It’s rare to find a person who doesn’t like action movies. It’s not fair to assume that such a person doesn’t exist, but the genre never really seems to be a contentious one. You can stumble across people who don’t like Westerns, musicals, or horror movies for whatever reason, but action film naysayers seem a great deal rarer. After all, there’s something undeniably irresistible about exciting on-screen action, and it’s been a consistently popular movie genre for just about all of cinema’s existence.
What follows is an attempt to highlight not the very best action movies ever made, but some of the greatest action scenes of all time. Naturally, any list that’s shorter than say 500 entries is going to have some huge omissions when the topic is as broad as “best action movie scenes,” and anyone reading this will probably be upset about something that’s not on here. Still, what follows is the cream of a huge crop, and the best of the best when it comes to exciting, groundbreaking, explosive, intense, and influential action scenes.
10 ‘Oldboy’ (2003)
The Hallway Fight
Park Chan-wook has made some terrifically intense and offbeat movies in his time as a filmmaker, but he doesn’t tend to make films that can be called action movies in the traditional sense. Even Oldboy is an arthouse take on the action genre, and is principally a mystery/thriller about a man trying to learn the truth about why he was locked up by unseen forces for 15 years of his life.
It explores themes surrounding revenge, resentment, and injustice in fascinating and stomach-churning ways, all the while being punctuated by bursts of intense and squirm-inducing action. The most iconic of such scenes in Oldboy is the revered one-take hallway fight, featuring the protagonist battling a gang of attackers in a confined space. It’s a realistic approach to how such a fight might play out, emphasizing physical pain and the awkwardness of hand-to-hand combat in a way that never seems amateurish from a filmmaking or acting perspective, and has to be seen to be believed.
9 ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers’ (2002)
The Battle of Helm’s Deep
Trying to pick a favorite battle sequence from The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a Choice that even Sophie might struggle with. Each entry in the iconic fantasy/epic trilogy has at least one all-timer when it comes to breathtaking action, from the intense and grounded Skirmish at Amon Hen that ends The Fellowship of the Ring to the Siege of Minas Tirith and the subsequent Battle of Pelennor Fields in The Return of the King.
However, the most impactful action sequence of the trilogy is likely the famed Battle of Helm’s Deep which takes up much of the final act in The Two Towers. Taking place at night (though still being plenty well-lit), the battle features 10,000 Uruk-hai attacking a fortified keep being defended by just a few hundred men (plus some elves). It’s particularly exciting because the heroes are such underdogs, forced to take on insurmountable odds, and because the battle itself is remarkably well-paced and intelligently constructed geographically, on top of featuring special effects that were groundbreaking for 2002 and still hold up well today.
8 ‘Harakiri’ (1962)
The Final Fight
Harakiri is an iconic samurai movie that shows how a film doesn’t necessarily have to belong squarely to the action genre to showcase remarkable action. Masaki Kobayashi’s greatest film deconstructs ideas relating to the samurai and their less-than-honorable ways, showcasing hypocrisy on their part through the devastating story while also downplaying heroics by featuring less traditional action sequences than most samurai movies.
It does still end with an incredible showdown between a wronged man who has nothing left to lose and various members of a corrupt samurai clan, and though the fight is technically impressive and engaging, it’s the two hours of storytelling prior to it beginning that gives the fight itself so much weight. The big action set piece in Harakiri is one, therefore, that needs the movie as a whole connected to it for maximum impact, but it’s undoubtedly one of the best films of its decade and more than worth watching in any event.
7 ‘The Raid 2’ (2014)
The Kitchen Fight
Action movies don’t get a whole lot more brutal than The Raid 2, the sequel to an already-great Indonesian action movie that pushes things further in every regard. While The Raid (2011) is fantastic for how it confines all its action to a single location and presents a simple fight for survival for its characters, The Raid 2 – though a little messier and less consistent – increases the scope, becoming something of a crime epic alongside showcasing brutal martial arts action.
Like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, it’s hard to highlight just one great action sequence from The Raid 2, but the one-on-one fight near the film’s end between protagonist Rama and a man known only as “The Assassin” inside a kitchen is probably the most remarkable. It’s nearly seven minutes long, every hit looks uncomfortably convincing, it escalates into a total bloodbath, and is just perfectly put together as far as editing and fight choreography go. Also from The Raid 2, honorable mentions ought to go to the prison yard brawl in the opening act, the train fight featuring “Hammer Girl,” and the frenetically shot and unique car chase around the film’s mid-point.
6 ‘Heat’ (1995)
The Bank Robbery/Street Shootout
Heat is arguably the greatest film Michael Mann’s ever directed, and is about as good as it gets when it comes to crime movies on an epic scale. It’s a film that runs for almost three hours and has an incredible cast led by Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, with the former playing a determined police detective on the hunt for the latter’s character, who’s an equally determined bank robber.
Things build up to an immensely intense bank robbery sequence that gives way to a shootout on a busy Los Angeles street, with it feeling like one of the loudest – as well as one of the most hard-hitting and memorable – shootouts in cinema history. Mann captures it all with an impressive level of grit and believability, and in almost 30 years since Heat’s release, the sheer visceral nature of this sequence has seldom been topped by any other action scene.
5 ‘Hard Boiled’ (1992)
The Hospital Shootout
There’s a debate to be had surrounding what John Woo’s best movie is, as he’s made several undisputed classics, such as The Killer, Face/Off, the underrated Last Hurrah for Chivalry, and Hard Boiled. Yet it’s the latter that likely contains the single best action sequence out of Woo’s entire filmography, given the final act of Hard Boiled is largely made up of one extraordinary set piece inside a hospital.
Hard Boiled is a film where the body count is high, and most of those deaths ironically occur in and around said hospital, with shootouts, explosions, and amazing stunts showcased throughout this extended sequence. Maybe it’s cheating to include such a long “scene” here, but the fact that this location and the action within it stay interesting for such a lengthy amount of time makes it all the more impressive. But, for what it’s worth, the best part of this entire sequence is likely the famed one-take portion, which presents complex action in a single ambitious shot that lasts about three minutes.
4 ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015)
Pretty much the whole movie
While Hard Boiled contains an extended action sequence that feels like it takes up one-third of the movie, Mad Max: Fury Road feels like it goes a step further by creating the sensation of a single chase scene across a post-apocalyptic desert stretched to two hours. Of course, this groundbreaking and breathtaking sequel features quieter moments and some solid character development (you know, to make you care), but the action is frequent and frantic enough to make highlighting a single piece of it as the highlight near-impossible.
So, even if it’s sort of cheating, the whole of Mad Max: Fury Road is hereby declared one of the best action scenes of all time. It’s colorful, visually distinctive, blends practical and digital effects seamlessly (while emphasizing the former), and just feels non-stop thanks to the bombastic nature of it all and the fast-paced editing. It’s a feast for the eyes that also gets the heart racing, and feature-length action scenes don’t really get much better.
3 ‘Police Story’ (1985)
The Shopping Mall Fight
Jackie Chan has been in so many great movies that more than a few have gone under the radar and feel, in a sense, underrated, especially among English-speaking audiences who know him mainly from his American films. Those Hollywood movies can be solidly entertaining, sure, but the films he made when he was younger and based in Hong Kong showcase Jackie Chan at his best. Of those, Police Story is deservedly considered one of his greatest, and is well-known enough now that it can’t really be counted among his more underrated efforts.
It’s perhaps the perfect film to showcase Jackie Chan’s stuntwork and action sensibilities, with a handful of great sequences throughout… though it’s a film that saves the best for last. Police Story’s climax takes place in a shopping mall and is just spectacularly done in every conceivable way, with convincingly hard-hitting fight choreography, more smashed glass than perhaps any other film in existence, and all capped off with one of Jackie Chan’s most iconic and jaw-dropping stunts: the slide down a pole through various electric lights that ranks among the most death-defying in cinema history.
2 ‘Kill Bill Vol. 1’ (2003)
The Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves
One half of an amazing 4+ hour epic about revenge, Kill Bill Vol. 1 is the more action-heavy portion of the two-part action/crime/drama film by Quentin Tarantino. Vol. 2 contains most of the great dialogue from the duology, and does feature one amazing fight sequence in the form of a one-on-one brutal fight inside a trailer home… but the showdown at the end of Vol. 1 takes the cake, and might well be the best action sequence of the 21st century so far.
Thanks to the use of chapter titles throughout Kill Bill, this segment of Vol. 1 is given an explicit name: The Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves. It sees Uma Thurman’s The Bride taking on what’s essentially a small army known as the Crazy 88 inside a Tokyo restaurant. The place is drenched in blood and body parts, with Tarantino seemingly taking all the shots and scenes from martial arts classics he loves and throwing them all into a blender, with the resulting explosion of grisly yet darkly hilarious action being an awe-inspiring one to behold.
1 ‘Seven Samurai’ (1954)
The Climactic Battle
An epic that’s beyond influential, Seven Samurai is an essentially perfect movie, standing tall 70 years on from release as the gold standard when it comes to making exciting, approachable, and ambitious action cinema. Akira Kurosawa has numerous movies that are arguably among the greatest of all time, but none have quite the same impact as Seven Samurai, which spends three-and-a-half hours telling the story of villagers recruiting warriors to help defend their town against an oncoming bandit attack.
Like the aforementioned Harakiri, Seven Samurai’s action is great both because it’s well presented and because of the build-up to it. The titular samurai warriors and various townspeople are all well-developed characters who bond and prepare throughout the first two acts of the film, and are then thrown into an extended battle in the final act of the film, with the last hour of the movie being its most action-packed. Most action movies made since 1954 feel like they take influence from some aspect of Seven Samurai, and as far as action scenes go, few are as emotional, lengthy, or technically impressive as the extended battle showcased throughout this masterpiece’s third act.
