Top 25 Action Movies Ever Made

[trinityvixen]

Whenever you make a list like that, you're going to get into trouble. I would have though Entertainment Weekly would have learned its lesson after it printed the Top 25 Sci-Fi movies ever and then had to print a subsequent article about the ones that necessarily got left out a week later. Maybe it's a slow news month and they're looking to do a follow-up article. Anyway, here's the list:
1. Die Hard
2. Aliens
3. Raiders of the Lost Ark
4. The Road Warrior
5. The Matrix
6. Seven Samurai
7. Gladiator
8. Saving Private Ryan
9. Hard-Boiled
10. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
11. Speed
12. The Empire Strikes Back
13. The Wild Bunch
14. RoboCop
15. Enter the Dragon
16. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
17. The Bourne Supremacy
18. The Adventures of Robin Hood
19. Goldfinger
20. Kill Bill Vol.1
21. Spider-Man 2
22. Predator
23. Druken Master II
24. Lethal Weapon
25. The Incredibles

The preponderance of sci-fi in that list is pretty interesting. I won't argue with the #1 choice--it's a fair call, you ask me, that Die Hard is the best action movie of all time. I do take offense at Predator lurking so close to the bottom (behind Spider-Man 2!?!? The fuck?), though, upon further recollection, Predator isn't even that much of an action movie. It's more a thriller-horror movie--bunch of bad-asses being stalked through South American jungles by an alien hunting them for sport. There's suprisingly little action in that movie, save for the end. I think there's exactly one punch thrown. Still doesn't seem right some how.

Mostly, I take greater offense at the characterization of Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 as mannish (this was brough up to show how the buff and beautiful Ellen Ripley needed not to be bikini-clad heroine nor "mannish" in Aliens to be tough and awesome). Sarah is "mannish" in what sense, exactly? Because she has muscles? Because she acts to destroy evil instead of moralizing about it? I'm pissed that her ability to be a soldier is somehow determined to be her aping "manly" attributes. Would that John Connor (by T3) had half of her chutzpah.

I also don't recognize Saving Private Ryan as an action film. And, as an action film, it is NOT better than Speed. So, nyah!

Comments

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Crouching Tiger is a Chinese kung-fu movie. (Well, unless you want to call it Taiwanese I guess.) Of course it's more than that too, but Ang Lee was definitely trying to make a kung fu movie. Otherwise I think you're pretty on.

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

I would argue that Wu Xia doesn't quite fit the "action" category. It's a little too specifically stylized, and its other themes are a little too important and strong. It's why I think other major kung-fu/martial arts films fit the ticket much better.

Otherwise, both Hero and the entire LOTR trilogy need to be on here before Crouching Tiger would be.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Oh sure, there are certainly other things that should be here. All I meant was there's more than one Chinese kung fu movie on the list, is all. I would totally have picked Ong Bak before CTHD or Legend of Drunken Master both, but not enough people in the US are familiar with it I guess...

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Ong Bak had a lot more action than CTHD because the point was people hitting each other to hurt each other and someone trying to accomplish a goal through said exercise of pain. I think Hero and Crouching Tiger were too operatic to really be considered "action." They're so balletic that the "action" is really dance. As dance theater, second to none in recent memory.