
Heart-to-heart banter is spiked with gay panic entendre and broadcast across a Best Buy so shoppers can properly sneer at genuine, human feelings. Morgue-fresh corpses bounce around during a car chase like barrels in "Donkey Kong." A throwaway line about rat sex pays off with an animatronic demonstration. It's a joke that Bay never stops laughing at. "Everyone deserves some dignity," Martin Lawrence says. In response to the critical savaging of Bay's reach for "Titanic" prestige, "Pearl Harbor," Bay made a $130 million manifesto that stands to this day: He'll wipe out the human race in exchange for a big enough pyro budget. In many ways, it's the Michael Bay movie. She's not tough, just calloused, and that makes her a lot more exciting to watch lock, load, and cry havoc.īy contrast, "Bad Boys II" isn't just a Michael Bay movie. In "Aliens," she's in exponentially deeper, and yet still goes sallying forth into the heart of darkness to save a single lost child. In a 2017 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Weaver broke the character down to her clinical core: "Ripley doesn't have time to try to be sympathetic, you know?" In "Alien," she was in over her head. She's going to exterminate these monsters or die trying, and she knows exactly where those odds lie. Though she still wages a one-woman-war with an assault rifle and flamethrower, the stakes are obvious in her stuttered breath. As finally performed, her reprisal of Ellen Ripley belongs in the action heroine pantheon. It took Cameron a while to convince Weaver that she wouldn't be playing, well, Rambo in space. Little do either Ripley or the meathead peanut gallery realize that she's the one who'll be dishing out most of it. But redemption and employment don't matter to her as much as cold, high-caliber revenge. Now an expert only because of her pain, she's offered an assignment to accompany some space marines on a possible bug hunt. This is action, packed.įor her Xenomorph troubles, freight hauler Ellen Ripley receives PTSD and a formal inquisition over her competence behind the wheel. The only real qualification for inclusion here is that the film delivers a thrill unlike any other, whether that means Tony Jaa doing push-ups on an elephant or Rudy Ray Moore taking a night off from insult comedy to practice kung-fu. Consider this a course in the essentials of running, jumping, and falling down.

As a result, the following 95 entries are listed alphabetically. Seeking out the definitive, all-time, no-questions-asked greatest action film of all time is folly. As such, for the sake of nailing down true greatness, this list includes a little of all the above.īut how does "Hard Boiled" stack up against "The Lord of the Rings"? There's apples to oranges, and then there's Jackie Chan to Arnold Schwarzengger. Today, action films have re-diversified into superhero soaps and every other type of effect-addled blockbuster - it's hard not to find an action flick at the local multiplex. Before then, it was scattered amongst westerns, war films, martial arts flicks, and police procedurals. de Souza, writer of multiple films venerated below, didn't hear action identified as a distinct genre until the mid-1980s.

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This is our list of the best action movies of all time.But what makes an action movie great? The genre is already quite subjective. But why not check out some of the other best action movies of all time next time you want to watch something adventurous? If you're into big-budget adventure, killer action sequences, and superhero movies, we've got just the list for you. Sure, you've got go-to's like the Indiana Jones classic Raiders of the Lost Ark or Arnold Schwarzenegger's filmography, which somehow includes both the Terminator franchise and Total Recall. There are a ton of other action movies to choose from next time you're down to watch, that overlap with genres ranging from sci-fi to comedy to thriller to martial arts. But John Wick and Marvel/Avengers films, as well as last year's Mission: Impossibleinstallment and the Oscar-nominated Mad Max: Fury Road kind of follow the same premise- there’s running, there’s robbery, there’s some violence. Of course, some of the current picks to watch have come a long way from The Great Train Robbery (1903).


The greatest action movies of all time span across generations.
