10 Amazing Action Scenes From Terrible Movies
6. The Giant Stone Samurai Showdown (Sucker Punch)
The entire premise of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch can be best summed up as Alice in Wonderland retold by a 14-year-old after he’d had one too many Monster energy drinks. The film focuses on the fantastical hallucinations of a creepy fetish symbol trying to escape from an insane asylum while imagining all sorts of bizarre battles in her head. Most of them are typical examples of style over substance, except for the giant samurai battle, which is an EXTRAORDINARY example of style over substance.
The first sword fight is kind of cool, but ends way too quickly. Thankfully, we aren’t left with a lot of time to feel sorry about that because almost immediately after it, the second giant stone samurai enters the fray wielding a massive fantasy minigun. Suddenly, in a complete change of pace, the whole thing feels like a gritty war movie, ending when the heroine empties an entire gun magazine right in the samurai golem’s dumb face. Finally, she disposes of the third warrior by doing a Dragon Ball power up and slicing him with her katana.
In any other movie, the whole over-the-top sequence would not work but here it’s done with so much obvious love for the cliché fighting tropes from video games, anime, and fantasy, that it becomes something, well, good. It becomes an impassioned tribute to delicious pop culture cheese.