| V for Vendetta |  |
 |
Eastern Promises |
 |
Planet Terror (2007)
|
We know, we know – the last person you’d expect to see on this list twice is Robert Rodriguez, but when it comes to making an actor look like a total badass, he never fails. And no, we’re not talking about Naveen Andrews and his monster knife (you know, the one designed to serve his curious testicle fetish), but rather El Wray (played by Freddy Rodriguez), a man half the size of Snake Plissken and El Mariachi, but twice as dangerous. True, he spends most of the film blasting baddies with a hand cannon, but when one-legged girlfriend Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) is holed up in a hospital filled with zombies, he breaks out a pair of balisong (butterfly) knives and goes to work slicing and dicing his way through the wreckage. It’s always nice to see an action scene infused with a little comedy (like when Wray slashes a throat, only to bend backwards to avoid the spurting, infected blood), but the real money shot comes right before that, when Rodriguez performs a wall flip over another zombie before gashing him in the neck. It doesn’t last very long, but considering the scene actually upstages McGowan’s climactic machine gun leg shootout, it hardly matters.
 |
 |
 V for Vendetta |
 Eastern Promises |