10 Incredible Scenes From Mediocre Movies
3. The Ninja Mountain Fight - G.I. Joe: Retaliation
Nobody could really be blamed for remembering barely a thing about 2013's G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which despite starring both Dwayne Johnson and Bruce Willis, evaporated from the cultural consciousness within mere weeks of its release.
An enthusiastically generic sci-fi actioner at its core, Retaliation deserves to endure for one scene only - the expertly-crafted, near-wordless mountainside ninja fight.
Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Jinx (Elodie Yung) team up to fend off a seemingly never-ending caravan of ninjas while carrying their injured bud Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun) up the side of a cliff, and it's the only sequence in the entire movie put together with real technical craft and playful ingenuity.
Watching the heroes fearlessly run across a cliff face while mowing down ninjas with their swords is basically the blockbuster equivalent of a kid staging an impossibly epic battle with their action figures.
Somehow, in a movie starring The Rock of all people, the best scene doesn't feature him for even a single solitary second.
Above all else, the sequence's technical excellence should've plainly indicated that director Jon M. Chu, who went on to direct Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights, was always destined for greater things.