These 10 Action Movies Are Officially the Best of All Time
William likes watching movies and writing about those movies. Anything else is minutae.
Sign in to your Collider account
Action movies are awesome. There's no need for any ostentatious language to state the obvious. Action movies aren't often made to be profound or to earn critical points. They're made to excite and entertain, and they do it better than just about any other genre. Through impressive stuntwork, explosive effects, stellar cinematography and tight editing, action movies leave everything else in the dust. All well-made action movies are technical achievements, but the best of all time are even more than that.
The genre's best feature relatable heroes, dastardly villains and captivating plots. It's the combination of all those elements with the aforementioned technical aspects that make these movies the best. Every single one of them elevates the genre and remains an essential part of it. That's what makes these ten action movies awesome, and the best of all time.
'Seven Samurai' (1954)
A foundational action movie, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is the best film on this list, and possibly ever made, even if its action has since been surpassed in scale and intensity. The battle sequences are still immaculately staged and incredibly exhilarating, which is impressive considering the film is over seven decades old. Kurosawa pioneered action filmmaking techniques, such as multicamera setups and cutting on motion, that are still fundamental to the genre. Every action filmmaker, in one way or another, is a disciple of Kurosawa, and Seven Samurai is an essential action movie.
The basic premise of the film, that of the titular seven samurai who are hired to protect a vulnerable village from crop-stealing bandits, has inspired dozens of direct and indirect imitators. Its simplicity belies the epic scale of the film, which allows each member of the team to be a developed individual and makes their collective sacrifice in the film's climactic battle all the more affecting. That rain-soaked climax is still iconic, and Seven Samurai is still one of the greatest action films of all time.
'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (1981)
Steven Spielberg is certainly among the filmmakers who took notes from Kurosawa, who he shares the status of directorial icon with. Though not known as an action director, Spielberg's ability to stage action is second to none. Sequences in films like Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report and even The Adventures of Tintin are all proof of that, but even collectively they can't match his action adventure masterpiece, Raiders of the Lost Ark. The film is iconic from the first scene to the last, filled with old-fashioned stunts and large-scale setpieces. Inspired by classic serials, it set the bar for modern adventure films, which hasn't been cleared since.
Developed with George Lucas, Raiders of the Lost Ark was designed to be a quick and dirty shoot, with Spielberg wanting to avoid the bloated production woes of his previous film, the notorious bomb 1941. That attitude is apparent in the breezy tone of the film as it moves effortlessly from set piece to set piece, following Harrison Ford in his most iconic role as Indiana Jones as he attempts to procure the legendary Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis do. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a film where every individual element of its production adds up to a great whole. Mileage may vary on enjoyment of the sequels, but the original is the best action-adventure movie of all time.
'Police Story' (1985)
While the big, bombastic movies of America were making a lot of noise in the 80s, filmmakers in other countries were delivering their own delirious brand of action. Jackie Chan had already had a couple of false starts trying to break into the American market, but those failures only motivated him to pour his creative energy into his next film, which happened to be the action classic Police Story. With iconic stunts and sequences that have yet to be topped in the genre, it's the best film from one of the biggest names in action cinema.
The film's plot, which follows Chan as an inspector whose attempts to bring down a drug lord are complicated when he's framed for murder, was designed to be structured around the action sequences. From the opening shantytown shootout to the shopping mall climax, the death-defying stunts performed by Chan and his team are simply unbelievable. As an action star, Chan's physicality is unmatched, combining the comedic stuntwork of performers like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd with the martial arts ability of Bruce Lee. He's one of the greatest action stars of all time, and Police Story is his best film of all time.
'Aliens' (1986)
Sci-fi and action got together like peanut butter and chocolate. Predator, RoboCop, Edge of Tomorrow. The list goes on and on, and there will be more featured on this list, but it can't go any further without mention of James Cameron. The majority of the legendary filmmaker's career has been devoted to sci-fi action, dominated mostly by his work in The Terminator and Avatar franchises. His best sci-fi action movie comes from a franchise he didn't create, with the sequel to Ridley Scott's Alien, which proudly declared that this time, it's war. Aliens expanded the world of the first film and the biology of the xenomorphs exponentially, creating a bigger, boomier sequel that's an express elevator to hell.
Picking up with Sigourney Weaver's Ripley after 57 years of floating in space, the film takes its time getting back to the planet where her crew first found the fateful alien eggs. Cameron ratchets up the tension and then releases it with explosive action scenes that spill acid blood all over the place, leading up to the iconic climax where Ripley takes on the mother of all aliens with a power loader. The action in Aliens is indisputable, but what holds the film together is Weaver's Oscar-nominated performance. Her status as genre royalty was already assured thanks to the first film as well as her supporting turn in Ghostbusters, but Aliens made her a full-blown action hero.
'Die Hard' (1988)
Samurais, adventure, martial arts and sci-fi. They're all accurate descriptors of the preceding action movies on this list, but if there's one movie that could be considered the definitive, capital A action movie, it's Die Hard. There's really no denying it, and for all the debate surrounding the film's status as a Christmas movie, there's never been any debating its reigning status as one of the best action films of all time. It's another classic where all the individual elements had to come together in the right combination to create the perfect result, and it's proven impossible to recreate by the myriad imitators that followed it.
The casting of Bruce Willis is one of the most crucial elements to the film's success. Almost every major star in Hollywood was considered before Willis, then best known for his role on the television series Moonlighting, was given the role of John McClane. He brought an everyman charm and wisecracking sensibility to the role that balanced perfectly with Alan Rickman's erudite villain Hans Gruber. Director John McTiernan then populated the rest of his film with solid character actors who all get singular moments to shine in between the action sequences. Die Hard is everything an action movie should be and more.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
01
How does a room know you've walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you're actually made of.
05
There's a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don't posture, you don't escalate, and you don't warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.
- The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one against him.
- You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and then completely immovable past it.
- Focus, commitment and sheer will. You'd be the one carrying grief through three sequels and turning it into technique rather than noise.
- People wouldn't call you dangerous. They'd say your name quietly and let that do the work.
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you'd drive through a building for any one of them.
- This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject, because loyalty scales and plot doesn't have to.
- You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you defend it past the point of reason.
- You'd thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve, an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
- The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it's really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
- This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that's left.
- You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an administrative error.
- You'd thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure. The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
- Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
- Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned, bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
- You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn't make you noble, it makes you sarcastic, and then it makes you unstoppable.
- You'd thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation, and you've never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
- You didn't want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
'Hard Boiled' (1992)
If Die Hard is the quintessential action movie, John Woo might be the quintessential action director. From his early martial arts films like Last Hurrah for Chivalry to his 90s Hollywood output like Face/Off to his epics like Red Cliff, Woo has delivered on all fronts, but there's nothing quite like his Heroic Bloodshed films. That subgenre was launched by Woo and fellow filmmakers Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam, and focused on themes of brotherhood and honor with highly stylized action. Woo made several action classics within it, but his masterpiece Hard Boiled was also his final word on it. It's a balls-to-the-wall cop thriller with gun fights so intense they leave blisters.
Chow Yun-fat plays Tequila and Tony Leung plays Alan, two cops trying to take down the same Triad from the outside and inside respectively. That conflict is what fuels the films major setpieces, three of the most ballistic and balletic gunfights ever put on film. The mixture of slow-motion cinematography, dynamic effects and the physicality of the actors and stunt performers puts Hard Boiled on an entirely different level. It's second to none in terms of pure action, and even if Woo had never made a single film before or after it, he would still qualify for the action hall of fame.
'The Matrix' (1999)
Woo's shadow is one of many that loom over The Wachowski's cyberpunk action classic The Matrix. Inspired by filmmakers like Woo, sci-fi thrillers like The Terminator, anime and a dozen other disparate sources, the film blends all of them together into a thought-provoking action blockbuster that completely reinvigorated American action movies. The only disappointment is that none of the films that took inspiration from The Matrix, whether through its aesthetic, plot or bullet-time action, ever transcended that inspiration in the same way it had.
The film gives Keanu Reeves his first official action franchise, after his solo 90s offerings Point Break and Speed, with the role of the hacker Neo who discovers his reality is a simulation, and he's the prophesied savior of humanity. Despite having a similar running time to its sequels, it feels far less bloated, balancing its philosophical ponderance with well-timed and expertly executed action sequences. With fight choreography by Yuen Woo-ping that incorporates wire-fu and gunplay that upgrades the John Woo-inspired slow motion with its bullet-time visual effects. The Matrix was the culmination of 20th century action movies and blew them out into the 21st.
'Casino Royale' (2006)
Spy movies have been an integral part of action cinema for decades. Franchises like Mission: Impossible and Jason Bourne have dominated the 21st century, but if there's one name that's paramount to spy action, it's Bond, James Bond. The film adaptations of Ian Fleming's Agent 007 have been delivering action since the 60s, with every era of the character offering their own classic. There's Sean Connery's second film From Russia With Love, George Lazenby's solo outing On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Roger Moore's fun The Spy Who Loved Me, Timothy Dalton's gritty License to Kill, and Pierce Brosnan's debut GoldenEye. Nobody does it better than Bond, and Bond has never been better than when Daniel Craig first donned the tux for Casino Royale.
Based on the first Bond novel, the film gave the decades-long franchise a gritty reboot that brought the character back to basics, beginning with him earning his license to kill. Craig brings both a ruthless physicality to the role in the action scenes and a vulnerability in those shared with Eva Green's Vesper Lynd, with the electric chemistry between the two as exciting as any gunfight or parkour chase. Casino Royale brought back director Martin Campbell, who had previously helmed GoldenEye, and his brisk, no-frills style of directing perfectly suits the film. It's a bruising action movie that still manages to maintain the distinct panache of the character even without featuring many of his signature elements.
'The Raid' (2011)
The grittiness of Casino Royale was indicative of a larger trend of brutality in action movies that began to take hold in the 2000s and then exploded in the 2010s with franchises like John Wick and The Raid. The first film of the latter series, an Indonesian action thriller directed by Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans, immediately took the action world by storm thanks to its relentless pacing, the physicality of martial artist and star Iko Uwais, and the lethal efficiency of Evans' direction. The Raid is a lean and very mean action movie, and it packs a harder punch than anything Hollywood has to offer.
Uwais, who had also collaborated with Evans on the film Merantau, plays a member of a SWAT team raiding an apartment building controlled by a drug lord. When most of his team is slaughtered, he and the other survivors have to fight their way through floor after floor of armed henchmen. What could be a repetitive slog is instead a sustained white-knuckle action movie that balances fight scenes with quieter scenes where they attempt to avoid detection that feel more suited to a horror film. It's Die Hard stripped down to the bone, and it belongs on the same list.
'Mad Max: Fury Road' (2015)
Epic, adventurous, brutal and perfectly directed, Mad Max: Fury Road exemplifies all the elements present in the other best action movies of all time. It brought a franchise that had been dormant for three decades back to high-octane life, with director George Miller spending years developing and filming it. With its troubled production and delays, the film seemed to be primed for catastrophic failure, but the end result was a masterpiece that many considered the greatest action movie of all time. A decade after its release, its high status has only become more cemented, and there's yet to be an action film to move it from that position.
With Tom Hardy replacing Mel Gibson in the titular role, the film also introduces a new protagonist to the franchise, with Charlize Theron's Furiosa given equal even more power as the driver of the film's narrative. Max is merely along for the ride, as he has been in every film after the original. Miller keeps the story on a straight line drawn back and froth across its post-apocalyptic desert, and lets its characters develop within it, often letting the visuals take on more weight than the spartan dialogue. Mad Max: Fury Road is an elemental action movie, stripping it down to the basic, most essential parts necessary for any film that could be considered one of the best of all time.
Mad Max: Fury Road
- Release Date
- May 15, 2015
- Runtime
- 121 minutes
- Director
- George Miller
- Writers
- Brendan McCarthy, George Miller, Nico Lathouris
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.