A specific scene she pointed out was the dangerous shot of the helicopter flown by Robert Patrick's T-1000 under an overpass in that third act highway chase. Of course, it's a professional helicopter pilot flying the chopper, not Patrick, but presumably it is still quite a tricky maneuver, and maybe they just wouldn't bother today.
Well, it was funny only two months later to see the stunt performed again -- in the movie about Matchbox cars, of all places.
Yes, there is a helicopter that flies under an overpass in Sam Hargrave's Matchbox: The Movie, which I watched on Sunday night. This time the not-pilot is the character played by Teyonah Parris.
Looking up the director afterward, I should not be surprised. Hargrave is the name behind the Extraction movies for Netflix, though now he's switched streamers to Apple.
If you aren't familiar with the Extraction movies, well, they are worth seeing -- if only for the stunts. The stunts are part and parcel to the thing that really wows me about those movies, which is that each features a one-take action scene that lasts upwards of ten minutes. I think the one in Extraction 2 is closer to 20 minutes. And probably it's not really one take, but it is meant to look like it, and in order to fully pull it off, there are only a few ways you can cheat. Mostly you just have to do the actual work.
It occurs to me that while the work Cameron was doing back in the early 1990s is not maybe typical anymore, neither are we in age where stunt work is a lost art. In fact, we may paradoxically be at a high point for it, at least in terms of its recognition.
At the 2028 Oscars, recognizing films released in 2027, the Academy will debut its Achievement in Stunt Design Oscar. I don't know if a movie like Matchbox: The Movie would be enough to qualify for it, but because Hargrave is the director and he really cares about that sort of thing, it probably would be. It would have needed to come out next year, though. It's not like the movies nominated for this Oscar will be significantly better than Matchbox, because there is not usually a huge Venn diagram between films going for artistic quality/profundity and going for kickass stunts.
And then of course you have directors who have risen to prominence purely on the basis of their facility with stunt coordination. I have a trouble separating these two in my head, but both David Leitch and Chad Stahelski have come out of the John Wick movies, which are very stunt focused, to have their own directing careers. Just don't ask me to try to remember which one directed which movies.
And then you have Tom Cruise, who does his own stunts even in movies like Digger. That's a joke, though there is a great extended scene in a European parliament that is also a single take and that requires Cruise to stumble all over that chamber and risk hurting himself. We've much more likely to be talking about his stunts in Mission: Impossible movies, each of which has had something that should have/could have cost him his life.
There would be other examples if I really wanted to go digging.
So it this entire post intended as a rebuke to my wife's takeaway from Terminator 2?
It isn't, though it does make me realize that stunts are coming back, if they ever did go away in the first place. I mean, obviously stunts themselves did not go away -- you need stunt men (or women) even in movies where someone just gets punched in the face and falls to the ground. I'm sure they have a pretty good union that sees to it that the many working professionals in this industry keep working regularly.
But the sheer daring of stunts, the desire to wow us just with stunts ... that's all at a new high. The helicopter bit is only one such example in Matchbox, and it was something I specifically noticed just because of the conversation we'd had about T2.
And I think part of that is the ongoing repudiation of digital. Obviously we understand the role of creating images digitally in movies when necessary, and the coming use of AI is only going to blur those lines all the more. But just as horror directors want to wow us with obviously practical gore effects, action directors want to wow us with stunts that are equally practical -- even if you could achieve almost the same effect with a green screen and a little digital trickery.
As for Matchbox itself?
The next morning, I'm wondering if the two-star rating I slapped on it was too harsh. Maybe it's a bit better than that. But I think I hoped it would make use of the Matchbox car IP in at bit more of an intentionally silly, knowing way, which mildly satirized the fact that the studio clearly just wanted name recognition for an otherwise generic action movie. This was another one of those movies I started way too late, but there wasn't anything in the way of real laughter in this movie, even though certain moments were set up to be at least sort of funny. John Cena brings a certain charm, but the charm he brings is a bit on autopilot, as is the whole movie.
But maybe not the action itself, and it proves there are still places to turn in 2026 if you want helicopters flying under overpasses.
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