Considering that the genre gets a shout-out every time a director calls “lights, camera, action!” while making a film, it’s no wonder that there are countless great action movies. Ever since Hollywood’s earliest days, audiences have hooted and hollered at exciting scenes up on the big screen, whether they’re jaw-dropping stunts, incredible fights, or breakneck chases.
These are 32 of the greatest action films ever made. This list tends to skew towards newer movies, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that the first half of the 20th century didn’t have exciting cinema. This list only includes live-action films; you could make an entire list out of the best action anime or Western animated films. We’ve also limited the list to one entry per franchise. Finally, there aren’t any superhero movies on this list, not because superhero movies don’t have great action, but because the subgenre might otherwise dominate the conversation.
32. Godzilla vs. Kong
Year: 2021
Director: Adam Wingard
The fourth installment of the Monsterverse is not what you might call a “smart” movie, but it does deliver on the promise of its title: Godzilla does indeed fight King Kong, and it is glorious. A kaiju-sized smash-up that boasts significantly better special effects than the giant icons’ first mashup in the 1962 Japanese movie, Godzilla vs. Kong understands how to keep its human characters out of the way for the main event, a match-up that will sink aircraft carriers and level cities.
31. The Dirty Dozen
Year: 1967
Director: Robert Aldrich
Many of the greatest war movies are about something deeper than just conflict, highlighting the brutality and futility of such a conflict or attempting to honor heroism in deeply unheroic times. The Dirty Dozen, perhaps because it came out before the Vietnam War had really begun to change audience’s appetites, is not concerned with deeper meaning. Instead it just follows a World War II major (Lee Marvin) as he gathers and trains a group of 12 convicts for a suicidal mission against the Nazis. Excitement, not commentary, is the main goal here, and The Dirty Dozen succeeds.
30. Sisu
Year: 2022
Director: Jalmari Helander
Finnish actor Jorma Tommila stars as an older, reclusive man living in Lapland mining for gold in the waning years of World War II. When some Nazis try to take his gold, they soon discover that he’s a legendary ex-commando known as Koshchei, or “the immortal.” The rest of Sisu is pretty much just an exercise in finding increasingly elaborate and exciting ways for a grizzled old man to slaughter Nazis. It’s a real feel-good flick—they had it coming.
29. Wings
Year: 1929
Director: William A. Wellman
The first-ever Best Picture-winner at the Oscars (and the only silent movie to do so) proves that great action has been a part of cinema history from the beginning. (Many silent stars like Buster Keaton are thought of as having been in comedies, but films like The General are full of flabbergasting stunts, too!) Wings stars Clara Bow as a girl who two rival pilots in World War I are fighting over. The dogfights and aerial combat hold up incredibly well despite being roughly a century old.
28. Starship Troopers
Year: 1997
Director: Paul Verhoeven
A staggering number of audiences (and even critics) missed the not-at-all-subtle satire of Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi war flick, which follows Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, and Neil Patrick Harris into battle against a race of alien bugs. Extremely gory, Starship Troopers is an over-the-top portrayal of patriotism, militarism, and xenophobia—concepts that in the real world are the cause of wars with much more dire stakes than a silly sci-fi shoot-’em-ups but are cheered on all the same.
27. Casino Royale
Year: 2006
Director: Martin Campbell
The best James Bond movie when it comes to action is probably either Casino Royale or Skyfall, but Daniel Craig’s first outing as 007 takes the win if only for the thrilling, parkour-inspired chase through a Madagascar city that kicks off the rebooted franchise. With a start like that, adrenaline is high enough that even a high-stakes poker game will still have an audience’s blood pumping. (The final set piece in Venice is a series standout, too.)
26. Avatar
Year: 2009
Director: James Cameron
James Cameron’s Avatar is often hailed as an astounding spectacle and special effects breakthrough or it’s criticized for thin characters and a generic sci-fi plot. It doesn’t get praised enough for how exciting it is as an action movie—especially when viewed in 3D, though even watching on a small screen without special glasses, it still hits. Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully going on his first flight and the final battle, especially when Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) fights Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) in his mech, are so much fun to watch.
25. Fast Five
Year: 2011
Director: Justin Lin
What began as a fairly grounded series about street racing and eventually reached such absurd heights that Vin Diesel and his on-screen family were fighting submarines and driving in space peaked in 2011’s Fast Five. This is the movie that nails the level of absurdity behind the wheel to make for an exhilarating action movie. The big ending, where Dominic Toretto (Diesel) and Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) drag a safe through the streets of Rio, is one of the most sensational scenes in all of film.
24. Speed
Year: 1994
Director: Jan de Bont
Keanu Reeves stars in this ’90s classic as an LAPD officer who boards a bus that has been rigged by a terrorist (Dennis Hopper) to explode if it goes slower than 50 miles per hour. Sandra Bullock plays a passenger who takes the wheel in an effort to help Reeves save the day and stop them all from going kablooie, making Los Angeles’ infamous traffic even worse. Speed is a fittingly fast-paced flick that gets incredible mileage out of its admittedly somewhat contrived premise, aided by slick execution of the action scenes and great performances from the leads.
23. Rebel Ridge
Year: 2004
Director: Jeremy Saulnier
Rebel Ridge, one of the great surprises of 2024, stars Aaron Pierre as a former Marine who is trying to get his cousin out on bail only for corrupt cops to take the funds from him, using the controversial practice of civil forfeiture. What the cops don’t know is that he’s an elite instructor at the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program, and he uses his incredible martial arts skills and quick thinking to do what he has to. Rebel Ridge runs out of steam a little bit towards the end—there’s probably a 90-minute version of this movie that’s a five-star masterpiece—but it’s still an incredibly tense and well-done action-thriller.
22. Sicario
Year: 2015
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Denis Villeneuve (who would go on to direct Dune, which also has amazing action) put audiences right in the thick of the fight against Mexican drug cartels in 2015’s Sicario. The film, which stars Emily Blunt as an FBI special agent who finds herself working with Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin’s much more morally dubious operatives on a special task force, goes south of the border in sequences that are as enthralling and exciting as they are horrifying.
21. Air Force One
Year: 1997
Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Harrison Ford plays one of our finest on-screen presidents in Air Force One where his commander-in-chief, James Marshall, finds himself fighting terrorists the old fashioned way when Gary Oldman and his group of rogue Soviets take over the titular airplane. It’s crackerjack action cinema, and not unlike Die Hard many of the most exciting sequences come from watching the clever ways the outnumbers President Marshall finds to solve his problems rather than just charging.
20. John Wick
Year: 2014
Director: Chad Stahelski
Not content with just having re-invented action cinema with The Matrix, Keanu Reeves leads another game-changing action franchise in John Wick, where he plays the title character. A retired assassin who was legendary in his time, Wick finds himself back to his old ways when some punks with ties to the Russian Mafia break into his house, steal his car, and kill his dog without having any idea who they’re dealing with. John Wick and its sequels helped popularize gun fu, a blend of shooting and martial arts that became one of the defining action styles of the era.
19. Hot Fuzz
Year: 2007
Director: Edgar Wright
The best spoofs or parodies come from a place of love, and it’s very clear that Edgar Wright is a knowledgeable fan of action movies watching Hot Fuzz, a hilarious comedy that skewers every action movie trope while also being an exciting time at the movies in its own right. Simon Pegg plays an elite, overzealous London cop who is transferred to a sleepy West Country village and partnered with a well-meaning but seemingly dull local cop (Nick Frost). However, when dead bodies start piling up, he finds himself thrust, guns-a-blazin’, into the middle of an explosive criminal conspiracy.
18. RRR
Year: 2022
Director: S. S. Rajamouli
This epic, three-hour Telugu-language Indian action film was such a sensation that it broke through and became a hit in the United States, too, and it’s easy to see why. A gloriously over-the-top reimagining of two Indian revolutionaries (played by N. T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan), RRR has the pair have the world’s greatest bromance despite initially being on opposite sides of the struggle against British imperialism. The fight scenes are absurd and go absurdly hard; the dance scene, set to the Oscar-winning original song “Naatu Naatu,” even more so.
17. Point Break
Year: 1991
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Keanu Reeves stars as Johnny Utah, a rookie FBI agent who is tasked with going undercover to try to find a group of bank robbers. Utah and his partner (Gary Busey) believe the robbers are surfers in their spare time, so he starts hitting the beach. When he befriends a chill surfer named Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), it’s the start of a beautiful bromance. But, of course, Bodhi is the leader of the bank robbers, putting this extreme sports friendship in an extremely tough place.
16. Heat
Year: 1999
Director: Michael Mann
Al Pacino and Robert De Niro play a Los Angeles Police Department detective and a professional thief, respectively, in Michael Mann’s action masterpiece. A cat-and-mouse game between a cop and a bank robber, Heat is one of the all-time great crime films; it’s an exploration of masculinity and the reasons why people do what they do, and it also features one of the greatest (and loudest) shootouts in cinema history. Val Kilmer, Jon Voight, and Danny Trejo also star.
15. Aliens
Year: 1986
Director: James Cameron
Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Alien is basically a perfect horror movie. For the sequel, James Cameron added an “s” to the title and created a basically perfect horror movie. Sigourney Weaver returns as Ellen Ripley, the only survivor of the first Xenomorph’s rampage who is called to tag along with some gung-ho space marines as they check out some trouble on a moon colony. Their big guns and bravado don’t help much against the alien menace; it’s Ripley who is the one going toe-to-toe with an alien queen inside of a power-loader mech shouting “get away from her!”
14. The Raid
Year: 2011
Director: Gareth Evans
In this acclaimed Indonesian action flick, a rookie cop is part of a squad of 20 officers attempting to catch a crime lord inside of the Jakarta apartment building he operates out of. Once inside, the situation quickly goes south; they realize they’ve been trapped by the criminal’s thugs and goons, and their only hope of escape is fighting their way up to the top of the building. It is a brutally simple premise for an action movie, and The Raid makes full use of it.
13. Enter the Dragon
Year: 1973
Director: Robert Clouse
Bruce Lee tragically died before the release of Enter the Dragon, which only makes the kung fu classic that much more beloved of a piece of action cinema. Lee plays a martial artist (also named Lee) who agrees to participate in a crime lord’s fighting tournament as part of an undercover agent to bring him down. An espionage thriller full of some of the most iconic martial arts ever put to film, Enter the Dragon is exhilarating—and, on some level, sad to watch. You can’t help but wonder what else Lee might’ve been able to accomplish had he not died too early.
12. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Year: 1980
Director: Irvin Kershner
Compared to some of the fast-paced action in the more recent Star Wars movies, selecting The Empire Strikes Back as the best action movie of the franchise might seem a little odd, until you consider that, as a movie, it is by far better than anything in the prequel or sequel trilogies. A space opera epic that takes the setup of A New Hope and adds bigger battles (like the thrilling opening escape from Hoth or Luke and Darth Vader’s lightsaber duel) and imbibes them with emotion, The Empire Strikes Back is a testament to the importance of having narrative and heart behind your flashy set pieces and special effects.
11. Gladiator
Year: 2000
Director: Ridley Scott
In ancient Rome, the crowds gathered into the Colosseum to watch men fight to the death. A couple millennia later, we’re much more civilized: moviegoers gathered in theaters to watch actors pretend to fight to the death. Ridley Scott’s Best Picture-winning swords and sandals epic is an undeniable spectacle, boasting several exhilarating fight scenes that might make you understand why a member of the crowd back in Roman times might’ve gotten caught up in the excitement. What really makes Gladiator special, though, isn’t just the swordplay and bloodshed but the intense emotional forces driving the fighting—it’s one of the best movies about revenge ever made.
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Year: 2002
Director: Peter Jackson
It’s hard to pick which film in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is the best—they’re all full of incredible moments. What’s pretty clear, though, is that the middle installment, The Two Towers, has perhaps the greatest battle sequence ever put to film in the Battle of Helm’s Deep. From the tense stand-off between the men of Rohan and Uruk-hai to Legolas’ shield slide to the sounding of the Horn of Helm Hammerhand to the arrival of the riders of Rohan at first light on the fifth day, it’s an astounding work of fantasy action filmmaking.
9. Mission: Impossible — Fallout
Year: 2018
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Especially in later installments of the series, the Mission: Impossible films were famous for their incredible action set pieces. With respect to Ghost Protocol’s climbing of the Burj Khalifa and Dead Reckoning’s motorcycle cliff jump, Fallout is the film to beat, because Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt does so much. There’s a motorcycle chase, an insanely dangerous bit of helicopter stunt piloting, a HALO jump, and just a good old-fashioned brawl in a bathroom. Every single sequence is perfectly, thrillingly done.
8. Top Gun: Maverick
Year: 2022
Director: Joseph Kosinski
It’s only slight hyperbole to say that Tom Cruise saved movies with this decades-later sequel to the ’80s classic Top Gun. After the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered theaters and had audiences trained to just wait at home for movies to hit streaming, it took a big blockbuster action movie to get them to go back to the theaters—and Maverick delivered. Though nearly every beat of the plot, which has Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell attempting to train a group of young pilots for an impossible mission against a notably un-specified enemy rogue nation, is predictable, even that might be a feature not a bug. It’s a war movie as a sports film, and there are few feelings more exciting for cheering when the planes go whoosh.
7. Edge of Tomorrow
Year: 2014
Director: Doug Liman
Tom Cruise plays a somewhat cowardly public affairs officer who finds himself on the front lines of a last-ditch fight against an alien invasion in this sci-fi masterpiece, which didn’t get enough recognition when it first came out. When one of the aliens unwittingly infects him with its blood, Cruise gets stuck in a time loop—every time he dies, he starts the day over, which means he can keep getting better and better at fighting the aliens in an attempt to actually win the war. It’s like Groundhog’s Day if Bill Murray learned how to be the ultimate soldier, and had a steely Emily Blunt helping him.
6. Kill Bill: Volume 1
Year: 2003
Director: Quentin Tarantino
The second volume of Quentin Tarantino’s action-packed love-letter to genre cinema has great fights, too, and it might even be the better movie overall, but if forced to pick one of the two as a representative for the action movie hall of fame, the first film has to win. Starring Uma Thurman as a former assassin out for revenge against the people who betrayed her and put her in a coma, Volume 1 culminates in an extremely bloody sword fight between Thurman’s Bride and the Crazy 88, a yakuza squad of elite warriors.
5. Police Story
Year: 1985
Director: Jackie Chan
Truth be told, just about any old Hong Kong action flick has fights and stunts that would blow the minds of an American fan of action movies who hasn’t seen many non-Hollywood productions. Jackie Chan’s Police Story—along with its sequels, the third of which also features Michelle Yeoh—is an incredible entry point. Chan, who stars in addition to directing, plays a Hong Kong police detective who is trying to take down a crime lord. This involves a truly insane car chase through a hillside shantytown, a death-defying leap down a pole covered in bursting lightbulbs down the middle of a mall, and a lot of really funny comedy bits, too. You can tell that Chan and his team were actually doing the stunts, which is something that no special effects can hope to match.
4. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Year: 1991
Director: James Cameron
The first Terminator movie had action in it, but Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first romp as a cybernetic assassin from the future was really more of a sci-fi horror movie in its vibe. The sequel, meanwhile, is action perfection. Schwarzenegger returns, this time as a good Terminator hoping to save the future savior of mankind in the war against the machines from another, even more-advanced cybernetic killer (Robert Patrick as the T-1000). Linda Hamilton reprises her role as Sarah Connor, establishing herself as one of the greatest women in action movie history in the process. The chase in the Los Angeles River where Schwarzenegger reloads a shotgun with one hand while riding a motorcycle is peak cinema.
3. The Matrix
Year: 1999
Director: The Wachowskis
It’s not an exaggeration to say that The Matrix is one of the most important and influential movies ever made, not just to action cinema but to film history as a whole. There are things in The Wachowskis’ cyberpunk masterpiece—both in terms of visuals like “bullet time” and heady sci-fi concepts—that people didn’t think you could do in a movie. But Keanu Reeves helped moviegoers take the red pull, delivering a mind-blowing action movie that expanded the horizons of what a fight scene could look like.
2. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Year: 2000
Director: Ang Lee
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, one of the first wuxia films to break through in the West thanks to Ang Lee’s vision, is a profoundly beautiful, thoughtful, and sad tale of lost love and the prison of duty. It also features several of the greatest fight scenes ever put to film. Starring Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh as master warriors whose loyalty prevents them from admitting their feelings for one another and Zhang Ziyi as the daughter of a rich governor who wants to escape her destiny and steal a legendary sword, Crouching Tiger is quite simply one of the greatest films ever made.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road
Year: 2015
Director: George Miller
The masses weren’t necessarily clamoring for a new movie in George Miller’s automotive post-apocalyptic franchise, but when the Australian director delivered a new one, 30 years after the previous film, he earned his place in Valhalla. Tom Hardy, taking over for Mel Gibson in the title role, gets involved in an epic escape from the vile Immortan Joe’s citadel, forming an alliance with Charlize Theron’s steely Imperator Furiosa in the process. Fury Road is essentially a feature-length car chase, but it’s unlike any car chase you’ve ever seen. Even the Academy Awards, which tend not to recognize genre films—especially ones as unique and weird as Max Max—couldn’t deny that Fury Road was a masterpiece. It was nominated for best picture, is widely considered one of the best films of the decade, and is possibly the single greatest action film ever made.