The 10 Most Vicious Beatings In Movies

This weekend, girls who bow to pin-ups of Ryan Gosling and dudes who are anticipating a Fast & Furious knockoff are in for one hell of an awakening. Unlike the film being sold in its glossy and accessible-looking commercials, Drive (in theaters Friday) is, in fact, an artistically daring, unconventionally designed spectacle, pulsating with a soundtrack of modern-day '80s pop music, airtight pacing, and sporadic outbursts of extreme violence that might upset snooty critics if the scenes weren’t so visually stunning.

The credit for that goes to director Nicolas Winding Refn, the esteemed Danish filmmaker behind non-mainstream standouts like the crime thriller Pusher (1996), the maniacal biopic Bronson (2008), and the expressionistic and brutal Viking flick Valhalla Rising (2009).

With Drive, the story of an enigmatic getaway driver (Gosling) who falls in love and gets entangled in a heist gone bad, Refn is making his Hollywood debut, and we couldn’t be happier. Not enough big studio movies feature scenes in which a guy gets his head kicked to mush, especially when the kicker is an A-list star such as Gosling. Set in an elevator, the sequence in question has already earned a growing bit of infamy amongst festival attendees and critics; the rep should only grow bigger once Drive opens later this week.

The question is, though, how does the gruesome beatdown in Refn’s film stack up against cinema’s nearly unwatchable (in a good way) ass-kickings? Quite high, actually. To relive every cracked skull and bruise, check out the competition with our countdown of The 10 Most Vicious Beatings In Movies. Ice packs, stretchers, and body bags not included.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

Ass-kicker: Tommy DeVito and Jimmy Conway
Victim: Billy Batts

When you’re a little kid, being a shoeshine boy is an honest living; give a few pairs of shoes that desired, glossy appearance, pocket the cash, and then go buy yourself a video game. But for temperamental gangster Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) in Martin Scorsese’s classic Goodfellas, his childhood days of cleaning older men’s kicks is a sore subject—he’s now a big-time mobster, so reminders about his less-than-minimum-wage past won’t go unpunished.

Fresh out of jail, Gambino crime family member Billy Batts (Frank Vincent), a made man, hits up the local bar for a few celebratory drinks with his pals, the same drinking hole where Tommy and his associates Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) are knocking a few stiff beverages back. Small talk leads an argument between Tommy and Batts, which concludes with Batts spitting on a peace treaty with, “Go get your fuckin’ shinebox!”

Though he doesn’t retrieve his old work kit, Tommy does kick the ever-living shit out of Billy Boy, with Jimmy joining in for a few foot stomps himself. At least they won’t have to look far for someone who knows how to properly wipe the blood off of their shoes.

Ass-kicker: Virgil
Victim: Alabama Whitman

In director Tony Scott’s manic crime thriller True Romance, chivalry is most certainly dead. To be fair, though, we can’t imagine that any guy whose job is to beat the shit out of people for a powerful gangster would adhere to a gentleman’s code of conduct. Clearly, Virgil, James Gandolfini’s hulking character in the Quentin Tarantino-written, Tony Scott-directed crime flick True Romance isn’t concerned with honoring a lady’s gender rights. Just watch how savagely he cold-cocks Patricia Arquette’s character, Alabama, in the face and tosses her around the motel room like a weightless doll.

Alabama is on the lam with Clarence (Christian Slater), who stole a batch of drugs from crime boss Vincenzo Coccotti (Christopher Walken); Virgil catches Alabama by her lonesome and tries to knock the cocaine’s whereabouts out of her with inhumane fisticuffs. And, for a minute, she’s pounded into a bloody mess, defiantly laughing and flipping Virgil the middle finger as he continues to drive knuckles into her forehead.

Virgil, being a “nice guy,” skips an opportunity to finish Alabama, a dumb move that leads to the guy getting plunked over the head with a toilet bowl lid, set on fire, and stabbed to death with a corkscrew. Take that as a lesson, fellas: Never hit women, especially not women who can take more punches than a prize fighter.

Ass-kicker: Sonny Corleone
Victim: Carlo Rizzi

Hitting your fiancée is an act that should never be condoned, but doing so when your future wife is the daughter of a heavyweight Mafia boss Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), who also has a loose cannon for a son (Sonny Corleone, played by James Caan)? That’s suicide. Yet that’s exactly what Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo), the lover of Connie Corleone (Talia Shire), does, bruising Connie’s face so badly that Sonny can’t help but notice.

He also can’t help but beat the piss out of Carlo in public, on a hot day in front of an eager crowd of grown-ups and kids. Left hooks, upper-cuts, right hooks, one-two punch combos—Sonny strikes with all of the above, as well as a few wallops with a garbage lid for good measure. Just to make sure Carlo gets the point, of course.

Ass-kicker: Donnie “The Bear Jew” Donowitz
Victim: A proud Nazi sergeant

The mind of writer-director Quentin Tarantino is one fucked-up place, and we can’t get enough of its creations. Arguably, 2009’s Inglourious Basterds is the filmmaker’s most accomplished work, though many would debate that Pulp Fiction is superior. It’s hard to deny Basterds excessive amounts of respect, though, when the film is chockfull of masterful sequences, scenes pulsating with engaging dialogue and sudden outbursts of violence.

The nucleus of the flick revolves around the Basterds, a renegade troop of Nazi-hunters led by Southern brute Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt); as per their ritual, the Basterds’ most physically imposing member, Donnie “The Bear Jew” Donowitz (Eli Roth, who, yes, is miscast), beats Nazis’ heads in with his trusty baseball bat, which bears—no pun intended—the signatures of relatives from his native Boston who’ve lost Jewish family members in the war.

Not one to rely upon secondhand accounts, Tarantino gives the audience a hard look at Donnie’s handiwork with a scene in which he impersonates Teddy “Fuckin’” Williams all over a Nazi sergeant’s dome, much to the delight of his fellow Basterds. By the sounds of their cheers and joyous howls, you’d think the scene was set in Fenway Park.

Ass-kicker: Captain Vidal
Victim: Innocent, young anti-fascist rebel

Guillermo del Toro’s tremendous fantasy flick Pan’s Labyrinth is, oddly enough, thought of as a kiddie movie in some parts. Maybe that’s due to the film’s young protagonist, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a quiet girl with a wild imagination and tyrannical new stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), but, after one viewing, Pan’s Labyrinth is effortlessly seen as an adult pic of the highest order. The mythical creatures are nightmarish, namely a monster with eyeballs on the palms of his large hands, and Captain Vidal’s methods of punishing anti-fascists brave enough to challenge his rule are hard-R.

Early into del Toro’s best film to date, Vidal makes an example of a young rebel, using a bottle to pound the guy’s nose into a hollowed-out crater, with the victim’s father looking on helplessly (and, thanks to the above YouTube clip, us re-watching in heartless slow-motion). Still thinking about showing Pan’s Labyrinth to adolescent bed-wetters anytime soon?

Ass-kicker: The Driver
Victim: Lackey sent by crime boss Bernie Rose

Don’t be lulled into a sense of romantic bliss by the above clip; being that Drive isn’t even in theaters yet, the entire scene isn’t available for clickable public consumption, but, trust us, the scene’s payoff is an explosion of ferocious violence. It starts off rather sweetly, though. Throughout the film, Ryan Gosling’s nameless character, simply known as The Driver, develops a loving bond with his pixie-cute neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and their passionate smooch in the elevator is the culmination of endless, silent flirtations.

But keep an eye on the dude who’s cock-blocking Gosling from getting some love in an elevator, a la Aerosmith. He’s a hit-man sent to kill The Driver, and Sir Drive knows it—his lip-lock with Irene is actually a goodbye kiss, one last tender exchange before The Driver goes on a war-path against criminal mastermind Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks). Once their kiss is done, Refn switches the tone without even flinching; Gosling rams the guy’s head into the wall, flings him to the ground, and stomps his head into a pile of skin chunks and exposed brain matter. Kiss of death, anyone?

Ass-kicker: Al Capone
Victim: Unsuspecting dinner party guest

Gangster movies have been mighty kind to the Louisville Slugger corporation. Guns might be the most easily identifiable weapon-of-choice for mobsters and violent criminals, but the baseball bat has always been the heavily employed second option. Fittingly, America’s pastime is one of Al Capone’s (Robert De Niro) “enthusiasms,” a lifelong passion of his that the legendary gangster shares with a table full of tuxedo-clad criminals and deviants.

It’s one thing to simply deliver a monologue that explains how baseball is a team sport, not a one-man show for individual statistics, and it’s another to demonstrate how to effectively swing down on a low pitch by clubbing one of your guest’s skulls into the table. What does any good MLB captain know? The job is all about leading by example. Also, in Capone’s case, the fear of barbarism.

Ass-kicker: Pissed-off Mafia goons who’ve turned on their boss, Nicky Santoro
Victim: Nicky Santoro and his brother, Dominick

In Martin Scorsese’s brilliant Casino, volatile mob enforcer Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) does everything in his power to irk the O.G. Mafia heads, including banging powerful member Sam Rothstein’s (Robert De Niro) woman. So it’s inevitable that Nicky receives his comeuppance by the film’s end; only, in Casino, it’s not your run-of-the-mill, gangster pic tactic of a gunshot to the back of the head.

At the command of the mob’s Midwest bosses, Nicky’s crew drives him and his brother, Dominick, out into an isolated cornfield for some privacy, and, unfortunately for the Santoro boys, some batting practice. First up is Dominick, who’s beaten to a gory pulp with a metal baseball bat as Nicky is forced to watch in agony; then, it’s Nicky’s turn to have his forehead split open like a piñata. And, for one last insult, the thugs roll his lifeless, tighty-whitey-wearing body into a ditch, landing alongside his equally dead brother, and pour dirt over the fresh corpses. For our money, it’s the most brutal “whack” in mob movie history.

Ass-kicker: White supremacist Derek Vinyard
Victim: Unnamed black guy who’s trying to steal Derek’s father’s truck

There’s only two ways a person can stare at the above scene from American History X without either shutting one’s eyes or covering one’s eyes with his or hands: They’re either blind or their eye-lids are propped open Clockwork Orange style. Otherwise, they’re one desensitized son of a bitch.

Edward Norton is a force of nature in the film, playing a neo-Nazi skinhead who’s the worst kind of influence on his younger brother, Danny (Edward Furlong). Lucky little bros get to watch their older male siblings kick it to girls, but not Danny; his role model forces a black kid, who’s trying to truck-jack his daddy’s whip, to lie on his stomach and bite down on the curb. We’ll let you witness the rest for yourself, but just know that it involves a human skull getting cracked in half like a cashew. Good luck chewing for the rest of the day.

Ass-kicker: Marcus
Victim: Random, misidentified club-goer

There really was no contest here, especially considering that this list’s inspiration, the head-bashing elevator scene in Drive was directly influenced by French writer-director Gaspar Noé’s hard-to-watch skull crushing by way of fire extinguisher in the notoriously graphic 2002 film Irreversible. Nicolas Winding Refn, director of Drive called Noé for advice on how to properly stage the ultimate head-smash on film, though, as Refn himself admits, Ryan Gosling’s act is no match for Irreversible’s non-rape calling card.

Told backwards, Irreversible follows the before and after of a horrific rape; as the film begins, we’re at the end of the fiasco, with the victim’s boyfriend (Vincent Cassel) and guy pal, Marcus (Albert Dupontel), seeking out the rapist inside a gay nightclub called La Rectum (Hey, Noé’s never been cited for subtlety). With the camera swirling around, and the dizzying score burrowing holes into the viewer’s ear, the guys forcefully question everyone in sight before finding whom they think is La Tenia, the pimp responsible for the sexual assault.

They find the wrong man, however, though dude still manages to break the boyfriend’s arm and threaten to butt-plug him; that is, until the friend grabs the nearest fire extinguisher and proceeds to turn the supposed Tenia’s head into bloody oatmeal. Each strike of the extinguisher makes a loud, crunching sound; Noé’s camera gets up close and personal with the mangled face. And the viewer is dared to keep watching. Like we said, this shit was no contest.