Part 1 – The Masterpieces
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Mediocre |
Part 10: The Poor |
Part 11: The Failures
Every film in this tier establishes its space before it stages anything in it.
Die Hard walks the audience through Nakatomi Plaza floor by floor. Seven Samurai spends its second act fortifying a village so the final battle is legible as tactics. Assault on Precinct 13 gives you every door and window before anybody comes through one.
That’s the single most reliable difference between action that works and action that doesn’t. The films lower down this ranking are usually not worse choreographed; they’re worse surveyed.
I’ll forgive almost anything in a film that shows me the room before it wrecks it. Nothing wrecks a film faster than a fight chopped into confetti, where I can’t tell who’s standing where or who just took the hit. Every picture in this part respects the audience enough to draw the map first. That respect is why I keep going back to them, and it’s why a cheap siege movie from 1976 sits up here with the epics.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and the whole action ranking runs across eleven parts.
Die Hard walks Nakatomi floor by floor, Seven Samurai fortifies a village for a whole act, and Precinct 13 shows every door first. Build a map that pays in the World Builder’s Handbook.
1. Taken (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of Taken (2008)
RLR: 10++++ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"The best pure action film of the century, shot in thirty-six days."
Pierre Morel shot it in thirty-six days for around twenty-five million dollars and it took more than two hundred and twenty. Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen wrote it in French first and the English draft followed. That’s part of why the dialogue carries almost no fat anywhere in it.
The structure is the leanest in the genre. The abduction happens inside the first twenty minutes, the deadline is stated out loud, and every scene afterward is either movement or information. Nothing stops for grief, nothing stops for doubt, and the film runs ninety-three minutes because there’s nothing in it that doesn’t advance the search.
Liam Neeson was fifty-six and had never headlined an action picture. The telephone speech works because Bryan Mills is simply describing his own professional capabilities to a man who doesn’t yet know what he’s listening to, and Neeson delivers it flat, like a man reading out a weather report.
Everything Bryan does is procedural instead of exceptional. He identifies an accent from a recording, works a construction site, runs a name through an old colleague, and the film never gives him a capability the audience hasn’t already watched him show. The competence is established once and then simply applied.
Morel shoots Paris as a working city instead of a postcard. The pursuit runs through construction sites, apartment blocks and a canal, and the geography is legible enough that the audience always knows which direction the daughter is in. That legibility is the reason the pace never reads as confusion.
Taken at number one starts more arguments than anything else on this list, and I’m happy to keep having them. I adore a movie that knows exactly what it is and never wanders off to find itself. Most action pictures with twice its budget can’t manage that kind of discipline. They pad the middle and stop for a sad flashback, and I end up checking my watch. Taken never gave me a reason to.
2. The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974)
RLR: 10+++ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"The best Dumas adaptation ever filmed, and the duels are funny because the men are tired."
Richard Lester shot both films at once in 1973 and the cast discovered afterward that a single production had been released as two pictures. The resulting lawsuits produced the Salkind clause, now standard in performer contracts and exists entirely because of what happened here. Alexandre Dumas published the novel as a serial in 1844.
The duels are the reason it endures. William Hobbs choreographed them as exhausting instead of elegant, so men slip on wet flagstones, drop weapons, use furniture and stop to catch their breath. Nobody in the film is ever as good with a sword as the genre usually pretends. The comedy comes out of competence failing under ordinary conditions. Oliver Reed’s Athos is drunk and formidable at once, Michael York’s d’Artagnan is young enough to be bad at this, and the film treats every fight as a physical problem instead of a display.
Faye Dunaway’s Milady is the best screen version of the character and the film refuses to soften her. Charlton Heston plays Richelieu as an administrator with a headache, and the two of them give the picture a political weight the swashbuckling wouldn’t otherwise carry.
3. Heat (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Heat (1995)
RLR: 10+++ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"The peak of crime cinema, and the two leads share one scene before the end."
Michael Mann expanded his own 1989 television film L.A. Takedown into a two-hour-and-fifty-minute picture and shot it in sixty-five Los Angeles locations with no sets. The city is photographed as a system of glass, concrete and distance, and it does as much characterization as the script.
The downtown shootout is the most influential action sequence in modern American film. The weapons were recorded live in the actual streets instead of dubbed, the actors trained with a former SAS instructor for months, and military units still screen it as an example of correct movement under fire.
The coffee shop scene is the only one De Niro and Pacino share before the end, and Mann shot it in a single afternoon with two cameras running at once so neither actor was performing to a stand-in. Neither man raises his voice and both of them state exactly what they’ll do.
The film’s real subject is the cost of the professional life on both sides. Hanna is on his third marriage and can’t stop working.
McCauley has a rule about walking away from anything in thirty seconds and then breaks it. The structure puts them in the same position and lets the audience decide whether either had a choice.
Everybody in the crew gets an interior life. Val Kilmer’s gambling, Tom Sizemore’s flat certainty, Dennis Haysbert’s parolee taking a cook’s job, and Mann gives each of them enough screen time that the last act costs something when it arrives. Mann had made the same story as a television film called L.A. Takedown in 1989.
Heat is the film I’d hand to anyone who tells me action movies are dumb.
It takes its time and justifies every minute. By the end I care about the crew as much as the cops, so the last act hurts in a way almost no shootout ever has for me. Mann made a three-hour crime picture feel short, and damn few directors have pulled that off.
4. Die Hard (1988) [full review]
► Read the full review of Die Hard (1988)
RLR: 10+ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"One building, one man with no shoes, and the film that reorganized the genre."
John McTiernan adapted Roderick Thorp’s novel Nothing Lasts Forever, itself a sequel to a book filmed with Frank Sinatra, and the contract obliged the studio to offer Sinatra the part first at seventy-three. He declined and Bruce Willis was cast off a television comedy. Willis was paid five million dollars and the press treated the figure as reckless.
The building is taught before it’s used. Elevator shafts, the unfinished thirtieth floor, the roof access and the ventilation are all established in ordinary scenes, so when McClane moves through them the audience tracks him without a line of explanation. The map is the whole architecture of the suspense.
Alan Rickman was making his first film at forty-two and invented most of what people remember. The American accent in the Bill Clay scene was his idea, the fall at the end was shot by dropping him a moment before he expected it, and Hans Gruber is a thief pretending to be a terrorist for the whole picture.
McClane is vulnerable in a way action leads hadn’t been. He’s barefoot on broken glass, he bleeds continuously, he talks to himself to stay calm and he’s frightened. The physical cost accumulates across the running time instead of resetting between sequences. Bonnie Bedelia plays Holly and Reginald VelJohnson the officer on the radio outside.
Leon is built from milk and a houseplant before he’s built from violence, and Bryan Mills never once doubts. Two ways to establish a lead in the Protagonist Handbook.
5. No Country for Old Men (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of No Country for Old Men (2007)
RLR: 10+ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"The Coens refuse the audience the confrontation it has been promised."
The Coens adapted Cormac McCarthy almost line for line and won Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay. Roger Deakins shot it with almost no score at all, leaving wind, boots, air conditioning and the sound of a cattle gun as the entire soundtrack. McCarthy published the novel in 2005 and had written it first as a screenplay.
The film removes every convention of the pursuit thriller in turn. The protagonist dies offscreen between scenes, the confrontation the structure has promised never occurs, and the sheriff arrives too late to every location in the picture. Each omission is deliberate and each one lands. Javier Bardem plays Chigurh as somebody operating on a system nobody else can see. The coin flips are the character deferring to a principle, and the gas station sequence is four minutes of a man who doesn’t understand that he’s in danger.
Josh Brolin’s Moss is competent enough to survive far longer than he should and not competent enough to win. The hotel sequences are constructed entirely on sound, with a transponder beeping, a door lock unscrewing and a light under a door, and the film gives the audience the information before it gives it to him.
No Country for Old Men rattles me more than anything else on this page.
I’ve got real affection for a film brave enough to kill its hero offscreen and dare you to complain. Plenty of studios would have forced that missing confrontation back in after one bad test screening, and the Coens were lucky to keep the film cold. If you need a tidy payoff, look elsewhere. If you want something that stays with you for days, this is it.
6. Baby Driver (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of Baby Driver (2017)
RLR: 10+ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"Nearly every action sequence synchronized to a specific song, and it was shot that way."
Edgar Wright cut the entire film to a pre-selected soundtrack, choreographing gunfire, gear changes, footsteps and dialogue to specific beats. The songs were locked before shooting began, the reverse of standard practice and meant the stunt drivers were working to a click track. Wright had been carrying the idea since a music video he made in 2003.
The opening heist and the coffee run behind the credits are the two sequences that explain the method. The car moves on the bassline, the windscreen wipers land on the snare, and a single unbroken shot of a man walking to a coffee shop matches graffiti and signage to the lyrics.
The tinnitus gives the device a reason to exist inside the story. Baby has a permanent ringing from a childhood crash and plays music constantly to cover it, so the soundtrack is diegetic and the audience is hearing what the character hears instead of a score laid over him.
The last act drops the precision and the film suffers for it. Jamie Foxx’s Bats is the best thing in the middle hour, and once the crew fragments the picture becomes a more conventional pursuit with the rhythmic construction largely set aside. Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx and Eiza Gonzalez complete the crew across the two heists.
7. Robin Hood (1938 / 1973 / 1991 / 2010), Contrast Review [full review]
► Read the full review of Robin Hood (1938 / 1973 / 1991 / 2010), Contrast Review
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Four adaptations, and the 1938 one solved it so completely that nobody has improved on it."
Four versions across seventy-two years, each one arguing for a different idea of what the story is for. The 1938 Errol Flynn picture is the one every later version is measured against, shot in early three-strip Technicolor with a fifty-piece orchestra and no irony anywhere in it.
Flynn’s Robin is unashamedly heroic and the film is the better for refusing complexity. Basil Rathbone was an accomplished fencer and the final duel is between two trained men. Erich Korngold’s score won an Academy Award and invented most of the adventure vocabulary that followed.
The 1973 Disney animation replaces everybody with animals and is the funniest of the four. Peter Ustinov’s Prince John is a thumb-sucking lion, the reused animation from earlier features is visible throughout, and the film works entirely on voice performance and rhythm. Wolfgang Reitherman directed it and Disney reused animation from four earlier features.
Costner’s 1991 version is remembered for Alan Rickman stealing a film out from under its lead and for an accent that comes and goes across the same sentence. Ridley Scott’s 2010 picture is the origin story nobody asked for, treating the legend as a prequel to itself and ending where the story should begin.
8. Seven Samurai (1954) [full review]
► Read the full review of Seven Samurai (1954)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
"The template for every assembled-team film made since."
Kurosawa shot for over a year at roughly seven times the standard Toho budget and the studio halted production twice. The film runs three hours and twenty-seven minutes and established the structure that Ocean’s Eleven, The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen and every recruitment picture since has used.
The second act is entirely about fortification. The samurai survey the village, mark the approaches, flood a field, wall off three sides and deliberately leave one entrance open so attackers can be funnelled into it one at a time. By the final battle the audience knows the terrain as well as the defenders.
Toshiro Mifune’s Kikuchiyo is the film’s argument. He’s not a samurai, he’s a farmer’s son performing the role, and his speech about what samurai have done to villages reframes the entire picture from an adventure into something considerably harder. Takashi Shimura had already worked with Kurosawa on Drunken Angel and Rashomon.
The rain battle was shot in freezing water with black ink added so the downpour would register on film, and Kurosawa used multiple cameras with long lenses so the actors couldn’t tell which one was on them. The technique became standard and started here.
Shimura’s Kambei delivers the closing line about the farmers being the ones who won, and the film ends on four burial mounds. Nothing about the victory is presented as a reward for the people who achieved it. Fumio Hayasaka scored it and died two years later at forty-one.
I’ll defend all three hours and twenty-seven minutes of Seven Samurai to anyone who calls it slow. That second act of ditches and fences is the reason the battle means anything, and I wish more modern directors had the patience to spend an hour on preparation. Kikuchiyo’s speech still stings, and those four burial mounds leave me quieter than any victory lap could.
9. Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) [full review]
► Read the full review of Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Rio Bravo in a decommissioned police station, made for a hundred thousand dollars."
Carpenter made it for around one hundred thousand dollars, wrote the score himself in three days, and edited it under a pseudonym. It’s Rio Bravo transplanted to a closing police station in Anderson, and Carpenter has never pretended otherwise. Austin Stoker and Darwin Joston lead the cast and neither had worked much before it.
Carpenter has said the budget was low enough that he silenced the gang’s weapons purely because blank-firing rounds cost money and silencers didn’t. The constraint produced the film’s most distinctive quality: the entire siege happens in near silence apart from breaking glass. The film credits the gang as Street Thunder.
Before anything happens, the film establishes the geography. The audience sees the lobby, the cells, the basement, the front doors and the phone lines, and when the assault begins every later decision is legible because the audience has already walked the space. The station is designated Precinct 9, Division 13, and the title gets it wrong on purpose.
The ice cream truck sequence is the moment the film announces what it’s willing to do. Carpenter shoots it without warning, without music and without any of the protection the period usually offered, and audiences in 1976 were unprepared for it. It was refused certification in Britain for years over that one sequence.
The siege is silenced weapons and no dialogue. Carpenter never explains the gang’s motivation, never names their leadership and never gives them a demand, and the absence makes them considerably more frightening than any stated grievance would have. Carpenter credited the editing to John T. Chance, the name of John Wayne’s character in Rio Bravo.
Taken installs a ninety-six hour clock in one line and never mentions urgency again. Learn what a stated deadline buys in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
10. The Indiana Jones Trilogy (1981, 1984, 1989) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Indiana Jones Trilogy (1981, 1984, 1989)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.4/10
"The best adventure trilogy ever made, and nothing else is close."
Spielberg and Lucas built the trilogy on the serials they grew up with and the first film’s opening sequence is the mission statement. Raiders establishes the character, the profession and the tone inside twelve minutes with almost no dialogue, and the trilogy never improves on it.
Temple of Doom is the darkest of the three and the reason the PG-13 rating exists. Spielberg has distanced himself from it since, the mine cart chase is the best practical sequence in the trilogy, and the film’s treatment of its setting hasn’t aged at all well.
Last Crusade recovers by giving Jones a father and making the quest personal. Connery was only twelve years older than Ford and plays the relationship as permanent low-level disappointment, funnier and more useful than warmth would have been. Kate Capshaw met Spielberg on the production and they married in 1991.
The stunt work across all three is the durable achievement. Vic Armstrong doubled Ford for the truck drag, the tank sequence used real vehicles on Spanish terrain, and the crews achieved almost nothing in the trilogy by removing risk from the frame. River Phoenix plays the young Jones in the opening sequence of the third film.
11. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) [full review]
► Read the full review of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.4/10
"Every set piece is a problem solved with the wrong tool."
Spielberg shot it in seventy-three days, under schedule and under budget, largely because he storyboarded the entire film first and refused to deviate. It cost around eighteen million dollars and took nearly four hundred, and it’s the most efficient studio adventure ever made. Tom Selleck was cast and had to withdraw over his television contract.
The Cairo swordsman is the most repeated anecdote in film production and it’s true. Ford had dysentery, the scripted fight would have taken three days, and he suggested shooting the man instead. The scene was completed in minutes and is the biggest laugh in the picture. The truck chase is the set piece and it’s almost entirely practical. Armstrong went under a moving vehicle on a ramp dug into the road, the stunt was performed at real speed, and Spielberg cuts wide enough that the audience can see it’s one continuous action. Marion is the best-written woman in any Spielberg adventure and Karen Allen plays her as somebody with a legitimate grievance. She runs a bar in Nepal, drinks a man twice her size under a table, and the relationship has a history the film refuses to explain in full.
The ending is the joke that holds the whole film together. Indiana Jones has no effect on the outcome whatsoever. If he’d stayed home the Nazis would have opened the Ark anyway and died anyway, and the film knows this and finds it funny.
Raiders is the purest fun on this list, and I’d put the truck chase up against anything made since. The ending’s nerve delights me. A studio adventure that admits its hero changed nothing, and then laughs about it, has total confidence in itself. Most of the imitators that followed missed that joke and made their heroes matter more, and they’re poorer for it.
12. Midnight Run (1988) [full review]
► Read the full review of Midnight Run (1988)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The most underrated buddy action comedy in commercial cinema."
Martin Brest made the best buddy film of the decade and it’s almost no action in it at all. A bounty hunter has to move an accountant from New York to Los Angeles in five days with the FBI, the mob and a rival hunter all trying to take him.
De Niro and Charles Grodin are the entire picture and the casting was fought over. The studio wanted a comedian opposite De Niro and Brest tested dozens before insisting on Grodin, whose method is to be quietly, relentlessly reasonable until the other man breaks. Robin Williams, Cher and Bruce Willis were all discussed for the Mardukas part.
Charles Grodin had been offered almost nothing of consequence for a decade when Brest insisted on him over a long list of comedians the studio preferred. His method in the film is to be relentlessly, quietly reasonable until the other man loses his composure, and he never raises his voice once.
The comedy comes from attrition instead of jokes. Every mode of transport fails in sequence, the two men are handcuffed together for large stretches, and Grodin’s Jonathan Mardukas keeps asking about Walsh’s ex-wife with what sounds like real concern. Yaphet Kotto plays the FBI agent and Dennis Farina the mob boss paying for the hunt.
Its endurance comes down to the last ten minutes.
The film has spent two hours on two men who can’t stand each other, and the ending is a transaction on an airport pavement played almost entirely on Grodin’s face. Nobody says anything about friendship. George Gallo wrote it and later created the Bad Boys screenplay.
13. The Killer (1989) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Killer (1989)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"The foundational text of contemporary action cinema."
John Woo made the film that introduced Hong Kong action to Western audiences and Chow Yun-fat is the reason. A hitman blinds a singer during a job, takes one last contract to pay for her surgery, and the entire picture runs on the obligation he’s invented for himself.
The church shootout is the sequence everybody knows. Doves, candles, slow motion and two men who have spent the film circling each other fighting side by side, and Woo shoots it as opera without any embarrassment about the comparison. Danny Lee plays the detective and Sally Yeh the singer at the center of the plot.
The relationship between the killer and the detective is the film’s actual subject. They point guns at each other while speaking with complete mutual respect, and the sequence where they mime a conversation in front of the blind woman is the best-constructed scene Woo ever shot.
The gunplay changed the vocabulary of the genre. Two-handed shooting, sustained exchanges, wide frames that hold the geography, and choreography treated as dance. Every American action film of the following decade borrowed from it, usually badly. Woo has said the two leads are the same man at different points in a life.
Precinct 13 gives its besiegers no motive at all, and Heat gives its crew as much interiority as the police. Two opposite methods in the Antagonist Handbook.
14. Goodfellas (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of Goodfellas (1990)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.7/10
"The modern standard for crime cinema, and the last act is a single paranoid day."
Scorsese adapted Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy with Pileggi co-writing, and the structure is a thirty-year career compressed into two hours and twenty-six minutes of accelerating narration. Henry Hill was still in witness protection when it was released. Pileggi published Wiseguy in 1985 and Scorsese called him the week it appeared.
The Copacabana steadicam shot is three minutes through a kitchen, a corridor and a service entrance to a table placed in front of the stage. It took eight takes and it’s doing argument instead of showing off, because the shot is the seduction the entire film is about.
Joe Pesci won the Academy Award for a performance built on the audience never knowing which way a scene will break. The funny-how sequence was improvised from an incident Pesci had witnessed, and Ray Liotta’s reaction is real uncertainty because he didn’t know it was coming. American film has no better depiction of amphetamine paranoia than the last act. The editing accelerates, the narration fragments, a helicopter may or may not be following, and the sauce still has to be stirred. Scorsese puts the audience inside the deterioration instead of describing it.
Goodfellas is the most seductive film on this page, and that’s exactly what makes it dangerous.
The first hour sells that life so well that I catch myself wanting in, and then Scorsese sends the bill. It takes guts to make an audience complicit and then refuse to let them off the hook. The paranoid last act, with the sauce still on the stove, is as funny as it is frightening, and I can’t name another film that manages both at once.
15. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) [full review]
► Read the full review of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
"Cameron took his own iconic villain and made him the protector."
Cameron made it for around one hundred million dollars, the most expensive film to that point, and the liquid metal effects took Industrial Light and Magic most of a year. The T-1000 has roughly five minutes of computer-generated screen time across the running time. Robert Patrick was cast for his build, on the principle that the threat should look ordinary.
The structural inversion is the reason the sequel works.
Schwarzenegger is the protector, the threat looks like nobody in particular, and Sarah Connor has become the person the first film was frightened of. Linda Hamilton trained for months and the physical transformation is the character’s argument. Edward Furlong was found in a boys club in Pasadena and had never acted.
The truck chase in the flood channel is practical and enormous. A real vehicle on a real concrete watercourse with a motorcycle underneath it, shot wide, and the sequence is still clearer to follow than most modern pursuits with twenty times the coverage. It won four Academy Awards including Visual Effects and Sound.
The hospital escape is the best action writing in the film.
The film explains Sarah’s plan, establishes the geography and sets up the paperclip, and when it collapses the audience understands exactly what has gone wrong and why. Nothing in it happens by accident. Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd had to buy the rights back from Hemdale to make it.
The ending is the argument Cameron was making and the studio let him keep it. The machine chooses to be destroyed, the thumbs-up was Schwarzenegger’s idea, and a character who’s about to remove himself from it states the film’s position on whether the future is fixed.
16. Hard Boiled (1992) [full review]
► Read the full review of Hard Boiled (1992)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"Woo’s last Hong Kong film, and the hospital sequence rewrote action cinema."
Woo’s last Hong Kong film before Hollywood and the one that goes furthest. Chow Yun-fat is a police inspector, Tony Leung is an undercover officer nobody knows about, and the final hour takes place almost entirely inside a hospital with an arms cache in the basement.
The teahouse opening establishes the tone immediately. A shotgun, a flour-covered birdcage, a slide down a bannister and a body count the film treats as routine. Woo is announcing that nothing here will be restrained and then keeping the promise for two hours. Philip Kwok choreographed the action and appears as one of the gunmen.
The hospital sequence contains a shot running nearly three minutes without a cut, moving between floors in a lift while the fight continues on both sides of the doors. The crew achieved it by building the lift as a practical rig and it remains one of the hardest things anybody has staged.
The maternity ward evacuation is the film’s most argued-about passage, with gunfire, infants and Chow carrying a baby through a corridor while returning fire. It should be unwatchable and Woo commits so completely that it becomes the emotional center of the picture. It was the last film Woo made in Hong Kong before Hard Target in 1993.
Hard Boiled is Woo with the brakes cut, and I’m grateful he made it before Hollywood got hold of him. The maternity ward should be in terrible taste, and somehow it plays as the most human stretch in the film. The American directors who copied him grabbed the slow motion and left out the feeling, and their pictures are hollow for it.
17. Leon: The Professional (1994) [full review]
► Read the full review of Leon: The Professional (1994)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Besson’s best film, and the most uncomfortable relationship in mainstream action."
Besson wrote it in a month after Jean Reno’s character in La Femme Nikita, shot it in New York, and cast Natalie Portman at eleven from a pool of more than two thousand. The European cut runs twenty-two minutes longer and the additional material is difficult.
Leon is defined through habit before he’s defined through violence. Milk, the plant, sleeping upright in a chair, the matinee. By the time Mathilda knocks on his door the audience understands exactly what her arrival is breaking, and Reno never has to articulate any of it.
Gary Oldman’s Stansfield is a performance with no floor. He’s a corrupt DEA agent who takes pills, talks about Beethoven and executes a family, and Oldman plays the part at a volume nobody else would attempt. The everyone line is the most quoted thing in the film.
The action is sparse and precise. The opening hit is a lesson in staging, the apartment siege is built on geography established twenty minutes earlier, and the ring in the last scene is set up so casually that most viewers don’t register it until it’s used.
Last Man Standing narrates away the mystery that made Yojimbo work. What to withhold and why is covered in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
18. Last Man Standing (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of Last Man Standing (1996)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
"Yojimbo relocated to Prohibition Texas, acknowledging the source this time."
Walter Hill remade Yojimbo as a Prohibition western in a Texas border town, the third time that story had been adapted after Kurosawa and A Fistful of Dollars. Bruce Willis plays a gunman selling himself to two gangs at once. Kurosawa’s estate was paid for the rights this time. That hadn’t happened with Leone.
The gunfights are the reason to watch it. Hill shoots them with enormous .45 automatics, bodies thrown backward through storefronts, and dust hanging in every frame. The style is closer to a Woo film than to a western and the film commits to it without apology.
Christopher Walken’s Hickey is barely in the first half and dominates the second. He arrives with a scarred face and a Thompson gun, speaks in a tone nobody else in the picture is using, and the film gets considerably better the moment he appears. Bruce Dern plays the sheriff and William Sanderson the hotel keeper.
The problem is the narration. Willis explains his own motivations continuously in voiceover, removing the ambiguity the structure depends on. Yojimbo works because nobody knows what Sanjuro wants, and this version keeps telling the audience. Ry Cooder scored it and had worked with Hill on several earlier pictures.
The narration is a weakness, and it’s the one crack in a film I’d still put up here without a second thought. Walken walks in and owns the second half, and Hill shoots every gunfight with a conviction I miss in nearly every action picture made today. Tune out the voiceover and what’s left is pure pleasure.
19. The Fifth Element (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Fifth Element (1997)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"Every element serving one vision with total commitment."
Besson began writing it at sixteen and made it twenty-two years later for around ninety million dollars, the most expensive European production to that point. Jean Giraud and Jean-Claude Mezieres designed the world. That’s why it looks like nothing else in nineties science fiction.
The flying car chase through New York rests on practical miniatures, a technique the industry was already abandoning in 1997, and the physicality gives the sequence a weight that digital work of the period couldn’t achieve. Every vehicle in the frame has mass. Digital Domain built the miniatures and the city has around two hundred and fifty levels.
Gary Oldman’s Zorg is a performance nobody asked for and the film would be poorer without. The half-haircut, the southern accent, the speech about the glass. He’s playing a different and larger picture than everybody around him and it somehow fits. Oldman took the part as a favor after Besson produced one of his own films.
The Diva Plavalaguna sequence is the film’s best construction. An operatic aria that becomes impossible for a human voice, intercut with a fight two floors below, and the editing puts the two rhythms in the same time signature deliberately. Inva Mula provided the singing voice and the final passage was assembled digitally.
Chris Tucker’s Ruby Rhod divides audiences permanently and the film can’t be defended on that point. He’s loud, he’s in a great deal of the second half, and there’s no version of the argument where everybody agrees. Milla Jovovich was twenty-one and learned the invented Divine Language for the part.
20. The Blade Trilogy (1998-2004) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Blade Trilogy (1998-2004)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"The foundation document of modern Marvel cinema, and nobody credits it."
Three films across six years that made the modern comic book adaptation commercially viable, and almost nobody credits them for it. The first arrived in 1998, two years before X-Men, and proved a Marvel property could work as an R-rated action picture. New Line made it for around forty-five million dollars and it took over one hundred and thirty.
Stephen Norrington’s 1998 film opens with the blood rave, the best single sequence in the trilogy. Sprinklers, a packed club, strobe lighting and Wesley Snipes arriving in a coat, and the film establishes its entire tone in about four minutes. Goyer wrote all three films and Traci Lords appears briefly in the opening sequence.
Wesley Snipes had trained in martial arts since childhood and choreographed a heavy amount of his own work across all three of the films. The physical performance is the reason the character reads as dangerous instead of as a man being assisted considerably by the editing. Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II is the best of the three and the only one with a real idea. The Reapers are a plague that preys on vampires, forcing an alliance nobody wants, and del Toro’s creature design is unpleasant in a way the first film’s wasn’t.
Blade: Trinity is the collapse. David Goyer directed his own script, the production was acrimonious, Snipes has publicly disputed his own involvement, and the film hands most of its running time to two new characters nobody had asked for. Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel play the Nightstalkers the third film introduces.
I’ll take the first two Blade films over most of the superhero parade that followed them, and they get left out of that history too often. Snipes moves like a man who could hurt you, and del Toro’s Reapers still disturb me. Trinity lets the side down, but two out of three this good is a better average than most franchises ever post.
Honorable Mentions: Action Films Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or close to it and each is on the list.
Where Eagles Dare (1968)
Alistair MacLean wrote the novel and the screenplay at once, and the plot reverses so many times that Richard Burton has to explain it in a twelve-minute scene. The cable car fight is dangerous and mostly practical.
The Road Warrior (1981)
Miller built the last forty minutes as one sustained chase with a tanker, a gyrocopter and almost no dialogue. Every vehicle stunt is practical and several of them went wrong on camera and were kept.
The Guns of Navarone (1961)
A demolition team scales a cliff to reach two artillery pieces in a mountain, and the film spends most of its length on the climb and the betrayal. Gregory Peck and David Niven argue about the cost of the mission throughout.
A Better Tomorrow (1986)
It made Chow Yun-fat a star and established the Hong Kong heroic bloodshed cycle. The restaurant sequence with pistols hidden in flowerpots was copied for the next fifteen years across two continents.
Bullet in the Head (1990)
Woo’s bleakest film, following three friends from Hong Kong into Vietnam and letting the war dismantle every one of them. He’s described it as the most personal thing he ever made.
Project A (1983)
Chan fell from a clock tower through two awnings onto the ground and shot the stunt three times. The bicycle chase through an alley is the best sustained physical comedy sequence in his catalogue.
Drunken Master II (1994)
Chan at forty with Lau Kar-leung choreographing, and the final fight runs close to twenty minutes. He crawled across real burning coals for one shot and the film doesn’t cut away from it.
Enter the Dragon (1973)
Bruce Lee died six days before the premiere and the film made him a global figure posthumously. The mirror room finale was built for the production and other films have copied it constantly since.
The Night Comes for Us (2018)
Timo Tjahjanto put Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim on opposite sides and produced the most punishing fight choreography ever committed to film. The butcher shop sequence is difficult to sit through.
The Raid 2 (2014)
Twice the length and considerably more ambitious, with a prison riot in mud and a kitchen fight that runs several minutes. The car chase was shot with the cameraman moving between vehicles at speed.
Ong-Bak (2003)
Tony Jaa performed everything without wires or doubles and the film says so in its own marketing. The chase through Bangkok on foot is the sequence that introduced Muay Thai to Western audiences.
The Train (1964)
Frankenheimer wrecked real locomotives because there was no other way to shoot it, and the film is about whether a crate of paintings is worth a human life. Burt Lancaster performs his own work throughout.
Dishonorable Mentions: Action Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had the budget, the cast or the premise and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
Wild Wild West (1999)
A hundred and seventy million dollars on a steampunk western whose climax is a mechanical spider. Will Smith turned down The Matrix for it and has said so publicly more than once.
The Last Airbender (2010)
Shyamalan compressed a twenty-episode season into ninety-four minutes and had characters narrate events the film had just shown. The elemental choreography is slowed to the point where nothing connects.
Jonah Hex (2010)
Cut from a reported two hours to eighty-one minutes after reshoots, leaving a film where characters reference events that were removed. Josh Brolin and John Malkovich are both stranded in it.
R.I.P.D. (2013)
A hundred and thirty million dollars on a premise identical to Men in Black with none of the timing. Jeff Bridges plays a nineteenth century marshal in a tone the rest of the film never matches.
47 Ronin (2013)
A real historical account with enormous dramatic potential, rewritten to add a witch, a dragon and a foreign protagonist. It lost over a hundred and fifty million dollars.
Jupiter Ascending (2015)
The Wachowskis built an enormous inheritance plot around a protagonist who’s rescued in nearly every sequence and decides almost nothing. The bureaucracy sequence is the best thing in it and lasts four minutes.
What Do You Think?
I know Taken at the top will be the objection, and I’d make the same call again tomorrow. It’s up there on efficiency, and ninety-three minutes with nothing wasted beats three bloated hours of everything a studio could afford. I’ve sat through too many films that confuse size with excitement, and every one of these twenty knows the difference. Tell me where you’d put it.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Mediocre |
Part 10: The Poor |
Part 11: The Failures
