Only 3 Action Thrillers in the 2020s Are Actually Perfect
If something is an action movie and a thriller at the same time, then what do you know: it’s an action thriller. The genres go together well, but if you’re using recent films as examples, it should be stressed that something can be a thriller without being an action movie (like No Other Choice), and something can be an action movie without also belonging to the thriller genre (like Top Gun: Maverick, even if it is thrilling/exciting in its own way). Muddying the waters a little further is the fact that something can belong to more genres than just those two and still be classified as an action thriller, which is what’s been done below. Like, two of these movies also count as crime films, with one of them being darkly comedic, and then the other movie here is an action, thriller, and horror movie all at once.
If that’s betraying the headline a bit, then apologies, but it was also just hard to find pure action thrillers from this decade that are hard to fault. Something like Tenet is kind of underrated, and has sequences in it that are pretty fantastic, but could it really be called a perfect movie? The ones below have the goods, though. Hopefully, they’re not the only three from the 2020s that will be perfect, because, at the time of writing, there are still three and a half years to go before this decade’s over, and that’s enough time for at least one or two more masterpieces to come out… hopefully. For now, these three are as good as things get. They keep things exciting and satisfy when it comes to action and spectacle, and while all were best appreciated on the big screen, they’re also likely to pack a punch at home, too. Just not, like, a sucker-punch. (Also, it was with a heavy heart that RRR was cut from this. It’s so exciting and fantastic as an action movie, but no sources really listed it as a thriller, so it would’ve been a little disingenuous to include it here, technically speaking).
3
‘One Battle After Another’ (2025)
The previously mentioned film that’s a comedy on top of being an action thriller, One Battle After Another could also be called an epic, since it spans a fair amount of time and has a runtime that’s well over two and a half hours, so it’s really not lacking in ambition, to say the least. Also, it’s a loose adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, and Pynchon’s hard enough to adapt that Paul Thomas Anderson is the only person who’s done it… twice, now, as 2014’s Inherent Vice was his first. That one followed the book of the same name a little closer, while One Battle After Another very much does its own thing with Vineland, being a loose adaptation at most. The setting is changed, and there’s a bit more by way of excitement in this film version, even if the sense of humor and some of the political/social commentary are comparable. As for the plot, One Battle After Another concerns the daughter of an ex-revolutionary being targeted by one of said ex-revolutionary’s old enemies. He’s out of his element when he has to abruptly re-enter that world, which is where a lot of the comedy comes in, and One Battle After Another is surprisingly broad in that regard, by Paul Thomas Anderson’s standards.
This is him in crowd-pleaser mode, and he makes it work, all the while being bold in choosing a Pynchon story as a starting point to go into blockbuster mode, which really shouldn’t work as well as it does. There’s been controversy caused by One Battle After Another, which is a bit confusing, when the film feels like it’s lampooning and/or critiquing people on different sides of the conflict, who themselves are politically opposed. It’s got some things to say about the way life has been so far, throughout the 2020s, in terms of division and tension, but there’s also a feeling of everything being particularly heightened and broad, but if someone can’t really get on board with that for whatever reason, then it’s their loss. One Battle After Another does a lot as a thriller, since it moves well and is either exciting or suspenseful from the beginning until the end, sometimes at the same time as it’s being funny, and then the action sequences sprinkled throughout are also hugely impressive. It’s one of the more flat-out fun movies to win Best Picture at the Oscars in recent memory, and honestly, it’s been nice (and not celebrated nearly often enough) how the last few winners have all been pretty far-removed from typical Oscar bait territory (this, 2024’s Anora, 2023’s Oppenheimer, and 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once).
2
‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ (2023)
Fourth time’s a charm? Well, actually, the first three times were charms, too. The John Wick series has been rather consistent, after all, even if the idea of doing a fifth film seems kind of wild. Not counting Ballerina, which was a spin-off/interquel kind of thing, each John Wick movie managed to get bigger and more bombastic with its action set pieces with every new installment, famously so. John Wick (2014) was pretty straightforward as a revenge movie about a guy who’s already lost everything, and then he literally loses everything he had left to live for, and so he goes on a violent quest for vengeance. There were interesting peaks into the criminal underworld he used to be a part of, so exploring that stuff in a little more detail seemed like a no-brainer, should John Wick become a series, and then a series it indeed became. John Wick: Chapter 2 was longer and had more by way of world-building, then John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum did the same for Chapter 2 that Chapter 2 did for the first movie.
John Wick: Chapter 4 just keeps on outdoing itself throughout its particularly phenomenal final act, which has some of the most inventively staged action and memorable stunt work seen in any action/thriller movie in recent memory.
Also, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum set up a logical endpoint for the series, and then John Wick: Chapter 4 more than made good on the continued idea of upping things more and more. It felt like a finale, even if it doesn’t look like it’s going to stay that way, but if they can indeed make something that feels more epic than (or, hell, even just as epic as) John Wick: Chapter 4, then that’ll be admittedly impressive. You’ve got an even more epic-length runtime here than was found in the previously mentioned One Battle After Another, as the fourth John Wick movie falls shy of three hours by just 11 minutes. Somehow, it keeps the momentum going for that entire runtime, and then it just keeps on outdoing itself throughout its particularly phenomenal final act, which has some of the most inventively staged action and memorable stunt work seen in any action/thriller movie in recent memory. You might not agree that it’s the best John Wick movie, but it’s the most John Wick-y of all the John Wick movies, and that counts for something.
1
‘Sinners’ (2025)
The elephant in the room has kind of already been addressed, since Sinners was the movie mentioned, in the introduction, as being a horror movie on top of being an action thriller. On top of those things, it feels like it dips its toes into a couple of other genres, since music is so important to the plot here, and there is a lot of music throughout (it’s not quite a musical, though), while Sinners also works as a period drama of sorts, since it takes place in the 1930s and deals with issues of particular relevance to that time. There’s a lot here, and there’s also a lot referenced throughout Sinners, but all those influential things are used and mixed up in interesting ways, resulting in something that feels very much like its own thing. That’s saying quite a bit, seeing as you can describe the premise here and think it sounds an awful lot like a certain movie from 1996 that involved Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney, owing to the vampires, the confined setting, and the action largely being relegated to the second half.
Yes, that means Sinners doesn’t have a ton of action, but when it needs to get bloody and/or exciting, it really delivers. That part of the movie being strong shouldn’t be too surprising, since Ryan Coogler delivered some pretty great – and varied – action scenes throughout the other movies in his career, up until this point, that weren’t Fruitvale Station (which was just a straightforward drama based on a tragic true story). Sinners is also thrilling, and it’s probably that slow build it has going for it which makes it work so effectively as a thriller, too. You can enter into a movie like this being in the mood for just about anything genre-wise, and you’ll likely find something that scratches that particular genre-related itch within Sinners. It’s very broadly entertaining and approachable, but not in a way that feels overly simplistic or like it’s talking down to anyone. It’s a rare crowd-pleasing horror that still has a bit of edge (or “bite,” if you’re feeling punny but you also like particularly lazy puns), and calling it the best action thriller of the decade so far… yeah, why not? There it is. It’s Sinners.
