Blade Runner 2049: 10 Reasons It's Massively Overrated

The action sequences in Blade Runner are impossible to forget.

Recall the sad and beautiful scene where Deckard shoots Zhora as she tries to escape, crashing through the glass, her chest exploding with blood. Or Deckard's fight with Pris, which is by turns terrifying and hilarious and ends with her screaming and shaking on the floor. Then, of course, there's the final battle with Roy Batty, a tour de force of cinema that culminates with one of sci-fi's greatest moments.

Blade Runner 2049's action scenes don't come close. There's nothing memorable about any of the fight sequences in the sequel, try as Denis Villeneuve might to render them so. The opening fight, for example, with Officer K going up against Sapper Morton, could have been bloody and brutal but comes off as generic.

Then there's the awkward punch up between Deckard and K, which is stilted and unimaginative. Even the final battle against nutty replicant Luv, which takes place in and out of the water as K tries desperately tries to save Deckard from drowning, feels like a wasted opportunity - one which is lost to dodgy, incoherent editing.

Ridley Scott made sure to craft some genuinely unforgettable action scenes in his own vision of a futuristic Los Angeles, the likes of which we'd never seen before. By comparison, Denis Villeneuve's attempts are a bit laughable.