Comments
- on Jan, 22 2010
- in General
I’ve always been a huge fan of training montages. There’s nothing out there that can energize, motivate, and ultimately defeat you when you realize that these montages are nothing but simple feats of cinematic camera trickery and months upon months of traning condensed into a bite size portion.
That doesn’t make them any less fun.
Batman Begins
You don’t really think of Batman Begins as a typical feel-good training/fighting movie, but it happens to have one of the best montages out there. While it’s not really music you would work out to, it does still have some prime motivation.
BloodSport
This was a tough one. There are so many hilarious Jean Claude Van Damme training montages out there that picking just one would be incredibly difficult. I went with this one for two reasons: 1) It’s Van Damme’s breakout role. 2) The stretching device that Van Damme puts himself into at around 5 minutes in makes me cringe.
Never Back Down
Let’s get one thing straight – Never Back Down is a horrible movie. It has two things going for it, however. First is a great theatrical trailer and second is this training montage. Sure, it has emo music, but the raw combination of Dijimon Honsou and Kettlebells cannot be trifled with.
Rocky IV
This is a great one boys and girls. Rocky IV’s training montage is the best training montage from any American movie ever (why only American? Well, the next one will explain why). This has everything a great montage should have. What’s especially exciting is that this montages follows what I like to call the montage cycle:
- Phase 1 – Initial training – protagonist is doing well, but slipping up in some parts.
- Phase 2 – Break, where the protagonist suddenly rediscovers his will to train.
- Phase 3 – Freight train of training tom-foolery.
Fighter in the Wind
This is it boys and girls – my favorite training montage of all time. This too goes through the montage cycle, but the phase 3 portion of the cycle has a song choice that absolutely CRUSHES any other montage I have ever seen. The man cries while eating beans, he breaks rocks with his bear hands, does thumb pushups, and climbs an ice mountain while barefoot. All to a song which I can only equate to a poor man’s Nightwish.
Do me a favor and comment on your own favorite montages.
