It’s a bit tricky to pin down exactly where action films as we know them now started. The Great Escape in 1963? The Great Train Robbery 60 years before?
The pure action film – the oeuvres of Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, Segal, Norris, Lundgren and the like, which use the nuts and bolts of thrillers to launch their enormous stars into a series of even bigger explosions – only really got going in the West in the early Eighties, after Hollywood had had its eyes opened to the majesty of the martial arts films coming out of Hong Kong and Japan.
Dr No was an early pointer too: Hitchcock’s heroes tended to be resourceful and quick-witted, but the vogue for one who can think, blast or shag their way out of any tricky situation started with James Bond, and the Swiss-army-protagonist is still an action movie essential. There’s an odd circularity to how big-budget action films now exist mainly in the superhero film vortex, with protagonists who are the logical extreme of that improbably handy secret agent.
Certainly, we’ve not lost our appetite for watching people smash seven shades out of each other while searching for some McGuffin or other. Here are the best action films ever.
Mission: Impossible (1996)
As Tom Cruise limbers up for a seventh outing as Ethan Hunt, go back to the start and remember why the Mission: Impossible movies felt so strikingly different. It’s a spy thriller which outflanked Bond by making great play of how very post-millennium it looked and felt, while being as outrageously daft a confection as any of Roger Moore’s outings at times. And yet for all the aha-it-was-me-all-along shenanigans, the action sequences which would become the series’ calling card are present and correct, most of all in the nerve-twanging, sweat-dripping computer heist.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)
It defies belief that two venerable Hollywood franchises are still smacking the competition about when by rights they should be creaking over to the walk-in bath to soak their joints, but both Mission: Impossible and Tom Cruise probably peaked here. The stunts are genuinely staggering, and while absolutely everyone’s pointed out that Cruise did the HALO jump for real – he jumped more than 100 times from 25,000 feet to get the shots – it still feels incredible every time you see it. There’s a terrorist syndicate on the loose, and it’s up to Ethan Hunt’s Mystery Machine gang to sort them out. Explosions, bust-ups and Henry Cavill’s moustache ensue. Unbeatable.
The Rock (1996)
Michael Bay wasn’t always the guy who made the world’s loudest films. Before Pearl Harbor and Transformers, there was The Rock. When a gang of heavily armed, heavily piss-ed off and heavily disillusioned Marines decide to take the island of Alcatraz hostage along with 81 tourists, there’s only one guy who can get the FBI into the place they need to be: the only guy who managed to break out, Sean Connery’s SAS Captain John Mason. It all goes horribly wrong, and Mason is left with just Nicolas Cage’s Dr Stanley Goodspeed for back-up. It’s pretty much a Logan for Connery’s Bond, but much bigger, much dumber, and much more fun.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Each of us carries within us one cinematic grievance which we shall nurse until the day we drop. Some are still angry about Elvis not getting the chance to redeem himself with the Seventies A Star is Born remake. Others fume about Forrest Gump beating Pulp Fiction to the Best Picture Oscar in 1994. I am still not over the fact that Master and Commander never turned into the seafaring series it so obviously should have been.
All we’re left with is a single, beautifully made adventure with dashing Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe, who will cuss you on Twitter if you slag off Master and Commander). He’s commanding the HMS Surprise, on the hunt for a supernaturally fast French ship called the Acheron which has been attacking British whalers. It’s all gorgeously put together, and you’re unlikely to see more realistic and thrilling sea battles on film, but it’s the friendship between Lucky Jack and his intellectual ship’s doctor Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany) that’s the heart of it though. Lovely soundtrack too.
Gantz: O (2016)
Tokyo’s falling. Yokohama too. To what, neither the Japanese government nor the actual viewer of animated action-horror Gantz: O can be sure as all manner of weird creatures overrun the cities (zombie geisha, severed rolling heads, tiny elderly men that morph into a giant sphere of tits, so on and so forth). And it’s this bizarreness that makes Gantz: O such a good watch, as recently dead schoolkids are revived and thrown into a game to battle the never-ending horde of monsters. Think video game mechanics in a survival horror with a big side of sci-fi and you’re still nowhere near to the actual madness of this anime adaptation.
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Despite a depressing Westernisation of its source material – Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s nihilistic 2004 novel All You Need Is Kill – Edge of Tomorrow is a fine example of a blockbuster done right. With the ever bankable Tom Cruise starring as a military pen pusher deployed to the frontline against an alien invasion, his inevitable gutting is not the end for this absolute mess of an army major. On the contrary, a cataclysmic event forces him to relive every single day on a loop until the moment of death, causing him to seek out a fellow time jumper in Emily Blunt’s steely war hero Rita as they try to break the cycle and save Earth. A time and space saga that’s not nearly as confusing as Tenet, but just as enjoyable thanks to solid set pieces and a creature design that’s genuinely quite chilling.
The Running Man (1987)
Loosely based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, The Running Man is peak Eighties action movie that’s as grisly as it is high camp. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as a man wrongly convicted of a massacre in a starving, dystopian future, and as a result, is forced into a deadly televised game (and a lycra jumpsuit) to do battle against armed mercenaries. The grand prize? A pardon! Expect pyrotechnics, silly one liners and a retrofuturist aesthetic that’s come cool once more.
The Dark Knight (2008)
The second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy has a habit of overshadowing the other two, mostly thanks to the scene stealing performance of Heath Ledger as Joker, a role whose legacy is still dominating cinema now. It’s also, for our money, the best of the three in terms of the action on display, opening with a thrilling bank robbery scene, closing with a heart-in-mouth shootout, and offering plenty of exploding hospitals and imploding football stadiums along the way. The Dark Knight is a thinking man’s action film, with even the absence of an explosion heightening the tension at one point, as in the scene where two ferries full of passengers refuse to blow the other up to save themselves, proving Gotham might have a soul after all.
Tenet (2020)
Yes, another Nolan, but it’s hard to deny the director’s action films are event blockbusters, and despite the maze of confusion that its use of time inversion, time travel and a reverse-engineered ending caused, Tenet is worth watching for the action sequences alone. In addition to the mind-melting scene of Robert Pattinson and John David Washington fighting each other seemingly playing in reverse – moves they learned, not a scene that was done in post-production – there is a Bond-esque building bungee that kicks off proceedings, as well as a gripping car chase scene which we witness from both the past and the future.
Blood Diamond (2006)
During Leo DiCaprio’s interesting middle period, in between Dishy Curtains Heartthrob Leo and Please May I Have A Crumb Of An Oscar Leo, was Action David Brent Leo. In Blood Diamond he’s the mercenary Danny Archer, who’s been incarcerated for smuggling diamonds during the Sierra Leone Civil War. He’s soon out, though, and on the trail of a gigantic pink diamond along with an American journalist (Jennifer Connolly) and the fisherman who originally found it (Djimon Hounsou). The conclusion feels a little bit Hollywood after the gritty, uncompromising first two acts, but there’s a lot to enjoy and DiCaprio shines throughout. Because professionalism is… and that is what he wants.
Heat (1995)
You know Heat. We know Heat. Heat is brilliant. De Niro. Pacino. Mann. A cop on the tail of a criminal he kind of admires. We’ve already laid out exactly why you should be watching Heat tonight. Let’s not waste each other’s time. Just go and watch Heat, then watch the Peep Show episode where Mark and Jez go to the theatre.
Mark Corrigan: I can’t believe coming here cost more than a film.
Jeremy Usborne: I’ve got Heat on DVD at home. We’re watching this, when, for less money, we could be watching Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.
Mark Corrigan: I’m going to pretend I am watching Heat.
Jeremy Usborne: OK. Let’s pretend we’re just watching Heat.
1917 (2019)
Sir Sam Mendes’ one-shot (yes, yes, it wasn’t a proper one-shot) epic, set on the Western Front just as the powers that were prepared to shovel more young men into the mincing machine, absolutely hoovered up Baftas and technical plaudits, as well as cramming in brief hellos from Colin Firth, Andrew Scott, Benedict Cumberbatch and Richard Madden. With a little distance, though, it’s not the glitz which makes a mark, even if Roger Deakins’ cinematography is still remarkable. It’s George Mackay’s extraordinary, tender, terrified, resolute performance as Schofield, and the small, quiet moments in which the adrenaline drops – a meeting with a mother and child, Schofield drifting along a river – which make it so good.
Bullitt (1968)
The coolest of the films from Steve McQueen’s very coolest years, this neo-noir sees McQueen as Lieutenant Detective Frank Bullitt, digging into some shady mob-related shenanigans. Though it sounds like something Humphrey Bogart could have carried, Bullitt was a deeply modern piece of filmmaking: Bullitt is one of cinema’s first proper procedural detectives, and new, light Arriflex cameras meant it could be filmed on real locations around San Francisco. Plus, it’s got one of the all-time great car chases through the streets of San Francisco thanks to a newly designed camera rig. They went to a good home after filming – Steven Spielberg nicked them so he could do the chase sequences in Duel. “The thing we tried to achieve,” McQueen later said, “was not to do a theatrical film, but a film about reality.”
Hanna (2011)
Saoirse Ronan teamed up again with director Joe Wright a few years after Atonement to make a film which is absolutely nothing like Atonement. Like so many daughters of special forces operatives in films, Hanna (Ronan) is schooled in the arts of doing people in by her ex-CIA guy dad in the Finnish wastes so she can nobble the people he knows are coming after him. She’s captured, but starts fighting her way through to her dad’s enemies. However, it turns out her family is even more complicated than having a dad who trains you to murder people for him would imply. Slightly off-kilter, woozy, and brutally effective.
Crank (2006)
Look, I’m not saying Crank is a great film. It’s noisy, and stupid, and absurd, and crass. What it is, is some of the biggest, dumbest fun available to you on an empty Thursday evening. Jason Statham is hitman Chev Chelios, who’s mugged off by some upstart punk who wants his gig and decides to poison him to get it. This poison inhibits his adrenaline and will eventually stop his heart. So Chev – who does not take kindly to this turn of events, let me tell you – heads out into LA to take revenge, find an antidote, and keep his adrenaline pumping in a number inventive ways. Namely: driving wildly, beating up anyone who gets in the way, smashing pingers and generally living on the edge. Very silly.
All is Lost (2013)
Robert Redford says he’s retired these days, and while The Old Man and the Gun was a very nice sign-off, full of Redfordian charm and twinkle and Sissy Spacek, this stands as his last great film. It’s unlike anything else in his long career too: Redford is nearly completely silent throughout, and carries the story alone. He’s an unnamed sailor adrift in his damaged boat, trying desperately to weather storms and keep himself alive while searching for a rescuer. He’s a resourceful, diligent, completely capable man, exactly who you’d want in that situation – and slowly he realises he’s powerless to help himself. It’s Cast Away, rewritten by Samuel Beckett.
Face/Off (1997)
To stop some terrorists and avenge his son, John Travolta has to swap his face and voice with all-round bad dude Nicolas Cage. This simple and harmless bit of highly experimental surgery goes unexpectedly awry though, and Cage ends up with Travolta’s face. On top of all that, Cage-as-Travolta has planted a bomb that will destroy Los Angeles, and he’s not telling where it is. John Woo’s best Hollywood film is absolutely batshit, and that is its core strength.
Attack the Block (2011)
Somewhere in south London, a group of teenagers rob a nurse on her way home from a shift on Guy Fawkes Night. But this Guy Fawkes Night turns out to be full of more bangs and fizzes than most: it’s the first night of an alien invasion, and the humans are going to have to work together to defend their tower block and survive. Joe Cornish’s funny, inventive sci-fi introduced the world to a 19-year-old John Boyega, who’s magnetic as the gang’s de facto leader Moses. There’s a sequel in the works too, and both Boyega and Cornish will return.
Seven Samurai (1954)
At more than 200 minutes long, Akiro Kurosawa’s greatest masterpiece probably isn’t an action film to chuck on of a Friday night after three beers and a Dinner Date. It is, however, a carefully paced meditation on desperation and violence, and a touchstone of the more thoughtful Westerns which followed it. In feudal Japan, a small village uses the last of its reserves of rice to pay seven masterless ronin to protect them from raiders and make sure they don’t starve. You’ve seen it referenced, lampooned, homaged and nodded to more times than you know, and the steady pace slowly ramps up to an absolutely gigantic barney.
13 Assassins (2010)
In this remake of the 1963 film, Shinzaemon Shimada leads the baker’s dozen of pro sword wielders in an attempt to take down the callous Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira in 1840s Japan. They don’t expect to get out of it alive, but given what a rancid type Matsudaira is, they plunge in anyway. Cue a lot of extremely good swordplay and a climactic battle which runs to 45 minutes long. Director Takashi Miike always manages to make room for genuinely affecting character beats amid the bloodshed though.
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Sergio Leone had sworn off making another Western after The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but came around when he had the chance to cast Henry Fonda, long his favourite actor, as the cold, villainous hired gun Frank. Charles Bronson is ‘Harmonica’, the man Frank is bearing down upon. There’s a fight brewing over the one water supply in the desert town of Flagstone, and while the action unfolds at Leone’s usual considered pace to one of Ennio Morricone’s great scores, it’s an action epic to lose yourself in.
Léon: The Professional (1994)
Luc Besson’s stylish crime thriller is built on an extremely strong central trio: there’s Jean Reno as the Italian hitman Léon, Natalie Portman in her feature debut as lonely preteen outcast Mathilda and Gary Oldman on absolutely storming, 1000-percent shouty Oldman form as drug-addled drug cop Norman Stansfield. When Stansfield and his cops kill Mathilda’s family, Léon takes her in and begins to tutor her in the subtle art of bumping people off. The target: Stansfield. But he’s not going down without a lot of gunplay and some of Oldman’s most inspired shrieking histrionics.
The Bourne Identity (2002)
The film that killed off Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond and reshaped every action film that followed it. Before Jason Bourne, action movies were mostly about impossibly large men doing implausibly athletic killings and then mangling cheesy one-liners. Post-Bourne, everything got a bit gritty, a bit real, a bit hard to stomach. This was the kind of action movie in which offing bad guys looked more like a job than a laugh, and where you felt every punch and car crash viscerally. Without Bourne, you don’t have Daniel Craig’s it-hurts-me-when-I-hurt-you James Bond. And the world would be a worse place.
Casino Royale (2006)
See? Casino Royale was Daniel Craig’s first run-out as the new 007, and 14 years on it’s still the high-watermark (we’re feeling very hopeful about No Time to Die, though). The previous film in the franchise, Die Another Day, had featured an ice palace, an invisible car and that CGI surfing scene. Its successor opened with a parkour-style chase in which you could almost taste Bond’s sweat, and closed with him being having his knackers battered in a seatless chair and watching the woman he loved drown in the Grand Canal. This was a post-9/11 Bond movie, a spy film about secret agent making tough choices about who to sacrifice and when torture might be justified. It was an action movie with consequences and it finally fleshed out a character who had sometimes seemed like little more than a philandering psychopath with a drinking problem.
The Wages of Fear (1953)
Unknown to each other, four unfortunate misfits are stuck in the desert town of Las Piedras. The only way out is an aeroplane ticket, but none can afford it. Then a job comes up. It could be a way out, but it’s only for the truly desperate. A team is needed to drive jerry cans of the incredibly unstable explosive nitroglycerine, and any jolt could set it off during the 300-mile trip across lumpy, bumpy desert roads. Rickety bridges, boulders, and – wouldn’t you know it – unexpected roadworks make things even trickier. It was later remade, brilliantly, as Sorcerer by William Friedkin. Friedkin reckons he didn’t, but he definitely did.
Yojimbo (1961)
In mid-19th century Japan, a roaming samurai arrives in a small town where local lords are scrambling to put themselves at the top of the food chain. The freelance swordsman is recruited as a secret weapon by one faction, but it’s soon clear that he’s got much bigger ideas in mind, and intends to bring all the bloodshed to an end. Akiro Kurosawa’s quite astonishingly violent film shocked audiences when first released, but its influence is enormous. The Westerns from Hollywood and Italy which followed Yojimbo pinched some it its moves, including its droll sense of humour, and a remake – Sergio Leone’s magnificent A Fistful of Dollars – spread Kurosawa’s influence even further.
Runaway Train (1985)
Kurosawa was originally on board this particular ride too, his story elevating what could initially have been a fairly rote disaster-action flick into something more thoughtful. Speed 2: Cruise Control doesn’t end, as Runaway Train does, with a quote from Richard III. Violent bank robber Manny (Jon Voight) persuades the easily led Buck (Eric Roberts) to help him bust out of prison, and they manage to sneak on board a train. But suddenly it starts speeding up. Soon their flight for freedom turns into a battle for survival.
Battle Royale (2000)
There’s been a massive recession in near-future Japan, and the kids are bored and hopeless. Juvenile delinquency is getting to be such a problem that the only way to sort things out is to force the worst kids to fight to the death on a remote island. When class 3-B are launched into it, including conscientious student Noriko and mourning classmate Shuya, shifting loyalties, improvised bombs and splenetic violence ensue. The moral: don’t trust anyone over 30.
Duel (1971)
Steven Spielberg’s lean, taut, Hitchcockian feature debut pits put-upon everyman David Mann (Dennis Weaver, on especially fraught, frothing form) against a truck driver who suddenly cuts him up on an empty desert road. Mann overtakes; the truck swings out in front of him again. Slowly it dawns on Mann: this truck driver isn’t going to let him get out of this trip alive. Who’s driving the truck? Why do they want Mann dead? And will Mann and his rapidly expiring car make it home?
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
It’s quite hard to comprehend now just how gigantic a phenomenon Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was when it came out. Even now everything about it just seems so big: big emotions; big, lush, sweeping vistas of 18th century China, during its last Imperial days; and, of course, gigantic, gymnastic sword fights. The martial arts sequences are still operatically beautiful, and counterpoint with the primly buttoned down emotional lives of its characters, who tend to ache quietly for each other before busting out their swordsmanship and Wudang skills.
Safety Last! (1923)
Yes, it’s a rom-com, but the defining image of silent cinema – Harold Lloyd hanging off the hand of a clock at the top of a building – is the most enduring of Lloyd’s ‘thrill sequences’, as he called his action-packed sections of daring stunts. There’s a straight line between Lloyd, who lost a thumb and forefinger to a prop bomb which turned out not to be a prop but carried on doing his own stunts, and Tom Cruise’s full-blooded commitment to smashing up his knees in the name of Mission: Impossible.
Deep Cover (1992)
Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum head up Bill Duke’s noir-styled story of an undercover police officer who goes so extremely undercover that he ends up getting fitted up for dealing cocaine. Fishburne’s Russell Stevens is raw, playing every line as if his very nerves are exposed to the open air; Goldblum is his lugubrious attorney, David Jason. (Not that David Jason.)
Baby Driver (2017)
Getaway driver Baby drowns out his tinnitus with eclectic mixtapes while he’s swinging cars around Atlanta for the malevolent Doc, and frankly if you put Blur’s ‘Intermission’ and Queen’s ‘Brighton Rock’ on your ultimate driving playlist you’ve only yourself to blame if you get into scrapes. Edgar Wright’s masterfully controlled, powerfully kinetic direction lets the music lead the many, many car chases as Baby goes in for one last job to free himself, escape his past, and bring down the nest of thieves he’s trapped in.
Commando (1985)
The quintessential Arnie film and, perhaps, the quintessential action flick. It’s a series of non sequiturs – Arnie and daughter feeding milk to a doe, Arnie disguising a corpse on a flight by giving it the full Weekend at Bernies, Arnie announcing: “I eat green berets for breakfast, and right now I’m very hungry” – conjoined by rocket launcher attacks. Blissful stuff.
Robocop (1987)
Much stranger, darker and funnier than you remember it. Look at Murphy’s death scene, in which he’s shot into several hundred large chunks. The levels of splenetic violence are so absurd it ends up looking like an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon. See also: the bit where a man is literally melted by a vat of toxic waste.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
The difference between the campy Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and its follow-up couldn’t be more stark. Muscular, bleak, lyrical, pounding and frenetic, Fury Road follows said very angry Max (Tom Hardy) as he helps the battle-hardened general Furiosa (Charlize Theron) to get five women away from the clutches of the water-hoarding warlord Immortan Joe.
Speed (1994)
A high concept chase thriller that’s so high concept you only need the one word of its title to know what it’s all about. Dennis Hopper’s put a bomb on a bus, Keanu Reeves isn’t having that, Sandra Bullock’s behind the wheel keeping the whole thing going above 50mph. It’s beautifully put together: just when you think it’s out of gas, Speed floors it again.
Police Story (1985)
Writer, director and star Jackie Chan is an undercover cop trying to sort out a crime kingpin, and can only do so with the help of several extremely good stunt set pieces including an opening car chase and a finale in which gigantic panes of glass explode and crash all around. Breathless stuff.
Black Panther (2018)
Superhero films are what the big-budget action morphed into once everyone got a bit bored of Jason Bourne-style wobble-camming, and Ryan Coogler and Michael B Jordan’s Rocky reboot Creed served notice of their ability to meld affecting character drama and brutal punch-ups. It blossomed here, with Chadwick Boseman, Danai Gurira, Letitia Wright and Lupita Nyong’o fighting to save the beautifully realised Afrofuturist paradise of Wakanda.
Snowpiercer (2013)
Bong Joon-ho’s dystopian epic is basically JG Ballard’s High Rise, but on a train and with Tilda Swinton doing a Yorkshire accent. The last crumbs of humanity are crammed onto class-divided carriages after an attempt to sort out climate change accidentally turns Earth into a snowball, but there’s an uprising brewing among the have-nots.
The Matrix (1999)
It’s quite easy to gloss over it now, but The Matrix really did set off a philosophical earthquake inside a a generation’s already wobbly sense of self. Are we, like, even here though? Are we just brains in jars? Red pill or blue pill, the Wachowskis’ opus is still blistering, still time-melting and still utterly propulsive.
Blade II (2002)
Human-vampire hybrid Blade returns to hunt more vampires in Guillermo Del Toro’s comic book adaptation. Two things elevate it: the splattery inventiveness of Blade’s weaponry, and Del Toro’s mastery of its animation-inspired action sequences.
Con Air (1997)
An extraordinarily high concentration of cinema’s most intensely odd character actors, including Nicolas Cage, John Malkovich and Steve Buscemi, are dangerous convicts being flown across America. The prisoners hijack the plane and all hell breaks lose. Cage is the actually-very-nice con trying to do the right thing without letting anyone know he’s on the feds’ side. Glorious stuff.
Point Break (1991)
Keanu Reeves infiltrates Patrick Swayze’s gang of cowabunga-ing yahoos in Kathryn Bigelow’s organised crime and surfing crime drama, in the process learning a lot about the mysteries of the universe and the true meaning of bro-hood. Yes, this is the third Keanu film on this list. Well spotted.
Aliens (1986)
If Alien was self-consciously a horror set in space, its follow-up goes full-tilt into action. After 57 years in hyper-sleep, Ripley returns to the moon where the crew of the Nostromo picked up their unwelcome cling-on, this time with a gang of marines in tow. They head off to find out what’s happened to a colony of humans and – would you believe it! – it turns out that there was more than one of that alien. There were aliens.
