How feasible are Hollywood’s biggest stunts?

Could Indy (Harrison Ford) really survive an atomic blast by hiding in a fridge? Image: Paramount/Lucasfilm.

We film fans like a good action sequence – with seemingly endless budgets for special effects and the creative freedom offered by CGI and other hi-tech wizardry, they can help transform even the dullest of scripts into crowd pleasing hits.

But have you ever – maybe on that third or fourth viewing of a film when your attention is unexpectedly beginning to wane – stopped to consider how many of those big screen escapades are actually plausible?

If so, this interactive graphic may hold the answers you’ve been seeking – the team at Betway have spoken to a range of scientific, medical and extreme sports experts to discover which stunts are pure Hollywood hokum and which have at least one foot grounded in reality.

Some of our favourite examples include whether Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones really could have survived an atomic blast by hiding in a fridge in The Crystal Skull, whether Dwayne Johnson’s Will Sawyer in Skyscraper could really crawl and swing across a crane’s superstructure despite him being an amputee and if James Bond really could have kitesurfed out of the path of an oncoming tsunami in Die Another Day using just a parachute and a piece of scrap metal.

Other films covered include Mission Impossible: Fallout, Live Free, Transporter 2, Die Hard, Saw VII, and Face/Off, the last of which gets a particularly stinging assessment by a Harley Street surgeon for its depiction of plastic surgery: