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The Playlist By The Playlist Staff | The Playlist December 23, 2013 at 9:05PM

It seemed as though 2013 was positively clogged up with major "event" movies, each one bigger, louder, and more expensive than the last. Every week some new gargantuan thingummy was trying to one-up the previous week's path of destruction. While many of these movies turned out to be numbing and dull, there were still a few that were actually pretty dazzling, or at the very least featured one truly outstanding sequence that caused you to drop your popcorn or spill your oversized soda in pure, unabashed delight. Almost every big movie in 2013 was marketed at 13-year-old boys; the very best of them made you actually feel like you were 13 again, if only momentarily.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug


The Grandmaster Zhang Ziyi

2. The World's Longest Train in "The Grandmaster"

Iron Man 3

1. The Free Fall From "Iron Man 3"
For some reason, in the weeks that followed the release of the exemplary "Iron Man 3," it got the reputation that it was somehow "light on action." Maybe because Shane Black and Drew Pearce's script actually had people talking a lot and solving mysteries instead of simply blasting beams of light at each other? (There was plenty of beam-blasting, too.) Unlike in most superhero movies the action really meant something here— each set piece felt hefty and momentous. The best of these sequences was, of course, an attack on Air Force One that culminated in a group of passengers being tossed out of the crippled aircraft. Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) is faced with an impossible problem: wrangling all of these falling survivors to safety, even though his suit can only carry so many. The solution: to daisy-chain the survivors together (he zaps them to make sure they hold) and drop them into the ocean. What makes the sequence so much fun is how much of it was practical – there were really skydivers jumping out of planes for this thing – and how director Black always has a way of upping the ante and letting you know how real the stakes are (the best shot is one from below, where you watch the remains of Air Force One burst into flame and start to plummet downwards). Black, who also is a huge fan of smart-ass twists, also has the sense to end the sequence on a wonderful shock—as Iron Man starts to fly away from the happy (if somewhat wet) survivors, he's hit by a train (again! a train!) and it's revealed that he was never in the suit, for the entire sequence, but was controlling his Iron Man get-up from afar. So many emotions! At the end of it, though, you're left with a smile on your face, which is really what all of the best action sequences should do. This is pure movie magic, breathlessly told and wonderfully fun. Also: when Disney finally gets around to putting the superheroes in the theme parks… they have a pretty good place to start, at least after construction on Thor's Asgardian Ale House is complete.

Additionally, there were some awesome action sequences this year that we simply didn't have time to squeeze into our list. The Chinese restaurant hold up in "Spring Breakers," conveyed simply with a single, super-long shot, not only set the tone and character but was an ominous foreshadow of the chaos to come. While something of a retread of the original film's platform jump, the ship-to-ship sequence from "Star Trek Into Darkness" remains one of the film's most noteworthy highlights. The axe fight in "Bullet to the Head" enlivened a mostly dreary Sylvester Stallone vehicle, while the cornfield chase in "The Last Stand," starring Sly's BFF Arnold Schwarzenegger was easily the best part of that movie, and one of the only indications that South Korean visionary Kim Ji-woon actually directed this movie. Keanu Reeves and Chen Hu facing off at the end of "Man of Tai Chi" was a whole lot of fun. And the Ryan Gosling beat-down in "Only God Forgives" is notable, if only for the amount of blood spilled and the fact that Gosling, easily one of the biggest (and prettiest) actors in Hollywood, allowed himself to get beaten to a bloody pulp.  -- Drew Taylor, Katie Walsh, Gabe Toro, Oliver Lyttleton, Rodrigo Perez, Jessica Kiang

This article is related to: G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Oblivion, Man Of Steel, The Wolverine, World War Z, The Lone Ranger, The World's End, Lone Survivor, Pacific Rim, Iron Man 3, Gravity, Captain Phillips, Fast & Furious 6, The Grandmaster, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Best Movies of 2013, Features, Feature, Best of 2013