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There is usually one rule for adventure movies which is that the guys go out, they nearly die a few times, and they come home with something to show for it. There is always a promise to come back and survive the danger so it all means something by the time you get back. But the thrill is to do something so unexpected that it stays with the audience for long.
The ten films here take that promise and break it on purpose. None of them play fair with the reward you were promised at the start, and that’s exactly why they’re still worth watching. You almost think you know what is going to happen, but keep your seatbelts on because you might never know. Let’s get into it.
10
‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ (2013)
Ben Stiller both directs and stars as Walter Mitty, a photo archivist who spends most of his day zoning out into elaborate daydreams instead of talking to Cheryl (Kristen Wiig), the coworker he likes. The trailers sold this as a globe-trotting adventure, skateboarding down Icelandic roads, outrunning a shark, climbing the Himalayas chasing down a photographer named Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn). Most of that footage is real in the film too. It just isn’t the point of it.
The missing photograph Walter travels the world to find turns out to be a picture of Walter himself, doing his unglamorous job at his desk, taken by Sean because he thought it mattered. An adventure movie spends two hours convincing you that grandeur is out there somewhere, then hands its main character a photo of an ordinary man doing ordinary work and calls that treasure. It’s a strange thing for a studio adventure film to argue, and it argues it anyway.
9
‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ (1948)
Humphrey Bogart plays Fred C. Dobbs, a broke drifter in Mexico who teams up with Curtin (Tim Holt) and an old prospector named Howard (Walter Huston) to dig gold out of a mountain none of them can legally claim. Bogart was the biggest star in America when this came out, and director John Huston spends the whole film making him uglier by the minute, paranoid, sweat-soaked, convinced his partners are plotting to rob him long before either of them actually considers it.
Dobbs dies at the hands of bandits who have no idea the sacks he’s carrying are full of gold dust, and they scatter it across the desert thinking it’s worthless sand. Nobody gets the fortune. The wind takes it instead. For a film starring the man who’d just played Rick in Casablanca, letting him die broke, deluded, and unmourned was not the ending 1948 audiences were expecting to pay for.
8
‘The Revenant’ (2015)
Alejandro G. Iñárritu shot this one in chronological order using only natural light, which meant the crew spent months chasing daylight across two continents just to keep the look consistent. All of that in service of one moment: Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), left for dead in the snow by Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) after a bear attack, finally catching up to him.
When Glass corners Fitzgerald, dying in the snow, he doesn’t kill him. He drags him to the river and pushes him toward a group of Arikara warriors who have their own reason to want him dead, and lets them finish it instead. Revenge movies almost always give the hero that final act with his own hands. This one takes the moment away from Glass right when the whole film has been promising it to him.
7
‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World’ (2003)
There’s barely a villain in this one, and there’s no romance subplot at all, which is a strange choice for a big studio adventure film released in 2003. What it has instead is Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe), chasing a French warship across the ocean with an obsession that starts to look a lot like Ahab’s, and the ship’s doctor, Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), who just wants five minutes onshore in the Galápagos to study finches.
That tension, between duty and curiosity, is what actually drives the film, not a clear hero-versus-villain chase, which meant audiences expecting a swashbuckling adventure got long stretches of barnacle scraping and amputated limbs instead. It underperformed at the box office for exactly that reason, and it’s also why people still bring it up as one of the most quietly intelligent adventure films a studio ever funded.
6
‘Sorcerer’ (1977)
By the time these four men agree to drive trucks packed with sweating, unstable dynamite through the jungle, none of them have anything left to lose, which is the only reason the job pays as well as it does. Jackie Scanlon (Roy Scheider) is one of them, a fugitive hiding under a fake name, and William Friedkin, coming off The Exorcist and The French Connection, wanted a film with no clean hero and no clean escape for any of them.
The movie opened the same summer as Star Wars in 1977, and audiences who’d just watched a farm boy blow up the Death Star had no appetite for four desperate men who might not survive their own truck. It bombed badly enough to help end Friedkin’s run as a bankable director, and decades later, critics reappraised it as one of the tensest adventure films ever made.
5
‘Deliverance’ (1972)
Four friends from Atlanta, led by Lewis (Burt Reynolds), the survivalist of the group, take a canoe trip down a river before it gets dammed and turned into a lake, wanting one last taste of real wilderness. Ed (Jon Voight), Bobby (Ned Beatty), and Drew (Ronny Cox) go along with him, and the trip turns into an assault, a killing, and a cover-up before the weekend is over.
Lewis, the character built up as the toughest man in the group, breaks his leg and has to be carried out, while Ed, the least outdoorsy of the four, ends up killing a man to save the others. John Boorman spends the whole film undoing the fantasy that nature makes men stronger, and by the time the survivors are lying to police at the end, the river they came looking for has already been flooded over for good.
4
‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’ (1972)
Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) is a Spanish conquistador who mutinies against his own expedition and drags a shrinking crew of soldiers down the Amazon hunting for a city of gold that was never real to begin with. Werner Herzog shot the film on actual rafts on an actual river, with a cast and crew who reportedly feared Kinski as much as anyone feared the jungle itself.
Nobody finds El Dorado. Nobody survives, in fact, except Aguirre, who ends the film alone on a raft that’s overrun with monkeys, declaring himself the wrath of God to an audience of nobody. Adventure movies about conquest usually end with a flag planted or a fortune claimed. This one ends with a man so consumed by his own delusion that he keeps giving orders to a crew that’s already dead.
3
‘Fitzcarraldo’ (1982)
The ship you see getting dragged over a mountain in this film is a real 320-ton steamship, pulled by real pulleys and real manual labor, because Werner Herzog refused to fake any of it with models or effects. The man obsessed enough to attempt it on screen, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski), wants to build an opera house in the jungle, and hauling a ship over a mountain turns out to be the reasonable part of his plan.
Fitzcarraldo actually gets the ship over the mountain, and the film could have ended there as a triumph. Instead, the ship gets swept down a set of rapids and lost almost immediately after. The opera happens anyway, on a different boat entirely, proof that Herzog was never interested in whether the obsession paid off, only in how far a person will go chasing something that never needed to make sense.
2
‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015)
The man whose name is in the title spends a good portion of his own movie chained to the hood of a car, muzzled, and mostly along for the ride. Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) isn’t the one driving the plot of Mad Max: Fury Road. Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a one-armed war rig commander who steals Immortan Joe’s (Hugh Keays-Byrne) five captive wives and runs, is.
George Miller shot the whole thing with real stunt drivers doing real stunts across real desert, using almost no CGI. Then, near the end, the film does something most quest stories never do: it turns around. The green land everyone’s been chasing doesn’t exist anymore, so instead of pushing forward toward a promised land, Furiosa leads everyone back the way they came to take the Citadel instead.
1
‘The Wages of Fear’ (1953)
Four broke men stranded in a South American oil town, including Mario (Yves Montand) and Jo (Charles Vanel), take a job no sane person would want and that is driving two trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over three hundred miles of unpaved road, because the American oil company running the town is offering enough money to finally leave. Henri-Georges Clouzot spends over an hour just showing how trapped and broke these men are before a single truck ever moves, so that by the time the driving starts, the money feels less like a prize and more like a trap with better lighting.
Mario survives the entire trip, the explosions, the oil-slicked road, the mountain pass that shouldn’t have been driveable. Then he dies on the way home, in a stupid car accident, swerving his truck off a cliff while dancing behind the wheel to music on the radio. The company he worked for never even slows down to notice.
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Safwan Azeem
Almontather Rassoul
