extraction 2)
• Scott Rogers (John Wick: Chapter 4)
• Marko Zaror (The Fist of the Condor, John Wick: Chapter 4)
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The Winner: Vincent Bouillon
Vincent Bouillon, longtime stunt professional and Keanu’s double on John Wick: Chapter 4, had a wild and busy year. From his work on Wick to his stunt coordination on Sniper: G.R.I.T. to his doubling for last year’s winner of this very award, Scott Adkins, in Egyptian action-comedy Wherever You Go, Bouillon embodied everything these awards exist to celebrate. But on his ballot this year, Adkins succinctly identifies what Bouillon will be etched into the history of cinema for: “The stair fall is insane.”
In a category stacked with talent — Bouillon’s long-unsung Wick co-star Marko Zaror and Extraction 2’s Rachel McDermott, whose doubling of Golshifteh Farahani should not go unnoticed — Bouillon stands out for the sheer diversity in stunt work applied across the film. Again, much of what we see onscreen is Keanu, but the film’s more outlandish set pieces, like the Best Vehicular Stunt winning Arc de Triomphe chase-shootout, require Bouillon’s almost superheroic efforts to meld the two men together. His doubling of Keanu is so seamless that many assumed it was Reeves himself tumbling down those stairs. It’s a shocking moment of instant cinema history; John Wick’s ascent to his climactic destiny is almost thwarted by Zaror’s Chidi, who kicks Wick’s ass all the way back down. The most mind-blowing aspect is that it only took two shots to get right, according to stunt professional Aaron Vargas, who noted in his ballot: “Without Vincent’s skill, it’s very possible that that stair stunt would’ve gone terribly, and he should 1,000 percent be recognized for making that work.”
These awards were created out of frustration that cinema’s highest trophy-granting institution, the Academy Awards, remains unwilling to celebrate achievements like these. To witness a man like Bouillon in a genuine star-making explosion makes the lack of movement on the Oscar front maddening. The slapstick brutality in his physical performance is as good as any leading male turn being celebrated this year. It’s not an insult to any of the acting hopefuls, but we might struggle to remember who won Best Actor in a given year. We’ll never forget Bouillon’s contribution to one of the greatest stunts ever performed, that’ll be spoken about alongside Chan’s glass-shattering fall in Police Story or the house falling over Keaton in Steamboat Bill Jr. for the rest of time.
Lifetime Achievement Award
Awarded to a trailblazer in the field of stunts whose commitment to the craft has shaped the world of action.
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The Recipient: Henri Kingi
Henry Kingi’s first acting gig was on the set of a Hitchcock movie. At 80 years old, he’s worked on TV shows (The Bionic Woman, T.J. Hooker, The A-Team, Walker, Texas Ranger); movies (Scarface, Dune, Road House, Batman Returns, Blade); and franchises (John Wick, Fast & Furious, Jurassic Park, The Matrix), becoming one of the most reliable stunt drivers in the business. And he’s been just as instrumental off set, co-founding the Black Stuntmen’s Association and advocating for equal pay for his peers.
Brandon Streussnig went long on Kingi’s contributions to a fascinating industry, here.