Best Action Movies

1. Die Hard (1988)

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia

Best quote: “Now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho.”

The killer scene: Alan Rickman’s final tumble: iconic, nostalgic, slightly-shoddy-effects–based glory.

Bruce cannon

So here it is. The No. 1 spot, the top of the skyscraper. The perfect action movie. But does Die Hard really fit the bill? It doesn’t have anything to say about the state of the world. It doesn’t offer much insight into the human condition (though the image of Bruce Willis walking on broken glass could be taken as a poignant metaphor for life’s little brutalities). It isn’t exactly what pseuds would call High Art.

All of which is precisely the point. If cinema is the perfect escapist medium—and until someone invents a virtual-reality device that works, it will be—then action movies are its purest expression, the best way we know of for humanity to shake itself loose from the trappings of humdrum reality and take to the ether. We don’t want to see ourselves reflected, we don’t want understanding or honesty or intellectual insight. We want speed and intensity, wit and wisecracks, cartoon violence and things going boom. We want Die Hard.

The story is so ingenious, it’s incredible no one had thought of it before: A group of terrorists invades a state-of-the-art skyscraper and takes the inhabitants hostage. Their only hope is a man locked in with them, yet free to roam, a lone hero who must pick off the bad guys one by one, arcade-game–style, until he reaches the Big Boss. Admittedly, there are precedents—Assault on Precinct 13 must have been an on-set favorite—but no one had told this tale with such streamlined precision before. It’s little accident that, in the wake of the film’s success, clones sprouted up like toadstools almost overnight, from Die Hard on a boat (Under Siege) to Die Hard on a bus (Speed) and this year’s Die Hard on a musical instrument (Grand Piano).

That said, even the highest of concepts will only work if all the elements are right, and Die Hard is a textbook case of everything falling into place. John McTiernan’s direction pulls no punches, and there are sequences here—like the oft-imitated, never-bettered swinging-through-a-window-on-a-firehose moment—that achieve something close to visual poetry. The script is crammed with humor and invention, and whoever came up with the idea of setting it at Christmas deserves a big medal. But of course, the blue-ribbon winner in all this has to be Bruce Willis, who crashed from nowhere (well, from TV’s Moonlighting) onto the world’s stage, thanks to a combination of antiheroic self-mockery, battered but unbowed machismo and one very grubby T-shirt. Yippie-ki-ay, indeed.—Tom Huddleston

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2. Aliens (1986)

Film

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton

Best quote: “Game over, man! Game over!”

The killer scene: Ripley straps into a Power Loader suit to destroy the alien queen.

Moms and ammo

When James Cameron stepped into Ridley Scott’s space-horror boots to direct the sequel to the brilliant Alien, he didn’t try to ape the sickening, paranoid, slow creep of the original. He just said “Screw that subtlety shit” and went big on explosions, big on aliens, and let the guns (and mech-robots) do the talking. Where before there was endless deep-space dread and grimness, now there was fully fledged big-screen action. Cameron was a relative newbie at the time, having previously only directed The Terminator, but he took to big-budget work with gusto.

Sigourney Weaver is pitted yet again against a vicious many-toothed foe, this time in an abandoned space colony, but now she’s surrounded by weapon-heavy Marines, hell-bent on kicking ass and taking no names. As in Alien, the plot centers around a male-dominated corporation’s obsession with developing bioweaponry, no matter what the human price may be. Yeah, it’s kind of a metaphor for the evils of big business, and sure, it’s an empowering fable about the strength of the female voice in a male world, but we all know what you’re here for: to watch Ripley stomp around in a huge mechanical suit and destroy some shockingly phallic alien bastards. And that’s awesome.—Eddy Frankel

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Seven Samurai (1954)

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3. Seven Samurai (1954)

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Seiji Miyaguchi

Best quote: “If we only defend, we lose the war.”

The killer scene: The villagers’ rain-lashed last stand against the rampaging bandits—the very definition of iconic

Playing the long game

If you’ve never seen a Kurosawa film and wonder why he’s held in such high regard, this all-time classic is all the evidence you need—not least because it inspired Hollywood’s much-loved, if slightly simplistic, remake, The Magnificent Seven. Running over 200 minutes, it’s also a textbook example of making action mean more, because we’re totally engrossed in the lives of the characters. We truly feel the fear and abject hunger of vulnerable farmers, so desperate to protect their new crop that they’re paying hired samurai with their last grains of rice. You also feel the desperation of the masterless ronin prepared to take the job, since at least it means bed and board for a while.

Kurosawa takes an hour to show us what’s at stake, and another hour showing how wise leader Takashi Shimura, volatile wanna-be samurai Toshiro Mifune and their cohorts plan to fend off their marauding foes. When the action does erupt, however, the ebb and flow of strategy is that much more absorbing, the casualties hitting hard, the payoff intense. Filmmaking of this breadth and depth takes courage, wisdom and the formal skills to put your ambitions on the screen. Utterly groundbreaking in its day, the kinetic energy with which Kurosawa’s mobile camera puts us in the midst of some hairy stunts and near-feral skirmishes has barely dated. Every action movie since owes him a debt for the hugely influential manner in which he distills space and movement into the enclosure of great cinema.—Trevor Johnston

4. The Wild Bunch (1969)

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Cast: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan

Best quote: “We’re after men. And I wish to God I was with them.”

The killer scene: One of the bunch sees his foxy former lover laughing in the arms of a fat-cat general—jealousy gets the better of him, and it’s a bloodbath.

Going out with a bang

It’s become customary to talk about Sam Peckinpah’s classic as the tombstone of the Western genre, the moment when Hollywood’s already-tired tradition of white-hat heroics was plunged irrevocably into nihilism, apocalypse and zero-sum catharsis. Then again, no other Western has proven as durably modern, or able to speak to a younger generation like this one. (Not for nothing, The Wild Bunch was comfortably the highest-ranked oater on our list.) It might be time for a rethink: The Wild Bunch is still very much with us, in every movie that gushes slo-mo rivers of blood in the name of brotherly principle, in every action film that lunges for timely political complexity amid the spent ammo casings and slung epitaphs.

The Vietnam War was raging when the movie was being made, and Peckinpah seized on those allegorical resonances, hoping to confront viewers with footage similar to what they were seeing on the nightly news. Call it a mark of his virtuosity (or naïveté) that the movie was met with a polarized response, some hailing it as a masterpiece, other pointing to it as a sign of a bankrupt art form. The Wild Bunch is breathtaking in its uncompromised grubbiness, the almighty dollar leading good men to their doom, and lesser men to a mercenary bounty. It echoes some of the director’s own struggles in Hollywood, but mainly stands as a testament to integrity: Go dark, go deep, and true action fans will follow you to the ruinous end.—Joshua Rothkopf

5. Police Story (1985)

Director: Jackie Chan

Cast: Jackie Chan, Brigitte Lin, Maggie Cheung

Best quote: “The success of the operation depended on careful planning.”

The killer scene: The climactic shopping-mall showdown sees Jackie taking a death-defying three-floor plunge down a lighting wire.

Good cop, mad cop

You have to go back to the silent-comedy era of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton to find the equivalent of Jackie Chan in his Hong Kong prime—a star who’d put life and limb at risk to get the shot he wanted. These days the phrase he does his own stunts implies relatively risk-free challenges, but Chan’s ’80s peak delivers a whole other level of insanity. Yes, that really is his gung-ho cop dangling by an umbrella off a moving double-decker bus in Police Story’s opening salvo, one slip away from a bone-breaking fall. (Moments later, the stuntmen tumbling from the top deck to the tarmac all ended up in hospital, lengthening a serious injury list that saw the star form a stunt-team association to pay their medical bills.)

By the time mainstream audiences encountered Chan in 1998’s Rush Hour, age and common sense had caught up with him, and he never quite matched the exuberant blend of comic knockabout thrills and heart-stopping spills from this landmark cop flick, where his character’s pledge to protect state witness Brigitte Lin endangers both of them. The star’s expertise in fight choreography also made him an assured action director, committed to registering the hurt and commitment the performers put in. If he shows his own climactic shopping-mall leap from three different angles, it’s not egotism—only making sure we believe he’d do something that batshit crazy. The after effects of electrocution, burned hands and damaged vertebrae have long dissipated (Jackie says), but the flying three-story fall has since become celluloid legend.—Trevor Johnston

6. Enter the Dragon (1973)

Director: Robert Clouse

Cast: Bruce Lee, Jim Kelly, John Saxon

Best quote: “Boards don’t hit back.”

The killer scene: Lee takes on an army.

Bruce Lee goes to grindhouse heaven

Bruce Lee’s fame is based on a mere four movies he made as an adult, and Enter the Dragon was the lightning strike that transformed him into an international box-office icon, one month after his death. A legendary movie, it really shouldn’t be: The production was a mess, director Robert Clouse was a hack, and the screenplay by and large sucked. But the performances turn a crap sandwich into fried gold. The project’s Hollywood pedigree allowed Lee to ditch all pretense of charming his hometown Hong Kong audience and play a savage superman who’s all oiled muscles and savage grace, coming alive only when he’s in motion.

Even the supporting actors are superstars: Jim Kelly supplies effortless cool as a take-no-shit competitor who won't tolerate racist cops, and John Saxon delivers his typical hangdog charm. Angela Mao, the Lady Whirlwind herself, delivers a short stunner of a set piece as Bruce’s sister, and 21-year-old Sammo Hung and his stunt squad (including a young Jackie Chan) are on fire. Shih Kien, with over 30 years of experience as a mandarin of menace, picks his teeth with the scenery as the evil one-handed Mr. Han, and the muscle-bound Bolo Yeung based his entire subsequent career on his performance as Han’s henchman. Full of underground dungeons and goofy gadgets, this is one of those rare cases when what should have been a B-list James Bond knock-off with an Asian cast wound up becoming one of the greatest action movies of all time.—Grady Hendrix

7. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)

Director: George Miller

Cast: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Vernon Wells

Best quote: “Greetings from Lord Humungus, the Warrior of the Wasteland!”

The killer scene: The first appearance of psychotic mutant Humungus and his band of gibbering drones—both hilarious and disturbing

Life’s a gas

It’s no accident that the car chase has become one of the foundation stones of popular cinema. Here is everything you could ever require from an action scene distilled into one easy package: speed, intensity, noise, competitiveness, swearing, gunfire, shiny surfaces and things blowing up. And no filmmaker has ever shot a pulse-pounding pedal-to-the-metal pursuit better than Australian legend George Miller, doing everything short of shoving the audience’s face into the fan belt to ensure that we can feel every bump in the road, every grind of the gears, every fender-bending slam.

The Road Warrior is without doubt Miller’s finest hour as a director, laying down the narrative ground rules in the first 20 minutes or so: Surly postapocalyptic drifter Max (Gibson) agrees to help a group of mullet-haired survivalists drag a truck filled with oil out of the Aussie desert, while a bunch of leather-clad loonies try to stop him. And when Miller pulls out the stops, no director on earth can match him: The closing chase, pitting Max’s V8 Special and accompanying Mack tanker against an army of souped-up dune buggies and rusted-out roadsters, is a symphony of destruction, an epic of excess, and arguably the finest automotive action sequence ever shot.—Tom Huddleston

8. Hard Boiled (1992)

Director: John Woo

Cast: Chow Yun Fat, Tony Chiu Wai Leung, Anthony Wong

Best quote: “You’re full of shit, you know that? There’s a toilet over there.”

The killer scene: A cop spits a toothpick faster than he shoots a bullet.

Not over easy

It’s just another day for Hong Kong policeman “Tequila” Yuen (Chow Yun Fat) and his partner, until the sting they’re overseeing at a teahouse goes very wrong. One of the lawmen lies dead. Tequila, meanwhile, blazes his way through the bad guys, putting a bloody end to one gangster with a gunshot to the face. That’s just the opening scene of John Woo’s vigorous rogue-cop thriller—one of his best bullet-riddled ballets. Eventually, an undercover agent, Alan (Tony Leung), emerges to give Tequila a run for his money, though in true Woo fashion, both men find they have similar stoic-macho codes and an identical goal: bring down the criminal syndicate led by ruthless mobster Johnny Wong (Anthony Wong).

Tequila’s love for jazz—he frequents a blues bar run, in a delightful bit of casting, by Woo himself—epitomizes this go-for-broke adventure, which moves between modes (moodily mournful one moment, fiercely kinetic the next) with the sublime confidence of a virtuoso playing at peak form. There’s a valedictory quality to the movie that seems especially poignant in retrospect, since this was the last film Woo made before he spent a decade-plus churning out Hollywood product of varying quality (see our No. 19). What a way to go out, though, especially in the astonishing climax in which Tequila and Alan infiltrate Johnny Wong’s arsenal…which just happens to be housed in a hospital filled to brimming with sick patients and newborn infants. By that point, even Hard Boiled seems too soft a title.—Keith Uhlich

9. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong

Best quote: “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

The killer scene: Sarah Connor's apocalyptic nightmare vision of L.A., as the city is blasted to ashes by a nuclear firestorm

A boy’s best friend is his cyborg

It’s interesting to note that, on our recent 100 Best Sci-fi Movies poll, James Cameron’s original Terminator placed in the top ten, with its sequel trailing behind at No. 16. Here, those positions are all but switched, but perhaps that’s as it should be. The Terminator is a perfect science-fiction movie, packed with ideas and invention, but thanks in large part to its tight budget, the action can feel a little constrained. The sequel suffered no such setbacks. By this point the most in-demand director in Hollywood, James Cameron was given a blank check to realize his most extreme destructive visions, and the result is a film that rockets from one incendiary set piece to the next, barely pausing for breath as burned-out trucks, exploding cop cars and crashed helicopters pile in its wake.

It’s also—with the arguable addition of Jurassic Park—the film that proved once and for all what computer-generated special effects were capable of. Admittedly, many of the most impressive effects were in-camera: The aforementioned helicopter crash is a triumph of practical ingenuity. But from the first appearance of the murderous, mercurial T-1000, a steely shape-shifter played to perfection by the blank-faced Robert Patrick, it was clear that something entirely new had been brought into the world. It’s possible to pick holes in the film—it’s sentimental in a way its predecessor wasn’t, and the employment of Arnie’s original Terminator as a comic sidekick can become grating—but as an action movie, this one’s hard to beat. And yet…—Tom Huddleston

10. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman

Best quote: “Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?”

The killer scene: Chasing a kidnapped Marion down Cairo’s alleys, Indy confronts a black-robed swordsman who clearly wants a little time. Our hero doesn’t have any.

Rolling with the punches

Are these not the most euphoric opening 12 minutes of any movie, forget the action ones? Steven Spielberg and conceptual guru George Lucas always tip their fedoras to the ’30s cliffhanger serials (movies that they were probably too young for, realistically). Rather, consider Raiders as a statement of ceaseless forward momentum, made by two impatient movie brats rewriting the rules of Hollywood. First, we see the dark Peruvian jungle, then the bullwhip, the golden idol, the boulder (the boulder, people), the blowgun-armed natives, the vine leap to the plane and finally, the supreme wink of a gag line, delivered by the pilot: “Come on, show a little backbone, will ya?” All in 12 minutes.

Action movies had never before been this supercharged, nor would they be, by virtually anyone else. It’s a perfect entertainment machine, effortlessly involving to teenage boys (fine, guilty as charged) or anyone looking for a pure hit of hotsy-totsy-Nazi escapism. When the dust settles on Spielberg’s career, many fans will point to his childlike sense of wonderment, supported by John Williams’s stirring orchestral scores and infused in the plots themselves. Raiders of the Lost Ark, meanwhile, just throws you in, with little time to think. (We’re hot on the trail of…the power of the Hebrew God?) It might be more of a masterpiece than any of Spielberg’s other triumphs, simply for unearthing the treasure of the chase, running down the magic for a perfect two hours and then, suggestively, hiding it in a dusty warehouse as if to say: Now it’s your turn. Go find it.—Joshua Rothkopf