[caitlin1214]

The Action 25: The Best Rock-'em, Sock-'em Movies of the Past 25 Years

Will the new ''Death Race'' join ''The Matrix,'' ''Gladiator,'' and ''Casino Royale'' on the list of edge-of-your-seat thrill rides? (Unlikely.)

By Marc Bernardin
Aug 22, 2008

(EW.com)


25. APOCALYPTO
Directed by Mel Gibson (2006)
Don't be put off by the subtitles, action fans. The last half of this movie is, essentially, subtitle-free. Because there's, essentially, no dialogue. Because it's all friggin' action. Say what you will about the man, but Mel Gibson, who's worked with some of the finest action directors around — and made a couple of terrific films himself — knows what he's doing.



24. DESPERADO
Directed by Robert Rodriguez (1995)
In the years before The Matrix, Robert Rodriguez's sequel to El Mariachi was the greatest comic-book movie not based on an actual comic book. It's all mythic swagger and south-of-the-border legend. Antonio Banderas struts like a gun-slinging matador as a guitarista looking for revenge.



23. RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II
Directed by George P. Cosmatos (1985)
Here's where Rambo gets elevated from wounded Vietnam veteran trying to find a place in the world to entire-village-slaying, POW-rescuing American myth. Written by James Cameron (at the same time he was writing Aliens — busy boy!), this sequel corners like it's on rails, hugging the plot turns and accelerating straight through to the speechifying finish.



22. THE FUGITIVE
Directed by Andrew Davis (1993)
It's more of a detective thriller than an action movie — with Harrison Ford sniffing out the trail of the one-armed man who killed his wife — but there are still some undeniably sweet scenes, from the train wreck in the beginning to the dive out of the drainage pipe. ''I didn't kill my wife.'' ''I don't care!''



21. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III
Directed by J.J. Abrams (2006)
M: I 1's plot was an incomprehensible mess. M: I 2 suffered from John Woo's tick-laden, uninspired direction (oh, yes, more doves, of course, John, no one's seen those before). But M: I 3 worked because Lost creator Abrams brought a TV-honed story sense to Tom Cruise's action franchise. It bounces with some nifty plot mechanics and turns Ethan Hunt into a real, honest-to-goodness character.

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20. THE TERMINATOR
Directed by James Cameron (1984)
Cameron's indie sci-fi thriller is a leaner, meaner machine than its majestic sequel. And Arnold is perfect as the implacable killing machine. (But — and don't tell anyone — it's a love story. Shhh.)



19. KUNG FU HUSTLE
Directed by Stephen Chow (2004)
It's a cartoon, really — the closest you'll ever see to a live-action Chuck Jones 'toon. It just so happens to be a martial arts flick. And it's got the sickest final battle — 'cause all martial arts flicks have a ''final battle'' — ever.



18. THE PROFESSIONAL
Directed by Luc Besson (1994)
The Frenchiest hitman thriller ever to take place on the streets of New York. Jean Reno is all Gallic cool as a simple-minded assassin and Natalie Portman, in her movie debut, is heartbreaking as the girl who falls in love with him.



17. THE INCREDIBLES
Directed by Brad Bird (2004)

Some may say that Pixar's sixth feature film is for kids. In truth, it's the best James Bond movie in decades — so what if it didn't actually have 007 in it? A villain plotting world domination from his volcanic island lair? Check. A hero whose romantic entanglements complicate his quest to defeat said villain? Done. Flying, running, jumping, exploding, throwing, shooting, icing, stretching, invisibling...If that ain't an action movie, then what is?



16. LETHAL WEAPON
Directed by Richard Donner (1987)
Mel Gibson is crazy. That might as well have been the tagline for this buddy-cop flick, which starred Gibson as a suicidal cop good at making people dead and Danny Glover as the unlucky family man who gets to be his partner. Together, they go after a similarly crazy Gary Busey (whose gleaming choppers may or may not be the lethal weapon of the title). Richard Donner, working from Shane Black's taut, quippy script, keeps the proceedings moving at a muscular pace. This is the film that took Gibson and polished him into an American movie star.

[caitlin1214]

15. CASINO ROYALE
Directed by Martin Campbell (2006)
You can talk about Daniel Craig's perfectly toned bod all you like (go on, we'll wait). But in this James Bond franchise revamp — more of a rebirth, really — the actor also offers a perfectly toned performance as a killing machine who's barely aware that he has a heart until it gets slashed to ribbons.



14. PREDATOR
Directed by John McTiernan (1987)
Arnold Schwarzenegger has never been as manly as he was in this alien-hunting testosterone-fest. Hell, has a manlier film ever been made? Exhibits A, B, and C: Predator kick-starts with Carl Weathers and Arnold, greased biceps flexed, locking fists in some protein handshake. Jesse ''the Gubernatorial Body'' Ventura actually says, ''I ain't got time to bleed,'' after getting shot. And Arnold finally takes on the Predator by stripping to the waist, covering himself with mud, and building a bow out of tree branches and twine. Plus, Bill Duke shaves — in the middle of the jungle — with no shaving cream. No shaving cream! Manly.



13. SPIDER-MAN 2
Directed by Sam Raimi (2004)
The first film set the stage — and the third just kinda sat there, twiddling its black-goo-covered thumbs, waiting for a script that made sense to come along — but the second Spidey flick had all the jump, jive, and whale-on-the-bad-guys you could ask for from comic-book-based entertainment. Sam Raimi's crowning achievement was the elevated subway chase, in which the webslinger (Tobey Maguire) duked it out with Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) in, on, and around an out-of-control train. Emotional substance combined with playful kineticism...dressed in blue-and-red tights.



12. KILL BILL — VOL. 1
Directed by Quentin Tarantino (2003)
Ever get the feeling that with a Tarantino movie, you're watching a mash-up of whatever he likes at the moment, be it heist movies, blaxploitation, or the back of Ving Rhames' head? With this revenge opus, it's clear he had a thing for chicks kicking butt. And, woman alive, Uma Thurman dug into the role of the Bride, an assassin left for dead on her wedding day, fresh out of a coma and paving the road to vengeance with the blood of those who wronged her. If you thought QT was all talk-talk-talk-bang, watch what he does in the House of Blue Leaves — Uma slices through wave after wave of masked thugs. And none of them says a word.



11. THE BOURNE SUPREMACY
Directed by Paul Greengrass (2004)
Where Bond thrillers are smooth like vodka, the Bourne films like to play rough. And docudramarian Paul Greengrass (United 93) was the perfect choice to fill in the blind spots of amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon); his handheld style expertly paints the world of a man whose life is jagged around the edges. Bonus: Now you know it's possible to beat the snot out of a man using a magazine.

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10. CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON
Directed by Ang Lee (2000)
Amazingly, this movie actually is all things to all people...provided those people dig unconsummated romance, subtitles, and some of the most graceful martial arts ever filmed. What makes that mélange work is the fact that Ang Lee treats every facet of his story just as seriously — which is why the audience doesn't blink an eye when Chow Yun-Fat and Zhang Ziyi share a painfully awkward surrogate father/daughter duel atop swaying bamboo fronds. No wonder Crouching Tiger was the first foreign-language film to cross $100 million in U.S. theaters.



9. ROBOCOP
Directed by Paul Verhoeven (1987)
Brutally murdered on the job, a police officer (Peter Weller) is brought back from the dead to become the perfect corporate cop. Oozing with both pathos and satire (those fake commercials for artificial hearts and nuclear-war board games are still prescient 20 years later), Paul Verhoeven's most accomplished film also beats with an action junkie's heart. The face-off between Robo and the panzer-guard-bot ED 209 is one for the ages.



8. SPEED
Directed by Jan De Bont (1994)
We're gonna go ahead and pretend that the last third of Jan De Bont's stellar directorial debut doesn't exist. (Remember the bit on the runaway subway? See, you've been pretending the same thing for years.) This is a movie about a cop on a bus that'll blow if it goes less than 50 mph. Writer Graham Yost's Gordian knot of a screenplay keeps the pressure on as Keanu Reeves (who has never been better) tries to keep hope — and passengers — alive. It's the best of the Die Hard on a... films, and that's saying something.



7. TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY
Directed by James Cameron (1991)
There's a saying that goes '' What good is having an envelope if you can't push it?'' And just because I made that up doesn't make it any less true. James Cameron returned to the series that made Arnold a star, and rather than rest it all on the Austrian Oak's shoulders, the director offered us a villain for the ages: the implacable molten-metal T-1000 (Robert Patrick), which represents the first — and last — time CG morphing was cool.



6. HARD-BOILED
Directed by John Woo (1992)
Any time you see someone in a movie firing two handguns at the same time, you can thank John Woo. The Hong Kong filmmaker almost single-handedly rescued action cinema from Hollywood-in-the-'80s bloat by digging into his love of male bonding, Western heroics, doves, and the heightened reality of classic musicals. (Yes, musicals. Shut up.) Hard-Boiled, a quicksilver tale of undercover cops and shifting allegiances, is Woo's explosive masterpiece. (It's better than The Killer. Really. Again, shut up.) Happiness is a warm pair of guns...especially when Chow Yun-Fat is holding them.

[caitlin1214]

5. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
Directed by Steven Spielberg (1998)
From the chaotic, visceral opening salvo, in which our citizen heroes storm Omaha Beach, to the final, sad triumph on a meaningless bridge, after having saved Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg's ode to those who fell in WWII — and those who didn't — is rife with resonance. The action, captured by Spielberg's longtime cinematographic wizard Janusz Kaminski, is so full-on it desensitizes us as we watch it, otherwise we couldn't watch it. The flawed, noble men on screen (Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Matt Damon, et al.) pull us back from the brink. They rescue us.



4. GLADIATOR
Directed by Ridley Scott (2000)
No, I'm not gonna say it. Instead, we'll talk about how easily this Best Picture Oscar winner could've been just a fair-to-middling sword-and-sandals flick — if not for Russell Crowe. The action still might've been first-rate, given Ridley Scott's hands on the reins, but the reason audiences cared about what happened to poor Maximus — father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife, sentenced to a fighting death on the Colosseum floor — was Crowe's steely, soulful performance. Without him as the rock in the center, we would not have been so entertained. (Dammit. I am so weak.)



3. THE MATRIX
Directed by the Wachowski brothers (1999)
There had been movies featuring virtual reality or hackers or kung fu or weirdo philosophy or groundbreaking F/X. But those things had never been assimilated into the same film until The Matrix, a Big Idea flick about a programmer (Keanu Reeves) who might just be the humanity-saving Chosen Dude.



2. ALIENS
Directed by James Cameron (1986)
In all of action herodom, Sigourney Weaver's Ripley is unique. She's a woman, which makes her part of an elite club. And writer-director James Cameron miraculously found a way to treat her gender as both a nonissue and the core of her character. Ripley isn't a vixen like Lara Croft or Charlie's Angels. Yet Weaver wasn't forced to turn Ripley into a man, either. (Remember Linda Hamilton in T2?) Aliens — a relentless Swiss watch of a war film — is a movie about women, about the matriarchs of two tribes fighting to protect their young.



1. DIE HARD
Directed by John McTiernan (1988)
He's just a guy. That's the amazing thing about Bruce Willis' John McClane, an NYC cop in L.A. to reconcile with his corporate-ladder-climbing wife, who gets trapped in a skyscraper with money-hungry ''terrorists.'' He's not thick with muscles, he's often afraid, and he forgot his shoes. But all of those things — combined with Willis' street-smart insouciance and McTiernan's high-tension camerawork — help make Die Hard the Greatest Action Movie of All Time. We know it, you know it, and Bruce knows it . . .