25 GREATEST STUNTS

With Gal Gadot, Tom Cruise, Rosario Dawson, Chris Hemsworth and more putting life and limb in great danger and pushing fight scenes to the limit in high-octane entertainment this summer, Total Film hails the most cunning stunts of all time.

25 WINGING IT 
TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON (2011)

‘I gotta have wingsuits in Transformers 3.’ So said Michael Bay after watching skydivers Julian Boulle and J.T. Holmes do their thing on TV. Used to mountains, they’d never navigated a cityscape, much less one like Chicago. ‘Skipping breakfast, going straight to launch,’ said Holmes on shoot day. Well, you’re not keeping bacon and eggs down, are you? Five Bell-Boeing V-22 Ospreys take to the sky, led by Josh Duhamel’s Colonel Lennox. Pursued by Decepticons, the strike team jump. Gliding in formation, the wingsuiters whip through the air, spiders on the wind, evading bogeys as they navigate steel and concrete. Despite the CG villains, the danger of the real stunt still impresses. Pure unadulterated Bayhem.

24 PLANE TALKING 
TENET (2020)

Outrageous, even by Christopher Nolan’s standards: a hijacked 747 tears through Oslo airport, crushing cars in its wake before pancaking a hangar. Nolan insisted on doing it all for real, sending the production team to Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville. A physics expert was brought in to calculate when to apply the brakes before smashing the aircraft into a loading bay built by production designer Nathan Crowley’s team. The plane was towed by a tug driven by Jim Wilkey, the stunt driver who’d flipped the Joker’s truck on The Dark Knight. ‘It was a huge undertaking for everybody involved,’ says stunt coordinator George Cottle. No kidding.

23 DOUBLE IMPACT 
RRR (2022)