Part 3 – The Excellent
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
The films in this tier mostly deliver their world while moving. Fury Road is a two-hour chase out along one road and back, and the War Boys, the Citadel, the water economy and the wives all arrive inside that single movement with nobody stopping to explain any of it. District 9 does the same thing through eviction paperwork and a cat food black market.
That’s harder than it looks and it’s the difference between worldbuilding and exposition. The films that stop to brief the audience are further down this ranking.
Movies that trust me to keep up are the ones I come back to, and this tier is packed with them.
Nothing kills my interest faster than a scene where the action stops so a character can explain the rules to people who already know them. I can feel myself losing interest while it happens. Every picture here found a way around that problem, and that’s what put them this high on my list.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the third of eleven parts.
Fury Road delivers an entire society without stopping the vehicles, and John Wick hands over an economy in gold coins. Build while moving, using the World Builder’s Handbook.
1. Face/Off (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of Face/Off (1997)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"The operatic peak of nineties American action, and the premise is completely absurd."
Woo’s third American film is the one where the studio finally let him work, and the premise is preposterous enough that committing to it entirely was the only available strategy. An FBI agent and a terrorist exchange faces surgically and then have to live inside each other’s lives. Travolta and Cage are each playing the other actor playing a character, a much harder assignment than it sounds. Cage studied Travolta’s posture and speech for weeks beforehand and the mimicry is precise enough that the audience can track who’s inside which body without being reminded. The film is about families instead of the chase. Archer is inside Troy’s life with Troy’s partner and son, Troy is inside Archer’s marriage and grieving daughter, and both men discover things about the other’s domestic situation that the plot then has to account for.
The mirror shootout is Woo’s best American sequence. Two men on opposite sides of a wall of reflective panels, firing at images, and the geography is established well enough that the audience knows which reflection belongs to whom throughout. Mike Werb and Michael Colleary wrote it and it had been in development since 1990.
The boat chase closes it and the picture never once apologizes for what it is. Doves in a chapel, a slow-motion crucifix, a child in headphones during a firefight. Woo staged all of it with total sincerity and the film is the better for refusing any irony at all.
Face/Off is exactly the kind of movie I wish studios still had the nerve to make.
A timid director would have played the face swap for laughs and winked at the audience, and the film would have shrunk into a sketch. Woo plays it like grand opera and I believe all of it, doves included. My one small gripe is that the boat chase keeps going after the story has already ended.
2. The Matrix (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Matrix (1999)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.7/10
"A philosophy lecture turned into one of the most entertaining action films ever made."
The Wachowskis built a film on a philosophy reading list and sold it as an action picture. The cast were required to read Baudrillard, Kevin Kelly and Dylan Evans before production, and the four-month martial arts training under Yuen Woo-ping was the first time a Western production had committed to Hong Kong choreography properly.
Bullet time was built by ringing a subject with a hundred and twenty stills cameras fired in sequence, then interpolating between the frames. It had been done before in smaller forms, and this film turned it into a technique everybody copied, usually without understanding what it was for.
Exposition is a problem the film solves by making the explanation part of the plot. Morpheus tells Neo what the Matrix is because he has to recruit Neo, the audience learns alongside him, and no scene in the film exists purely to brief anybody. Warner Bros. gave them the budget after Bound and still expected a loss.
In the lobby sequence, the choreography demonstrates the rules the film spent an hour establishing. Neo and Trinity can do these things because the film has taught the audience the physics, and the pleasure is watching established constraints exploited instead of watching spectacle. Bill Pope shot it and Don Davis scored it, and both returned for the sequels.
The sequels are a separate argument and the first film doesn’t need them. Reloaded and Revolutions expand the mythology in directions the original had no interest in, and the 1999 picture is complete on its own terms in a way the two follow-ups made harder to remember.
The first Matrix makes me a little angry on behalf of every movie that copied it. Half the industry grabbed bullet time and skipped the hour of rule-building that made the lobby scene mean anything, and we got years of slow-motion spinning with nothing at stake. The Wachowskis did the homework before they showed off. I can forgive them the sequels for that alone.
3. The One (2001) [full review]
► Read the full review of The One (2001)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.9/10
"A hundred and twenty-five parallel universes, and killing your other selves makes you stronger."
James Wong made a multiverse action film two decades before the concept became standard, with Jet Li hunting other versions of himself across parallel universes and absorbing their strength with each kill. The premise is better than the film around it. Wong and Glen Morgan had written for The X-Files before moving into features.
Li plays both leads and the two performances are distinct. Gabriel Yulaw moves with certainty and uses hard external styles, Gabe Law is hesitant and defensive, and the choreography by Corey Yuen assigns each of them a different martial vocabulary on purpose. Delroy Lindo and Jason Statham play the two agents pursuing him.
The escalation rule is the good idea. Every version killed makes the survivor stronger and everybody else weaker, so the film has a built-in clock and a reason the final confrontation has to happen. Almost nothing else in the script uses it. Statham was two years into his film career and had come from Guy Ritchie pictures.
The execution is where it falls down. The multiverse policing agency is explained in flat exposition, the digital doubling is poor even for 2001, and the film runs eighty-seven minutes because there’s not enough material to sustain anything longer. It cost around forty-nine million dollars and took just over seventy.
4. Swordfish (2001) [full review]
► Read the full review of Swordfish (2001)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"The opening monologue is better than the film’s reputation and the bus sequence is better than both."
Dominic Sena opens with the best scene in the film and never reaches it again. John Travolta sits in a cafe explaining what’s wrong with Hollywood endings, and the camera circles him for four minutes before the shot pulls back to reveal a hostage situation already in progress.
The bank explosion that follows was shot with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree camera array on a scale nobody had attempted, freezing a blast wave and moving around it. It cost a considerable fraction of the budget and remains impressive. Skip Woods wrote it and Joel Silver produced for Warner Bros.
Hugh Jackman was cast immediately after X-Men and plays a hacker with a daughter he can’t see, the entire motivation the film gives him. The computer material is the usual nonsense and the film moves fast enough that most viewers don’t care. Don Cheadle plays the agent who has been chasing him since the conviction.
The last act reverses several times and the reversals don’t survive examination. The film reveals Travolta’s Gabriel Shear as a covert operative funding counter-terrorism through bank theft, and the explanation requires the audience to accept that everything preceding it was staged. Halle Berry was paid a reported half million extra for one scene, and the coverage never moved past it.
The Matrix makes every explanation a scene somebody needed to have, because Neo is being recruited. Turn exposition into negotiation in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
5. Black Hawk Down (2001) [full review]
► Read the full review of Black Hawk Down (2001)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Nobody gets an arc. That is the point."
Ridley Scott adapted Mark Bowden’s account of the October 1993 raid in Mogadishu, shot it in Morocco with the cooperation of the United States Army, and put the cast through a week of military training. The film runs one hundred and forty-four minutes and covers roughly eighteen hours.
The structure deliberately refuses individual heroism. There are close to thirty named soldiers, almost none of them has a backstory, and the film identifies them by helmet markings and radio callsigns because that’s how the men themselves would have done it. Ken Nolan wrote the screenplay and Jerry Bruckheimer produced.
The confusion is the point and Scott commits to it completely. Radio traffic overlaps, orders contradict each other, a convoy is directed through the wrong intersection twice, and the audience is as lost as the soldiers for long stretches. Josh Hartnett, Eric Bana, Tom Hardy and Orlando Bloom are all in it early in their careers.
Critics have faulted the film for giving Somali characters almost no interiority and the criticism is fair. Bowden’s book has considerably more of it, and the picture’s decision to stay inside the American perspective is a real limitation instead of a stylistic choice. It won Academy Awards for Editing and Sound Mixing.
The final run is the sequence that works. Men jogging out of the city behind vehicles because there’s no room inside them, shot without music, and the film ends on a kitchen and a line about why anybody goes back. Hans Zimmer scored it and used Somali and Middle Eastern vocalists throughout.
Black Hawk Down moves me more than almost any war picture I can name.
That jog out of the city with no music is the scene that justifies its place, because Scott refuses to tell me how to feel and the silence does the job. I agree with the criticism about the Somali characters, and it’s the one thing I’d change. The rest puts you in the dust and the noise with those men and doesn’t let you out.
6. The Bourne Identity (2002) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Bourne Identity (2002)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"A man works out what he is from what his own body can do."
Doug Liman fought the studio for two years and the production went badly enough that reshoots were ordered and the ending replaced. What survives is the film that reset the spy genre and made the Bond series rebuild itself from scratch four years later. Chris Cooper and Clive Owen play the two men managing the problem.
The Paris apartment fight is the one everybody cites. A pen against a knife, shot at close range with almost no cutting away, and choreographed around what a man cornered in a small room would reach for. Nothing in it is presented as stylish.
The amnesia does structural work most amnesia plots never manage. Bourne learns he speaks several languages, reads a room automatically and can disarm a man in under two seconds at the same moment the audience does, so competence arrives as discovery instead of as demonstration.
Franka Potente’s Marie is the film’s other achievement. She’s not a professional, she’s frightened for legitimate reasons, and her presence forces Bourne to keep explaining a world he doesn’t understand either. The hair-cutting scene does more characterization than any dialogue in the picture.
7. Constantine (2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of Constantine (2005)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Better than its reputation, and the objection was casting instead of film-making."
Francis Lawrence made his first feature from a comic whose protagonist is a blond Liverpudlian, cast Keanu Reeves, and relocated the story to Los Angeles. Readers of the source were furious and the film that resulted is considerably better than that history suggests. Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello adapted the Hellblazer comics.
The cosmology is the best thing in it. Heaven and Hell are forbidden from direct intervention, so both sides work through influence and half-breeds, and the rule gives every supernatural encounter a legal shape the film never has to explain twice. Rachel Weisz plays the detective and Shia LaBeouf the apprentice.
Tilda Swinton plays Gabriel as androgynous, bureaucratic and entirely without warmth, and Peter Stormare arrives as Lucifer in the last fifteen minutes in a white suit with tar running off his feet. Both performances are pitched exactly right. Djimon Hounsou plays Midnite and runs a nightclub on neutral ground between the sides.
Constantine is dying of lung cancer throughout and the film treats it as the central fact about him instead of background. He’s trying to buy salvation with deeds, the arrangement doesn’t work that way, and the ending turns on him finally understanding why.
The casting fight buried Constantine unfairly, because a smart and strange movie got judged on a hair color and an accent. Swinton and Stormare give two of my favorite supernatural performances on film, and the rule that neither side may step in directly gives the story a spine most fantasy never bothers to build. I’d have happily watched another hour of Stormare dripping tar in that white suit.
8. Serenity (2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of Serenity (2005)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"A feature made to give a canceled television series a proper conclusion."
Joss Whedon got a feature after Firefly was canceled fourteen episodes in, an outcome that almost never happens, and the film had to work for an audience that had never seen the series. It largely does, and the compression cost it some of what made the show work.
The opening is a structural feat. A classroom, a flashback, a laboratory extraction and a security recording, resolving into a single continuous shot moving through the ship and introducing seven regulars by what each of them is doing. It takes about four minutes. Universal made it for around thirty-nine million dollars and it barely recovered that.
The Reavers are handled correctly. They’re described for most of the running time, glimpsed at distance, and only fully shown once the film has established what they do. The explanation of where they came from is the best idea in the picture. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the Operative and is given no name at any point.
The deaths are the reason the film has a reputation. Whedon kills two regulars, neither of them warned, and one of them mid-sentence in a way that reads as arbitrary instead of dramatic. The audience spends the last act unable to assume anybody is safe.
9. Live Free or Die Hard (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"A genuine return to form after twelve years, held back by a certificate."
Len Wiseman made the fourth film twelve years after the third, rated it for a wider audience, and the compromise shows in a series built on a man bleeding. It’s nevertheless the most structurally organized sequel in the sequence. Mark Bomback wrote it from an article about American infrastructure vulnerability.
The fire sale is the spine and the film states it in three parts early. Transport, finance, utilities, in that order, and the audience can track how far the plan has progressed at any point without anybody recapping. That’s a real piece of construction.
The tunnel sequence and the highway interchange are both practical to a degree the period had mostly abandoned. Cars are launched into a toll plaza, a vehicle destroys a helicopter, and the physical work is the reason those sequences still read as weighty.
The jet at the end is where it loses the thread. A fighter aircraft chasing a lorry along a collapsing motorway is the point at which the series stops being about a policeman in the wrong place, and the film never recovers the earlier tone.
Justin Long is a better foil than the marketing suggested. He’s frightened in a way McClane isn’t, he’s useful for reasons McClane can’t replicate, and the dynamic is close to what the third film did with Samuel L. Jackson. Timothy Olyphant plays Gabriel and Maggie Q the operative in the tunnel sequence.
District 9 spends an hour making its lead unpleasant before anything happens to him. Build an arc with room to travel using the Protagonist Handbook.
10. Iron Man (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of Iron Man (2008)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"The foundation the entire franchise was built on, and it is good before any of that weight attaches."
Favreau shot major portions without a finished script, with Downey improvising dialogue and the production working from an outline. It should have produced a disaster and instead produced the film that made a decade of shared-universe cinema commercially possible. Jeff Bridges shaved his head for Obadiah Stane and grew a beard for it.
Downey was a real risk. He had been uninsurable, Marvel’s board opposed the casting, and Favreau insisted because the character’s arc required somebody who could play arrogance and self-disgust in the same scene without softening either. Gwyneth Paltrow and Terrence Howard complete the principal cast. The cave sequence is the best-constructed material in the film. A suit built from missile components in captivity is a problem the audience can follow, the constraints are visible, and Yinsen is the only character in the picture who changes Stark instead of reacting to him.
The Mark II flight test is the sequence people remember and it’s a comedy scene. Icing at altitude, a bad landing through three floors, and a fire suppression system operating on cue. The film treats invention as iterative and fallible. It took over half a billion dollars and Marvel Studios financed it independently.
Where it falls down is the last act, and it set a pattern the franchise repeated for years. A larger version of the protagonist’s own suit, a fight at night in an industrial setting, and a resolution that’s nothing to do with what the film was about.
11. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"The consensus on this one is wrong in an interesting way."
Gavin Hood made the film that killed the X-Men prequel model for several years, and it leaked online in workprint form a month before release, producing a criminal investigation and a great deal of coverage about everything except the picture. David Benioff and Skip Woods share the screenplay credit.
The opening credits are the best thing in it. Logan and Victor fighting through the American Civil War, both World Wars and Vietnam in a single montage, aging not at all, and the sequence does a century of characterization in about two minutes. Danny Huston plays Stryker and Ryan Reynolds appears as Wade Wilson.
Liev Schreiber’s Victor Creed is the film’s strongest element by a wide margin. He’s enjoying himself, the relationship with Logan has an actual history, and the performance is doing considerably more than the screenplay requires of it. The workprint leak led to a federal investigation and a conviction.
The Deadpool decision is the one nobody has forgiven. A character defined entirely by speech is given a sealed mouth, arm blades and optic beams, and the film’s own studio spent the next several years pretending the sequence hadn’t happened. Hood had made Tsotsi, winner of the foreign language Academy Award in 2006.
12. District 9 (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of District 9 (2009)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Worldbuilding delivered entirely through logistics and paperwork."
Neill Blomkamp expanded his own six-minute short into a feature for around thirty million dollars, shot it in Chiawelo with residents who had been evicted, and improvised most of the dialogue. Sharlto Copley had never acted and was cast because he’d produced the short. The documentary framing does the world-building. Interviews, security footage, news inserts and a corporate eviction process, and the audience learns the entire situation through paperwork and talking heads without a single scene of explanation. Peter Jackson produced it after a Halo adaptation collapsed in preproduction.
Wikus is the film’s real achievement. He’s petty, cowardly, casually cruel and enormously pleased with himself, and the picture spends an hour making the audience dislike him before anything happens that would earn sympathy. It was nominated for Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Editing and Visual Effects.
Blomkamp films the transformation as body horror and the film never lets it be heroic. Fingernails, teeth, an arm, and a man who keeps trying to negotiate his way back to a life that’s already been reassigned to somebody else. Blomkamp grew up in Johannesburg and left for Canada at eighteen.
Conventional action takes over in the last act and the film survives it because the argument is already made. The exoskeleton sequence is well staged, and the film presents Wikus’s final decision without any suggestion that it redeems anything. Image Engine built the prawns digitally on a fraction of a standard budget.
If anybody tells me a first-time actor can’t carry a picture, District 9 is my answer. Copley makes Wikus so smug and petty that I wanted something bad to happen to him, and then the film makes me ashamed of wanting it. That’s a nasty trick and I admire the hell out of it. My one complaint is the late turn into exoskeleton action, and I’d have traded it for more of the paperwork and the panic.
13. Cowboys and Aliens (2011) [full review]
► Read the full review of Cowboys and Aliens (2011)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.0/10
"The western half is played completely straight. That is why the hybrid works."
Jon Favreau made it between Iron Man films with Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig, five credited writers and a budget around one hundred and sixty-three million dollars. It lost money and the title did most of the damage before anybody saw it. Scott Mitchell Rosenberg published the graphic novel in 2006.
The western half is well made. Favreau shoots New Mexico properly, the town is a real set, and the first forty minutes work as a straight western about a man who can’t remember what he’s done. Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell and Paul Dano fill out the cast.
Ford is better here than in most of his late work. Woodrow Dolarhyde is a cattleman who’s unpleasant to everybody including his own son, and the film lets him stay unpleasant considerably longer than the structure would normally permit. Spielberg and Ron Howard both produced it alongside Favreau.
The aliens are properly designed: heavy, wrong-looking things with a second set of arms that open out of the chest, shown in pieces until the story needs them in full. They want gold, a motive the film explains in one line and then has the sense to leave alone, and every attack is staged clearly enough that you always know where the ships are.
Constantine writes the prohibitions before the powers, and Serenity spends a regular with no warning at all. Two ways to generate pressure in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
14. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) [full review]
► Read the full review of Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"The most disciplined origin in the franchise, and it sustains one tone throughout."
Joe Johnston had made The Rocketeer twenty years earlier and was hired for that period sensibility. The film is a nineteen-forties adventure picture with an unfashionable sincerity, and it’s the least ironic thing Marvel has produced. Markus and McFeely wrote it and went on to write every later Captain America film.
Its first hour is the whole reason it works. Steve Rogers is small, sick and repeatedly rejected, and the film spends real time establishing that the character was already the person he becomes. The grenade scene states the entire thesis in about fifteen seconds. Hugo Weaving plays the Red Skull and declined to return afterward.
The digital shrinking of Chris Evans was achieved by shooting a body double and mapping his head, and it holds up considerably better than most work of the period because the film keeps the shots short and the lighting low. Hayley Atwell plays Peggy Carter and later carried her own series.
The USO montage is the best structural idea in the picture. A super-soldier is made and then used to sell war bonds, both funny and a real observation about what institutions do with unexpected assets. Alan Silvestri scored it and wrote the march that recurs across the franchise.
It thins out in the last act. Hydra becomes a conventional antagonist with energy weapons, the Red Skull is underused, and the ending is a plane in ice because the franchise needed him in the present day. Stanley Tucci plays Erskine and gets the film’s most important scene.
15. John Wick 1-4 (2014-2023) [full review]
► Read the full review of John Wick 1-4 (2014-2023)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Four films built out of a dog and a car, and the worldbuilding is the achievement."
Four films across nine years, built by stunt performers who decided the audience should be able to see what’s happening. Chad Stahelski and David Leitch had doubled Keanu Reeves on The Matrix and made the first film for around twenty million dollars. Ian McShane plays the Continental manager across all four pictures.
By design, the first film’s premise is famously thin. A retired assassin’s dog is killed and the picture spends ninety minutes on the consequences, with no subplot, no romance and no second objective anywhere in it. Lance Reddick appears as the concierge and died shortly before the fourth opened.
The world arrives entirely through props and procedure. Gold coins, a hotel with rules, a cleanup service that arrives with a van and a price list. Nobody stops to explain any of it and the films assume the audience will keep up. That’s why the sequels had anywhere to go.
The gun work is the detail specialists point at. Reeves trained for months in a close-quarters shooting discipline and the reloads, transitions and target changes are shot in frame, so the audience watches a magazine change happen instead of hearing it offscreen. Kolstad originally wrote the character as a man in his seventies.
Chapter 4 overextends. The Osaka sequence and the Sacre-Coeur stairs are as good as the series gets and the running time passes two hours and forty minutes, more than a premise this deliberately lean was built to carry. Leitch went uncredited as co-director and later made Atomic Blonde.
The John Wick films make me happy in a way most modern action doesn’t, because somebody finally decided I deserved to see the fight. For years studios chopped every punch into ten pieces and called it energy, and I was sick of it. These four films put the camera back where it belongs. Chapter 4 runs too long, and I’d still take its bloat over a tidy movie I can’t follow.
16. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) [full review]
► Read the full review of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"A two-hour car chase out along one road and back, and Miller says so cheerfully."
Miller was seventy when he shot it, spent around one hundred and fifty million dollars, and built a two-hour chase that runs out along one road and turns around at the midpoint. It won six Academy Awards and almost nothing in it was generated instead of built and driven.
Miller delivers the world entirely inside the movement. The War Boys, the Citadel, the water economy, the blood bags, the wives and the Vuvalini are all established while vehicles are moving, and no character stops to brief anybody about any of it. Miller had been developing it since 1998 and the production moved to Namibia in 2012.
Furiosa is the protagonist and Max is the passenger, and Miller has been open about it. She’s the objective, the plan and the history, and the film’s structure is her escape with Max attached to the front of a car for the first twenty minutes.
The practical work is the reason it holds. Around one hundred and fifty vehicles were built, Cirque du Soleil acrobats performed the pole cats on real swinging rigs, and the Namibian desert is doing what a digital environment can’t. Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron didn’t get on and both have discussed it since.
Margaret Sixel edited it and had never cut an action film, and Miller chose her deliberately. The rule she worked to was that the point of interest stays in the center of the frame, so the audience never loses the thread across roughly twenty-eight hundred cuts.
Fury Road is the movie I’d hand to anybody who claims practical effects belong to the past.
Miller was seventy, he put real vehicles in a real desert, and I feel the weight of every one of them. Making Furiosa the lead was the right call, and I wish more franchises had the spine to let the title character ride along as a passenger. If I could keep only one film from this tier, it’d be this one.
17. Upgrade (2018) [full review]
► Read the full review of Upgrade (2018)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"A five million dollar film that delivers a complete vision."
Leigh Whannell made it for around five million dollars and the fight choreography is why it works. Grey is paralyzed and controlled by an implanted chip, so the camera locks to his body and rotates with him while his own limbs do things he’s not doing.
Logan Marshall-Green plays the whole film in two tones at once, horrified passenger and efficient machine, and the physical comedy of a man watching his own arm break somebody is the film’s best idea. The kitchen fight is the sequence everybody cites. Whannell had written the Saw and Insidious films before directing this.
The ending is bleak and the film has been building to it steadily. STEM wanted a body, engineered the attack that produced the injury, and the last scene is Grey’s consciousness locked inside a fantasy while the chip drives. Betty Gabriel plays the detective and Harrison Gilbertson the developer.
Instead of building its world, the film sketches it, and the economy of it is deliberate. A near future with autonomous cars, neural implants and visible inequality, delivered in passing across ninety-five minutes with nobody explaining how any of it came about. Blumhouse produced it and it took over sixteen million dollars.
Predator changes genre at the forty-minute mark and lets the characters work it out first. Manage a shift the reader can feel, using the Plot Handbook.
18. Nobody 1 & 2 (2021, 2025) [full review]
► Read the full review of Nobody 1 & 2 (2021, 2025)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Bob Odenkirk as a suburban father who used to be something else."
Derek Kolstad wrote the first film after the John Wick pictures and Ilya Naishuller directed it, with Bob Odenkirk training for two years beforehand. It arrived in 2021 to almost no expectation and the bus sequence is the reason anybody remembers it. Connie Nielsen plays the wife and Christopher Lloyd the father.
The premise is honest about itself in a way the genre usually isn’t. Hutch Mansell is bored, he’s been performing suburban mediocrity for years, and the home invasion gives him an excuse he was openly looking for.
The bus fight is the centerpiece and it’s deliberately unglamorous. Hutch is outnumbered, he’s hurt, he loses teeth, and the choreography has him winning through persistence and willingness instead of any superiority. RZA appears as the half-brother running a radio station from a shipping container. Nobody 2 in 2025 moves the family to a holiday resort and expands the scale. Sharon Stone arrives as the antagonist, the practical work is still good, and the sequel has the problem every sequel of this kind has: the excuse no longer needs to be manufactured.
19. The Northman (2022) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Northman (2022)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"The Hamlet source filmed as a Norse saga with no modern psychology."
Robert Eggers spent around ninety million dollars on a Norse revenge story built from the Amleth legend that Shakespeare later used for Hamlet. The historical consultation was extensive enough that the film reads as reconstruction instead of fantasy. Eggers co-wrote it with the Icelandic poet Sjon.
The long takes are the formal signature. The village raid is a single sustained sequence moving through burning buildings and a locked barn, and the camera never cuts away from what is being done or who’s doing it. Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang and Ethan Hawke fill out the principal cast.
Alexander Skarsgard is enormous and almost silent, and he builds the performance on animal movement instead of dialogue. Eggers has been open that the character is meant to be frightening instead of sympathetic throughout. Bjork appears in a single scene as a seeress. Eggers has said he wanted the protagonist to unsettle an audience.
Eggers refuses to modernize the film’s morality. Amleth’s revenge is presented as an obligation inside a belief system the picture takes seriously, and the audience is given no contemporary character to stand behind while it happens. Jarin Blaschke shot it and had photographed both of Eggers’s earlier films.
Anya Taylor-Joy’s Olga is the one figure operating strategically instead of ritually, and the film’s ending gives her the outcome that matters while Amleth completes a prophecy that costs him everything. It lost money despite strong reviews and a heavy critical reassessment since. She’s also the only character who survives with what she wanted.
The Northman is the kind of film I want studios to keep paying for even when it loses money.
Eggers never hands me a modern guide to hold my hand, and I respect him for trusting the audience to sit inside a brutal belief system without apology. Skarsgard frightens me in it. My small complaint is that Amleth is so single-minded that Olga ends up the more interesting person on screen.
20. Predator (1987) [full review]
► Read the full review of Predator (1987)
RLR: 8.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"An action film that becomes a monster film halfway through, and the switch is the design."
John McTiernan took over from the original director, the creature was scrapped after Jean-Claude Van Damme had already been cast inside it, and Stan Winston rebuilt it from scratch with a suggestion from James Cameron about mandibles. The production was a disaster and the film is close to perfect.
The structure is the trick. For forty minutes it’s a commando picture with a unit clearing a camp, and then the genre changes to horror with the same cast and no announcement. The transition happens entirely through the men noticing they’re being reduced.
The heat vision is the audience’s first information advantage and McTiernan uses it carefully. The viewer knows what’s happening before Dutch does, the point of view alternates, and the tension comes from watching competent men act on incomplete information. Jim and John Thomas wrote it and the pitch was a joke about Rocky IV.
Every member of the squad is legible by function. Blain’s minigun, Billy’s tracking, Mac’s precision, Hawkins’s jokes, and the film establishes all six inside the first twenty minutes without a single biographical line. Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura and Sonny Landham fill out the squad.
By the last act, the film has stripped Dutch of everything. No team, no weapons, no technology, and a protagonist who has to win by building traps out of mud and branches. The film’s argument is that the advantage was never the equipment. Kevin Peter Hall wore the creature suit and was seven feet two inches tall.
Predator is a blast and smarter than it has any right to be. My reservation is the first act, where the squad banter gets thick and a couple of the one-liners aren’t funny, and that’s what keeps it a half point below everything else in this part. Once Dutch is down to mud and branches, though, I’m completely hooked.
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.
Kill Zone (2005)
Donnie Yen against Wu Jing in an alley with a baton and a knife, choreographed in a day and running about ninety seconds. It’s the most efficient thing either man ever filmed and the rest of the picture is a real tragedy.
Flash Point (2007)
Yen brought mixed martial arts grappling into Hong Kong choreography here for the first time, and the last twenty minutes are almost entirely one fight through a village. The ground work was unheard of in the form.
Dragons Forever (1988)
It’s the last film Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao made together, and the three-way fight in a warehouse is the best any of them staged as a trio. Benny Urquidez returns as the opponent after Wheels on Meals.
Eastern Condors (1987)
Sammo Hung directed and starred in a Dirty Dozen variant set in Vietnam, and it’s considerably darker than his reputation suggests. The bamboo sequence and the bridge finale are both well staged.
Time and Tide (2000)
Tsui Hark shot a gunfight down the outside of an apartment block on ropes and through windows, and the camera goes with the performers. It’s among the most aggressive pieces of action direction anybody attempted that decade.
Full Contact (1992)
Ringo Lam gave Chow Yun-fat a revenge plot and shot bullets traveling from the round’s point of view. It should be ridiculous and it’s not. Simon Yam plays the antagonist at maximum theatricality.
Undisputed II (2006)
A direct-to-video sequel that nobody expected to be good, with Scott Adkins introducing Yuri Boyka in a Russian prison. The fight choreography is better than most theatrical releases of the same year.
Ninja Assassin (2009)
Rain trained for months and the film is shot in near darkness with an enormous amount of blood. It’s silly and it commits completely, the only way material like this survives.
Khartoum (1966)
Charlton Heston as Gordon and Laurence Olivier as the Mahdi, in a siege film that gives both men a coherent position and lets them meet twice. The politics are more careful than the period usually managed.
Von Ryan’s Express (1965)
Sinatra leads a prison break onto a hijacked train through the Alps, and the ending is the reason people remember it. He insisted on it against the studio and he was right.
Kelly’s Heroes (1970)
A war film that’s really a heist, with Clint Eastwood and Donald Sutherland going after a bank behind German lines. Sutherland plays a tank commander with anachronistic hippie dialogue and it somehow works.
Long Arm of the Law (1984)
Johnny Mak made a Hong Kong crime film about mainland gunmen crossing for one robbery, and the Kowloon Walled City chase is shot in the real thing before it was demolished. Almost nothing else looks like it.
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.
Torque (2004)
A motorcycle film where the vehicles are so heavily composited that they appear to be sliding across the road instead of touching it. The final chase reaches a speed the film states out loud and can’t render.
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)
Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu in a film whose plot is difficult to summarize after watching it. It holds a zero percent critical rating and the action is cut so heavily that no exchange is legible.
Bulletproof Monk (2003)
Chow Yun-fat is wasted entirely, the wire work is weightless, and the prophecy plot requires three signs that the film reveals and resolves inside the same scene. Nothing in it’s any consequence.
In the Name of the King (2007)
Uwe Boll with Jason Statham, Ray Liotta and Burt Reynolds, and a budget of around sixty million dollars that’s visible nowhere on screen. The ninja sequence arrives with no setup and is never mentioned again.
Dragonball Evolution (2009)
A property with decades of material reduced to a high school film with a prophecy. The screenwriter has publicly apologized for it more than once, an almost unheard-of outcome.
The Legend of Hercules (2014)
Renny Harlin made it for around seventy million dollars and every action sequence is slowed and then sped up, sometimes within the same shot. It was released six months before a better Hercules film.
I can forgive a cheap flop made by people who had nothing to work with. These six are harder to forgive, because each one had the money and the cast and still shipped something careless enough that nobody could follow a fight or care who won it.
What Do You Think?
This tier is about delivering a world while moving, and two entries here break the pattern deliberately. Black Hawk Down refuses to characterize anybody and The Northman refuses to translate. I think both of them earn it, and I’d put either one ahead of any glossy blockbuster that burns twenty minutes explaining itself before anybody throws a punch. Tell me which one you think earns 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
