“Action!”
It’s the go-word that filmmakers say at the start of every take, as the cast springs to life on camera.
Action is the very thing that sets motion pictures apart from still photography, and while it took some time to compile, here’s my list of the top seven greatest action movies of all time.
1. Face Off (1997)
Nicolas Cage, who’s actually John Travolta, gets thrown into a supermax prison and stages a riot to break himself out.
A cop redefines ‘deep undercover’ by surgically grafting the face of a criminal mastermind onto his own head – a gambit that backfires when said criminal steals his face and crawls into bed with his wife. It sounds preposterous, if not downright insane. Also, the two principals are played by Nicolas Cage and John Travolta. Twenty-five years later, though, you wish contemporary Hollywood would have the guts to try something so bonkers.
2. Predator (1987)
The endgame as Arnie’s battered Dutch faces off against his nemesis and comes out on top.
Somewhere amongst the flying cartridges and exploding rifle grenades is a critique of American foreign policy in the ‘80s. If it’s in Central America, it’s a threat and probably needs blasting with a minigun – and in retrospect, probably its environmental policy too.
Predator’s primal joys come in the continuous changing of the odds, never heavily in favor of humankind in the first place, as one after another of its commandos gets offed, leaving only one for the climactic showdown.
3. Heat (1996)
Heat is an action fan’s dream, provided that dream includes room for the serious topic of professional compromise, marital dysfunction, and parental abandonment. The movie’s main protagonists Vincent (Pacino), a hard-driving lieutenant, and Neil (De Niro), a wary career criminal looking for that proverbial last job, both have commitment issues; their game of cat and mouse involves a ton of collateral damage. When the movie breaks out the guns, it becomes abstractly beautiful, especially during a brazen midday bank robbery scored to Brian Eno’s pumping synth beats. It’s a scene of urban warfare that’s never been eclipsed.
4. Die Hard (1988)
The image of Bruce Willis walking on broken glass could be taken as a poignant metaphor for life’s little brutalities. It isn’t exactly what pseuds would call High Art.
The story is so ingenious, it’s incredible no one had thought of it before. A group of terrorists invades a state-of-the-art skyscraper and takes the inhabitants hostage. Their only hope is a man locked in with them, yet free to roam, a lone hero who must pick off the bad guys one by one, arcade-game–style, until he reaches the Big Boss.
5. Gladiator (2000)
Gladiator is a box office hit that dramatizes Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius’ (Russell Crowe) experiences. When the ambitious traitor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) murders Maximus’ father (and family) and claims the throne for himself, the protagonist is forced into slavery and becomes a gladiator who fights through the ranks to exact revenge.
Director Ridley Scott’s beloved film is known for its engrossing portrayal of history, and it does an excellent job of depicting the life-or-death fights between gladiators. The risks only escalate as Maximus faces off against increasingly skilled foes, and audiences may find themselves watching the more stressful battles with bated breath.
6. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Mad Max Fury is the ultimate Mad Max movie, which means it might just be the ultimate action movie. Director and co-writer George Miller, who created the original Mad Max in 1979 on a nothing budget, took the fourth film in the series to unparalleled extremes of incredible post-apocalyptic intensity and relentlessness, staging some of the greatest chase and fight scenes of all time with a bravado, abandon, and physicality rarely seen in today’s CG-fests.
Tom Hardy stepped easily and solidly into the title role left behind by Mel Gibson, but the beating heart of the movie is Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. As full of wrath as her name suggests, she embodied a feminine force to be reckoned with and a new paradigm for a future ruled over by toxic men.
It may have been Max’s name in the title, but this action behemoth belonged to the women.
7. Django Unchained (2012)
Quentin Tarantino’s first full-throated Western—even though it’s technically set in the South—continued the iconoclast filmmaker’s penchant for rewriting grim histories into invigorating power fantasies. And there’s little on the big screen as powerful as the sight of Jamie Foxx’s Django in front of a Mississippi plantation, watching it burn to a cinder. Even better, he doesn’t just watch. Nay, he and his horse are dancing in the firelight.
#Clique, which of these movies is your favorite?
