Lights. Camera. And? What even constitutes an action film is a concept that never stops evolving, and one that’s palpably changed since the turn of Y2K. You could make the argument that Buster Keaton’s The General(1927), a non-stop chase achieving nearly perpetual motion, laid down a certain template for action blockbusters almost a century ago.
Long gone now are the days when Arnie, Sly, Chuck Norris or Dolph Lundgren would simply swing a shotgun at every revolting knucklehead that came their way.
The “action movie”, in that load-up-the-hot-dog 1980s sense, went through a long phase of being rarely green-lit in top-level production, even if the Die Hard franchise stubbornly persisted for as long as it could.
A revival, though, is well under way. Some films on this list have resurrected the flavour of that trigger-happy era in a winkingly retro fashion. Others have surged ahead with the times, delivering intensely harrowing suspense in space, or getting Actual Tom Cruise to run along the side of the world’s tallest skyscraper.
The most satisfying films in the genre have always had a glued-together coherence and know that thinking fast even in the downtime is crucial. These aren’t just the films with the best action in them; they’re those paragons of the genre which build excitement with context, character, and all the other tools available, adding up to a lot more than the sum of their whizziest parts.
Who’d have guessed that summer 2000′s hotrod caper flick, inauspiciously bolted together by Rob Cohen, would push up to 10 instalments? It has gotten too big for its boots, as the ever-expanding roster of guest stars shoves the running times up and the bombast through the roof. Justin Lin floored it nicely with 2009′s Fast & Furious, but it’s his next one that hit a series-high sweet spot, scoring as the pleasingly throwaway demolition derby it should have been all along. Plot is never the point, but theOcean’s 11 heist angle was a relief after all those street-racing interludes, The Rock arrived to clunk domes with Vin Diesel, and Lin socked over one preposterous highlight after another, peaking with a bank vault whipping around at crazy speeds through downtown Rio. Quoth co-star Tyrese, “This just went from Mission: Impossible to Mission In-freaking-SANITY!”
Gareth Edwards only had one feature to his name, the alien-quarantine drama Monsters (2010), when he was handed this US$160 million ($262m) production and gave Toho’s franchise the chance to atone for Godzilla (1998), a summer blockbuster as thuddingly lame as this one is bracing, weird and adventurous. Bryan Cranston’s dogged widower aside, the human elements are a little rote, but the movie dedicates its showmanship to unveiling us a snatch more of Godzilla each time we see him, while keeping a tingling unpredictability at play. The film paints with devastation, raining it down with a spooky gravity not in Roland Emmerich’s playbook; San Francisco is reconfigured as Dante’s Inferno and Edwards spelunks into it with bold, painterly strokes, like the stunning, Ligeti-scored military skydive midway, not to mention the rending screech of a giant parasite whose eggs have been fried. (Read the Herald’s Godzilla review here.)
18. X2: X-Men United (Bryan Singer, 2003)
Substitute your own superheroes, by all means – many will object to anything other than an Avengers, a Guardians of the Galaxyor one of theSpider-Man films getting a leg up above the rest. But the second and best X-Men film – with the assembled mutants staving off genocide – is a repeatable and cracking ride, justifying Bryan Singer’s whole approach to their mythos and advancing wholesale on his first one. The opening White House raid with Nightcrawler is a dazzling curtain-raiser, but the film goes on to develop real soul in its relationships, too, managing to weave a distinctly satirical intelligence into its script long before Joss Whedon was commanding $492m budgets. “Have you ever tried... not being a mutant?”, from mother to son, is a banner line, if you like your whiz-bang effects showcased wittily against a biting allegorical backdrop. (Read the Herald’sX2: X-Men United review here.)
17. Crank (Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor, 2006)
Don’t get me started on Crank: High Voltage (2009), which allowed the scuzzy exploitation appeal of this singular Jason Statham vehicle to fling itself way over the borderline into reprehensible toxicity. Here, it worked a treat, introducing us to a deeply cherishable low-budget/high-concept scenario in which Statham was essentially playing the bus from Speed. LA-based hitman Chev Chelios is much like Statham’s usual Transporter guy, except he’s been poisoned by Chinese mafia, and if his body stops pumping adrenaline for a second, he’ll die. The whole idea is a gauntlet thrown down to the directors (and editor) to keep things moving maniacally forward, with whatever stimulants – drugs, smashing cars through malls, public sex – Chev can get his hands on. It’s an almost guerrilla exercise in low-down, jolting nihilism, with an ending that goes all the way.
Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible 4.
There aren’t many standalone set pieces on this list which top that dangling lab descent in Mission: Impossible (1996), thanks to Brian De Palma’s exquisite choreography and that lone bead of Cruisean sweat-threatening catastrophe. But the plot was a confused mess. This fourth outing begins with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt framed for bombing the Kremlin: overall, it’s easily the best-organised film of the series, finding new ways to imperil its leading man – how about we chuck him off the Burj Khalifa this time? – and to whisk him and the IMF crew through a maze of intrigue we don’t get lost in. Much of the credit goes to Brad Bird’s snappy rhythms and gift for making hide-and-seek childishly exciting again. It may not exactly feel like the world’s at stake, but we get a Sneakers-esque esprit de corps that refreshed the whole brand. (Read the Herald’s Mission: Impossible 4 – Ghost Protocol review here.)
The first Extraction (2020) was a mercenary rescue thriller with a 12-minute midway highlight – a much-hyped “oner”, as the industry likes to call these fluid, 1917-style set pieces pretending to be a single shot. Extraction 2 exceeds that peak and sensibly elongates it for as long as possible. It boasts more exploding helicopters than anything in memory – and definitely the most deaths using items of gym equipment. It must also mark the first, though hopefully not the last, film in which a businesslike Chris Hemsworth batters thugs out of his way with a fist that’s literally on fire. The film’s commitment to dethroning Chuck Norris as cinema’s elite-commando king works like gangbusters, whether disguising the joins or opting not to. Sam Hargrave is aware that you can still be a man and cut to a reverse shot once in a while.
14. The Raid (Gareth Evans, 2011)
And now with less subtlety still. Gareth Evans blew genre fans away with this pounding, proficient and bloody showdown inside a derelict Jakarta apartment block, pitting drug dealers against an out-of-their-depth SWAT team. Some would gun for this film’s sequel instead, an astonishingly violent re-up which turned death by a thousand blows into an art form, and climaxes with one of the most gruelling fight scenes ever filmed. But this one – despite its over-the-top score and disinterest in character development – is the leaner and more disciplined achievement. The hero of both, Rama, is Iko Uwais, a practitioner of the school of Indonesian martial arts called “silat”, which he flexes with wild stamina in sequences for which the word “awesome” might have been invented. (Read the Herald’s The Raid review here.)
13. John Wick: Chapter 4 (Chad Stahelski, 2023)
The two bestJohn Wicks by miles are this one and the first, which fans of the leaner, meaner option (see The Raid, directly above) are welcome to prefer. That film reanimated the action-hero credentials of Keanu Reeves, who took down an entire network of Russian gangsters for their misuse of his pet dog. By this point in the series, he’s on the run from just about everyone, and the running time – barely shy of three hours – is nakedly ludicrous. But it’s also one long joke, as parodic as any Verdi opera might be with nunchaku fights for arias. Twice near the end – twice! – Reeves’ woebegone hitman must climb all 222 steps to the Sacre-Coeur, dispatching nearly as many foes, with a sunrise duel awaiting at the top. Even at practically Kubrickian length, the lockstep slaughter barely gives you pause for breath. It’s a barrage, and a blast.
Thai martial artist Tony Jaa had spent 14 years as a stuntman – he helped out on 1997′s Mortal Kombat: Annihilation – before this launchpad feature gained him international fame. He’s mind-bogglingly acrobatic in it as a villager being chased around Bangkok by drug dealers, and rather sympathetic for someone almost never shown smiling. The whole film is built, Bruce Lee-style, around his talents, which are prodigious enough that no wires, computer effects or stunt doubles were deployed: it’s all him. Jaa got off lightly during the shoot with an injured ligament, sprained ankle and burns to the face when his clothes caught fire. Following giddily behind him, this breathless Muay Thai beat-em-up knows how to punctuate the melees with comic relief – take the wonderful moment when a jumping Jaa gets hands and legs through a barbed-wire hoop, whereupon the goon behind him runs headfirst into a bucket. (Read the Herald’s Ong Bak review here.)
11. Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014)
Live. Die. Repeat. We’re all agreed this should have been the title all along, but when a film’s main mistake is just a nervous failure of marketing, something’s certainly gone right. If you think Bill Murray had it rough in Groundhog Day, try what Tom Cruise is up against, as a cowardly PR officer during a full-scale alien invasion, who finds himself stuck in a time loop, being fragged relentlessly and rebooted each time to the day before his own death. Essentially it’s like watching your friend play a state-of-the-art console shooter in which Cruise has unlimited lives and isn’t too happy about it. Observe and laugh – it’s hard not to – as he gets ripped repeatedly to pieces by tentacled slimies, and gradually hatches a survival plan, with the assistance of Emily Blunt as a decorated war hero. (Read the Herald’s Edge of Tomorrow review here.)
Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in the 1959 Hitchcock classic North by Northwest.
10. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
This is the closest Alfred Hitchcock ever came to a pure action picture: it certainly has the most headlong plot and covers the most ground, pinging us (and Cary Grant’s bewildered ad exec Roger Thornhill) from New York’s United Nations building to a Chicago auction house to the very top of Mount Rushmore – never forgetting the pit stop in the middle of nowhere, when Grant is inexplicably strafed by a crop-duster. The most breakneck element isn’t the editing, but the giddy swerves of Ernest Lehman’s splendid script in sending us around the houses. There are enough chases, fisticuffs and clambering sprees over scenic locations to make it oddly perfect as a prototype for a James Bond film, complete with a devilishly smooth baddie in James Mason, and Eva Marie Saint’s icily beautiful double agent. (Read the Herald’s North By Northwest review here.)
9. Face/Off (John Woo, 1997)
John Woo had been turning shootouts into ballet since his triad crime flick A Better Tomorrow (1986) and the escalating mayhem of its follow-ups, especially The Killer (1989), Bullet in the Head (1990), Hard Boiled (1992) and his ripely absurd Hollywood debut, the Van Damme vehicle Hard Target (1993). The apex of his magnificently overblown style – a career peak he’s never come close to since – was the meeting and melding of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage as lethal antagonists who literally swap faces. The film was not only nirvana for fans of both actors in their 1990s pomp, but a berserk symphony of gunplay, with Woo’s trademark doves fluttering in slow motion while the plot scoffs at our incomprehension. Woo’s whole approach cleaves to a total certainty that there’s no such thing as “too much”.
8. Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013)
Quibble away at some of the maudlin dead-daughter stuff, or the way it uses George Clooney to mansplain space to its weirdly underqualified heroine. But don’t try to deny that Gravity is a film of phenomenal tactile wizardry, which thrusts us into situations of such physically credible deep-space jeopardy that the viewer, let alone Sandra Bullock’s Ryan Stone, barely knows how to cling on. The film’s a series of knock-on effects in which every collision feels calibrated to a tee, caught with hair-raising precision by the effects team and Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera. The line between life and death, on which every true action film has to wobble as often as possible, rarely feels more precarious than when Bullock is clutching for a lifeline amid the tatters of space flotsam unravelling around her. (Read the Herald’s Gravity review here.)
Uma Thurman’s Bride has one epic score to settle, across two films, originally intended as one. We all knew how good Quentin Tarantino was at aping forms, reviving pulp, resurrecting careers... but perhaps not how dexterously he could hybridise the iconography of kung fu, grindhouse and the spaghetti western into a genre-splicing “rampage of revenge” that burst the banks of a single feature. Kill Bill is Tarantino indulging himself and an invitation to relish that; it may fall short of its grandiose story ambitions, but it kicks some unforgettably prolific derrière en route. Stuffed with nods to a panoply of action flicks past – the Bride’s yellow costume is the one Bruce Lee wore in his final film, Game of Death – it mounts the combat with orgiastic flair, adding up, at the very least, to the most show-offy demo of cinéaste virtuosity you could demand. A Game of Death, indeed. (Read the Herald’s Kill Bill review here.)
Somewhere in the unusual hinterland between Oscar-courting prestige art film and delirious blade-swishing extravaganza, Ang Lee managed to anchor this film, a whopping global hit which ushered Western viewers very consciously into the scenic glories of its Qing dynasty. Without it, Zhang Yimou’s subsequent Hero (2002) andHouse of Flying Daggers (2004) probably wouldn’t have charged into the fray either. It remains a rare and delicate balancing act of a picture, as gossamer in its manoeuvres as those famous stunt-wire sequences – courtesy of choreographer extraordinaire Yuen Woo-ping – which seem to hoist the characters magically up into the forest canopies. This is the action film distilled to its purest, most romantic essence – a series of balletic dances at swordpoint, with poison at the tip representing the corruption and betrayal of the warrior life. (Read the Herald’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon review here.)
5. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)
Out of their love of Saturday morning serials from the 1930s and 1940s, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg teamed up to bring us some dazzlingly spirited entertainment, hatching a whip-cracking matinee hero for the ages. For Spielberg, it was always “a James Bond film without the hardware” – so it starts just like one, in medias res, before Harrison Ford’s Indy switches missions to outfox an evil posse of greedy, plundering Nazis with dreams of absolute power. In action terms, the technique is pure cheek. Spielberg’s editor, Michael Kahn, pushes his luck shamelessly – the door we see dropping rapidly shut, that somehow, in every cutback, has never quite reached the bottom before Indy rolls to safety under it? These stretches in temporal logic heighten the fun by openly teasing us, like many a cliffhanger gambit before them.
Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road.
4. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)
There may be those who confess themselves unthrilled, even unimpressed byMad Max: Fury Road – like those who might be able to scoff a whole Carolina Reaper, the world’s strongest chilli pepper, and respond with nothing more than an underwhelmed shrug. It must be a matter of biology. For the rest of us, this whole film was like a sustained explosion booting gobsmacked audiences out of their seats. It was also perhaps the most exhilarating reminder of what practical filmmaking can accomplish in this genre since Aliens. The fact that George Miller, his cast and crew shot so much of it the old-fashioned way, using over 150 stunt performers in the Namib desert, surely generated a significant proportion of its riveting electric charge. But its sheer eccentricity, its gonzo outlaw attitude, are products of a sensibility for which the only true word – much misused these days in the rush for marketing shorthand – is visionary. (Read the Herald’s Mad Max: Fury Road review here.)
When Paul Greengrass took theBournereins over, making Matt Damon’s amnesiac assassin dig back further into his forgotten past, he turbo-charged the pace of the contemporary action thriller and made it connect in a new way with the world it wanted to be set in. This wasn’t dumb or purely headlong speed, but a kind of intelligent velocity – in its whipcrack editing it was only as fast as its hero’s reflexes, after all. Many struggled to keep pace. But if you threw yourself into the film the way Greengrass intended, the sense of acceleration felt like a chemical upgrade to the synapses: the whirl of detail, sound and ever-present threat ushered in a new age for verité suspense. Bond copied it. Documentaries copied it. Greengrass, in time, started to copy himself. But this is the one: a deep lunge into the Bourne psyche, crackling like thunder with its perpetual aura of overcast moral conscience. (Read the Herald’s The Bourne Supremacy review here.)
Images in action cinema don’t come much more giddily iconic than the sight of Bruce Willis in a grimy white vest jumping off a skyscraper, with only a fire hose as his lifeline, as the only holdout against a gang of thieves posing as terrorists. But Die Hard also proves that great action movies need to be more than the sum of their set pieces, wonderful as these are. You need the inaction to work just as tensely and well. John McTiernan’s film is richly satisfying scene by scene, line by line, performance by performance; the balancing of stark jeopardy and sidelong comedy in its tone is everything. Take away any single element – the Christmas setting; an Oscar-worthy Alan Rickman; the entire supporting cast – and it isn’t as great. It’s been sequelled, pastiched and copied to death by this point, but nothing touches the first and best.
Sigourney Weaver on the set of the film Aliens, directed by James Cameron. Photo / Getty Images
1. Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)
Nothing says “exponential” better than tacking an S onto the end of an already near-perfect science fiction classic and juicing the established lore for every last drop of extra acid. Dispatching a unit of wise-cracking Marines on a “bug-hunt” to an overrun mining colony, Aliens could go overboard and never does, because James Cameron came at it with such a precise grasp of all the conceits he wanted to bolt together, delivering the one screenplay of his career that is honestly unimprovable.
It escalates so brilliantly, laying out all the pieces on the board, inspecting their arsenals and picking off pawns with ruthless flair as the swarming enemy finds their foxhole. Come the endgame, we’re dealing with the greatest queen-off in film history, between the mother-bitch alien and Sigourney Weaver, our all-time-great action hero of any gender, who sweats her way to that accolade, earning every stripe. Make the mistake of messing with Ellen Ripley, and she’ll sternly incinerate your babies. It’s as simple as that.
