There's nothing like a crop of summer movies to meet your quota of explosions after a particularly dry Oscar season, but what of this year, when the percussion-heavy The Hurt Locker took Best Picture? It's time for Movieline's annual dissection of the best explosions as seen in this year's summer movie trailers, and if these flicks hope to outdo Hurt Locker, they've got a lot of ground to make up. Here are 6 of the most explosive contenders:
Kick-Ass
Total Explosions: A measly 2, as this superhero spoof is more concerned with Hit Girl's knife-throwing than any big blasts.
Featured Explosion: Both of this trailer's barely glimpsed fireballs take place behind closed doors, but in the bigger explosion, at least two of the heroes have the decency to blow up a whole house. (You can tell they're amateurs, though -- a professional superhero would know to calmly stride away from the explosion instead of running.)
Iron Man 2
Total Explosions: Only 4. Look, there's only so much room for explosions when you've got to service the roughly 8,000 movie stars that Marvel has crammed into this sequel.
Featured Explosion: Still, that whole "calmly striding away from an explosion" thing? Iron Man 2's got Mickey Rourke doing it in bad-ass silhouette.
MacGruber
Total Explosions: 4. Yup, it tied Iron Man 2.
Featured Explosion: Still, the trailer tries to give the impression of many more explosions by milking alternate takes from a sequence where Will Forte, Kristen Wiig, and Ryan Phillippe are thrown into the air from the concussive blast of a fireball. When you're a $10 million production, you've got to cut costs somewhere.
Knight & Day
Total Explosions: June's got two movies with near-identical premises: Killers, where Katherine Heigl finds out that man-of-her-dreams Ashton Kutcher is actually a secret agent (then screams a lot), and Knight & Day, which is the same thing with Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise. One advantage the latter has? Two explosions, as opposed to the single one featured in the trailer for Killers.
Featured Explosion: Diaz and Cruise escape from a hijacked plane, then watch it explode in a nearby cornfield. Yeah, you're not catching up to this one as an in-flight movie anytime soon.
The A-Team
Total Explosions: 6! Congratulations, A-Team. You win this round.
Featured Explosion: The A-Team's plane blows up, but they survive the blast inside a fortified tank (from which Bradley Cooper begins firing at even more planes, even as they're falling from sky). In the demolition derby that is ranking summer movie explosions, there's no such thing as too over-the-top.
The Losers
Total Explosions: 4. For a B-version of The A-Team, that sounds about right.
Featured Explosion: Zoe Saldana shoots the first of what will be several rocket launchers that factor into the trailer, and the massive explosion she causes is followed by an appreciative "She's volatile!" from Chris Evans. Eywa would not be pleased.