Foreign Action & Adventure – Beyond Hollywood

For decades Hollywood treated action as a matter of budget: more cars, more explosions, more cuts. The filmmakers on this page worked with less money and more discipline. They built sequences a viewer can follow from the first punch to the last, with stunt performers taking real falls and cameras holding long enough to prove it.

I find this corner of cinema more exciting than almost anything the big studios release. A Hong Kong gunfight or a Korean corridor fight will tell you who’s standing where, what each blow costs and why the next room is worse than the last. Too many American action films cut so fast that nobody in the audience can tell you what happened, and I’ve lost patience with that.

These twenty films come from Japan, Hong Kong, France, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, India and Finland, and they run from 1954 to 2022. They’re listed in order of release. Where I’ve reviewed a film, the entry links to the full review and the opinion matches the rating there.

Watch them with subtitles. The dialogue is the least of it, and the choreography needs no translation.

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1. Seven Samurai (1954)

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“Again we’ve been defeated. The farmers have won. Not us.”

Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) sits at the head of any list of action films made outside Hollywood. Takashi Shimura plays Kambei, the aging ronin who agrees to defend a farming village from forty bandits in exchange for rice, and Toshiro Mifune plays Kikuchiyo, a farmer’s son posing as a samurai. Mifune’s outburst about how samurai have treated farmers adds a hard edge of class anger. The film runs 207 minutes and never drags. Every action picture about recruiting a team and holding a position against bad odds borrows its plan from this one.

The craft starts with a map. Kambei sketches the village, marks its weak points and assigns each man a position, so by the time the bandits ride in the audience knows the ground as well as the defenders do. Kurosawa shot the battles with multiple cameras and long lenses, then cut them into a final assault in pouring rain where men slip in mud and bows misfire. Kambei tallies dead bandits on a scroll, and each samurai who falls leaves a gap in a line we’ve studied for hours.

Seven Samurai came out of Toho’s jidaigeki tradition, and it made the samurai battle muddy and chaotic after years of stately studio swordplay.

Kurosawa admired John Ford’s westerns, and Hollywood paid the debt back by taking his film wholesale. John Sturges remade it as The Magnificent Seven in 1960. The recruitment structure then turned up in The Dirty Dozen and in team pictures from Ocean’s Eleven onward, and its rain battle became the model for staging a siege on film.

Three and a half hours, and I wouldn’t cut a minute. Kikuchiyo’s last reckless charge is the moment I’d keep if I could keep only one from this film.

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2. Yojimbo (1961)

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“I’ll get paid for killing, and this town is full of people who deserve to die.”

Yojimbo (1961) is Akira Kurosawa’s sharpest and funniest action film. Toshiro Mifune plays Sanjuro, a masterless samurai who wanders into a town split between two rotten gangs backed by rival merchants, and he sells his sword to both sides until they destroy each other. It opens with a dog trotting down the main street with a severed hand in its mouth, which tells you what kind of town this is. Mifune won Best Actor at Venice, and every lone-stranger action story since grew from this film.

The violence is brief and decisive. Sanjuro’s first fight is over in seconds, which settles his skill for the rest of the picture and frees Kurosawa to spend the middle on scheming. Tatsuya Nakadai’s Unosuke arrives with a revolver, and the stakes jump because a sword can’t outrun a bullet. When Sanjuro’s double game is exposed, he’s beaten half to death and smuggled out of town in a coffin, so the final duel on the wind-blown main street feels paid for. Masaru Sato’s jazzy score grins through all of it.

Yojimbo is a jidaigeki set in the dying days of the Tokugawa era, and its cynical, mercenary hero broke with the noble swordsmen of earlier period films. Sergio Leone copied it almost scene for scene as A Fistful of Dollars in 1964, and Toho sued and won. That film made Clint Eastwood a star and handed the western its Man with No Name. Hollywood went back to the source directly with Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing in 1996, which moved the standoff to Prohibition-era Texas.

Yojimbo gets a 10 from me because I can’t find a wasted minute in it. I could watch Mifune scratch and roll those shoulders for two hours with no plot at all and be perfectly happy.

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3. Police Story (1985)

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Police Story (1985) is the film where Jackie Chan put his body on the line for every shot.

Chan directed it and designed the action, and he plays Ka-kui, a Hong Kong cop assigned to guard a witness, played by Brigitte Lin, in a case against a drug lord. Maggie Cheung plays his long-suffering girlfriend May. The plot is a thin witness story that mostly moves him between set pieces, but nobody has matched the film’s mix of danger and slapstick. It won Best Picture at the Hong Kong Film Awards.

The film opens with a car chase straight down a hillside shantytown, the cars plowing through the shacks. Chan then clings to a speeding double-decker bus by the hook of an umbrella and stops it by threatening the driver.

The mall finale escalates through shattering glass until Chan slides several stories down a pole strung with lights and crashes through a glass roof. The lights heated the pole, and he came away with second-degree burns on his hands and a dislocated pelvis. The comedy is built with the same care as the fights.

Chan trained in Peking Opera as a child, and Police Story fuses that acrobatic discipline with the kung fu comedy he’d been building at Golden Harvest.

It set the template for his later films and for a generation of Hong Kong stunt teams. Hollywood borrowed directly. The bus stop turned up in Tango & Cash, and the shantytown chase inspired a similar sequence in Bad Boys II. Rush Hour brought Chan himself to Hollywood in 1998, though his American films never took the same risks.

Police Story makes me ridiculously happy, and that pole slide turns my stomach over every time. The plot is thin, a witness story that mostly gets him from one set piece to the next, and I forgive it the moment he grabs that pole.

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4. The Killer (1989)

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The Killer (1989) is John Woo’s heroic bloodshed classic and the high point of Hong Kong’s gunplay era.

Chow Yun-fat plays Ah Jong, a hitman who blinds a nightclub singer, played by Sally Yeh, during a shootout and takes one last contract to pay for her surgery. Danny Lee plays Inspector Li, the cop who hunts him and comes to respect him, since the two men share a code nobody around them follows. Woo plays the melodrama with total sincerity, and that nerve puts it on any list of the world’s great action films.

Woo stages gunfights like dance numbers. Slow motion stretches the key moments, and Chow fires two pistols at once, a style Woo had introduced in A Better Tomorrow. Each set piece has a clear layout, from the opening nightclub hit to the dragon boat race to the church where killer and cop fight side by side while doves scatter. The shootouts escalate in scale and in cost, and the church battle ends with Ah Jong shot in the eyes, crawling blind toward a woman who can’t see him either.

Woo learned his trade as an assistant director to Chang Cheh, whose Shaw Brothers swordplay films celebrated loyalty between men and heroic death, and The Killer moves that code into modern Hong Kong with guns. Hollywood took the two-gun style, the slow-motion doves and the Mexican standoff.

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez borrowed from Woo openly, The Matrix picked up his gunplay, and Woo himself moved to Hollywood for Hard Target and Face/Off. Most of the imitators kept the guns and dropped the sincerity.

A hitman taking one last job to pay for the eyes of the singer he blinded is pure melodrama, and I adore Woo for playing it with total sincerity. Chow can hold perfectly still with a gun in his hand and let you see the guilt underneath.

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5. La Femme Nikita (1990)

La Femme Nikita (1990), released in France simply as Nikita, is Luc Besson’s thriller about a junkie killer turned into a government assassin. Anne Parillaud plays Nikita, sentenced to life for killing a policeman during a pharmacy robbery and then offered a choice between death and training with a secret agency. Tchéky Karyo plays Bob, her handler, and Jeanne Moreau teaches her makeup and manners. Parillaud won the César for Best Actress, and the action works because every mission threatens the life Nikita is trying to build.

Besson builds each mission as a test that breaks the plan. Her first assignment is a hit in a crowded restaurant, and the promised escape route turns out to be bricked over, so she has to shoot her way out through the kitchen. Later she takes a sniper job from a hotel bathroom in Venice while her boyfriend Marco talks to her through the door. The embassy job collapses when Jean Reno’s Victor the Cleaner arrives and turns a quiet theft into a massacre, and each job cuts deeper into her life with Marco.

Nikita came out of the French cinéma du look, the glossy style Besson shared with Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax, and it pointed French crime films toward slick international action. Besson followed it with Léon: The Professional, which grew out of Reno’s Victor, and later produced Taken and The Transporter. Hollywood remade Nikita as Point of No Return in 1993 with Bridget Fonda, Hong Kong made Black Cat, and television ran two series. The trained woman assassin became a stock Hollywood figure after this film.

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6. Hard Boiled (1992)

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Hard Boiled is John Woo’s 1992 police thriller and his last Hong Kong film before his Hollywood years. Chow Yun-fat plays Inspector Tequila Yuen, a clarinet-playing cop hunting gunrunners, and Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays Alan, an undercover officer working inside the same gang. It belongs on any list of the world’s great action films because nobody has staged a gunfight with more ambition or more stamina. Its final siege inside a hospital runs about forty minutes, and no action film since has topped it.

Woo builds each set piece around a place with its own rules. The opening shootout tears apart a teahouse full of caged songbirds, and the hospital climax moves through the wards and down to the morgue where the gang hides its arsenal before it reaches a maternity ward, where Tequila has to get newborns out under fire. One unbroken take follows the two cops down a corridor, into an elevator and out onto another floor. Philip Kwok’s stunt team did the falls and explosions for real, so every impact reads as physical risk.

With Hard Boiled, Woo capped the heroic bloodshed cycle he started with A Better Tomorrow in 1986, the Hong Kong tradition of doomed cops and gangsters bound by loyalty and firing two pistols at once.

Hollywood took nearly all of it. The slow-motion dives, the Mexican standoffs and the gun-fu choreography turned up in the lobby shootout of The Matrix and across the John Wick films. Anyone who sees Hard Boiled after those movies will recognize how much of the American action vocabulary started in Hong Kong.

I hold every other action film up against Hard Boiled, and almost nothing survives the comparison. That forty-minute hospital siege leaves me wrung out in the best way.

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7. Léon: The Professional (1994)

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“Is life always this hard, or is it just when you’re a kid?”

Léon: The Professional is Luc Besson’s 1994 French production, shot in English on the streets of New York.

Jean Reno plays Léon, a Little Italy hitman who drinks milk and tends a houseplant, and Natalie Portman, in her feature debut, plays Mathilda, the twelve-year-old neighbor he takes in after a corrupt DEA agent murders her family. Gary Oldman plays that agent, Norman Stansfield. The film belongs on this list because it builds its gunfights around a bond worth protecting, so every shot fired costs something.

Besson opens with Léon working through a gangster’s guards while the camera barely lets us see him, all dark hallways and silent kills until a knife reaches the boss’s throat. The finale reverses that. An army of police storms Léon’s apartment, and Besson keeps the geography tight around one room and the vent shaft Léon breaks open to push Mathilda to safety. Escalation comes from numbers, and the cost comes from the grenades Léon straps on for his way out.

Léon grew out of Besson’s own Nikita (1990), where Reno played a cleaner named Victor, and it set the pattern for the English-language French action films Besson later produced, Taken and The Transporter among them. Hollywood had already remade Nikita as Point of No Return in 1993.

From Léon it took the hitman with a code and the killer who mentors a child, a pairing American thrillers keep returning to. Few of those copies share Besson’s patience with the long, still scenes between the shootouts.

Reno gives me a whole life in the milk and the plant without a line of backstory, and Oldman’s Stansfield is the scariest villain of the decade. I’d pick the International Version every time.

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8. Battle Royale (2000)

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“So today’s lesson is, you kill each other off till there’s only one left. Nothing’s against the rules.”

Battle Royale is Kinji Fukasaku’s 2000 film of Koushun Takami’s novel, in which the Japanese government drops a class of forty-two junior high students on an island, locks explosive collars on them and orders them to kill each other until one is left. Tatsuya Fujiwara plays Shuya, and Takeshi Kitano plays the former teacher running the game. It belongs on this list because it treats survival action as moral horror, and because it makes each of those kids a person before the killing starts.

The randomized weapons set the rules of combat. One student ends up with a submachine gun while Shuya gets a pot lid, and the film lets those mismatches play as comedy and dread in the same breath. Fukasaku divides the island into danger zones that go live on a schedule, so the usable ground keeps shrinking and pushes enemies together.

The fights range from clumsy accidents to cold ambushes. Because each death comes with a name and a head count on screen, the cost stays personal.

Fukasaku made his name in the 1970s with Battles Without Honor and Humanity, yakuza films shot with a handheld, chaotic ferocity, and Battle Royale turns that energy on Japanese panic over youth violence.

It was his last completed film. Its title now names a video game genre, and the teen death game reached American screens with The Hunger Games, which drew constant comparisons. The imitations soften the premise. Fukasaku’s version is relentless enough that parts of it are easier to admire than to enjoy, and none of the later versions match its bite.

It’s savage and sad at once, and it makes forty-two kids matter to me before it starts killing them. I give it a 9 and hold one point back because it’s so punishing to sit through.

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9. Infernal Affairs (2002)

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“Sorry, I’m a cop.”

Infernal Affairs is Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s 2002 Hong Kong thriller about two moles. Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays Chan, a cop who has spent ten years undercover in a triad, and Andy Lau plays Lau, a triad plant who has risen through the police. It’s lighter on gunfights than a typical action film and belongs here anyway, because its set pieces run on surveillance and the constant threat of exposure, and when violence finally breaks out it’s sudden and final.

The drug bust sets the pattern. Chan taps Morse code to his handler from inside the gang while Lau leaks police movements to the triad boss, and the film cuts between both sides of the same operation. Escalation comes from the two moles closing in on each other.

The cost arrives without warning: Anthony Wong’s Superintendent Wong falls from a rooftop onto a taxi, and the shootings happen fast, with no slow motion to cushion them. The rooftop face-off between Chan and Lau is the best scene in the film.

It comes out of the Hong Kong undercover tradition of Ringo Lam’s City on Fire and Woo’s Hard Boiled, where loyalty is what gets men killed. Casting Leung and Andy Lau, two of Hong Kong’s biggest stars, as mirror images gave the premise instant stakes. It arrived when the local industry was in a slump, helped revive it and spawned two sequels.

Hollywood took the premise almost scene for scene in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, which won Best Picture. The original is tighter and colder, and it runs about fifty minutes shorter.

I much prefer this to The Departed. Leung’s tiredness stays with me longer than anything in the remake, and I can’t find a wasted minute in it.

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10. Oldboy (2003)

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“Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone.”

Oldboy is Park Chan-wook’s 2003 Korean revenge thriller, the middle film of his Vengeance Trilogy.

Choi Min-sik plays Oh Dae-su, a businessman locked in a private cell for fifteen years without explanation and then released with five days to find out why. Yoo Ji-tae plays the man who locked him away. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004. It belongs on this list for the hammer fight alone, and the rest of the film backs it up with a revenge story that follows its own logic somewhere most thrillers won’t go.

The corridor fight plays out in one sideways tracking shot of about three minutes as Oh Dae-su takes on a hallway full of thugs with a hammer. Park keeps the camera at a fixed distance, so the geography never changes and the audience watches the fight turn into labor.

Choi gets hit, stops to breathe and keeps going with a knife stuck in his back. The escalation is exhaustion. Every swing costs him, and the shot refuses to cut away from what the fight does to a middle-aged body.

Oldboy arrived during the Korean film boom that followed Shiri and Park’s own Joint Security Area, and its Cannes win helped push Korean genre cinema onto international screens. It adapts a Japanese manga by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi.

Hollywood took it twice: Spike Lee remade it in 2013, and the single-take hallway fight became a template American action directors still copy. The remake lacks the original’s nerve, especially in an ending that pushes a revenge plot into far darker territory than a studio would allow.

Oldboy knocks me flat. I’d put the hammer hallway up against any fight scene ever filmed, because I feel every swing in my own shoulders.

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11. Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (2003)

Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior is Prachya Pinkaew’s 2003 Muay Thai film, and it introduced Tony Jaa to audiences far outside Thailand. Jaa plays Ting, a young man from the village of Nong Pradu who travels to Bangkok to recover the stolen head of Ong-Bak, the Buddha statue his village worships. The plot is thin, and the comic relief from Petchtai Wongkamlao runs long. It belongs on this list anyway, because its stunts are performed by a man who can plainly do them, and the camera keeps proving it.

Panna Rittikrai choreographed the fights, and the production made a selling point of shooting without wires or computer effects.

Jaa fights with knees and elbows, which keeps every exchange close and brutal. The street chase through Bangkok has him diving through a hoop of barbed wire, and Pinkaew replays the biggest stunts from extra angles so you can check that nobody cheated. The fight club sequence escalates by opponent, each challenger bringing a different style, and Ting leaves the later bouts visibly hurt. That damage keeps the stakes physical.

Thai action had a long tradition of cheap, hard-hitting martial arts pictures, and Rittikrai had been making them since his 1986 film Born to Fight. Ong-Bak gave that tradition a worldwide audience after Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp picked it up for international release. Jaa and Pinkaew followed it with Tom-Yum-Goong in 2005. Hollywood took the selling point. Studio action started advertising stunts done for real, and the instant replay became a badge of honor. Jaa himself later turned up in Furious 7, trading blows with Paul Walker.

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12. District B13 (2004)

District B13 is Pierre Morel’s 2004 French action film, written by Luc Besson and Bibi Naceri, and it put parkour on movie screens. In a walled-off Paris housing project in 2010, a resident named Leïto teams with an undercover cop named Damien to recover a stolen bomb from a gang boss called Taha.

David Belle, one of the founders of parkour, plays Leïto. Cyril Raffaelli, a martial artist and stuntman, plays Damien. The film runs well under ninety minutes and wastes almost none of them.

The opening chase tells you what kind of film this is.

Belle flees Taha’s men across rooftops and down stairwells, and Morel frames each jump wide enough to show where it starts and where it finishes. The route stays clear, and the gaps between buildings look as wide as they are. Raffaelli gets his own introduction in a gambling den, fighting through a room of gangsters with the furniture as props. Both men perform their own stunts on camera, and a ticking bomb keeps raising the pressure until the final act.

France had a strong crime-film tradition long before this, and Besson’s EuropaCorp spent the 2000s turning it into export action. District B13 is the purest and fastest version of that effort. Hollywood took both the sport and the director. Sébastien Foucan, another of the founders of parkour, opened Casino Royale in 2006 with a construction-site chase, and Morel went on to make Taken in 2008. The film was later remade in America as Brick Mansions in 2014, with Belle back in the equivalent role opposite Paul Walker.

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13. A Bittersweet Life (2005)

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“Because the dream I had can’t come true.”

A Bittersweet Life is Kim Jee-woon’s 2005 Korean noir, and Lee Byung-hun gives the best performance of his career in it.

He plays Sun-woo, the hotel manager and enforcer for a Seoul crime boss, who is told to watch the boss’s young girlfriend while he’s away. Sun-woo catches her with another man and lets them both go. That single act of mercy sets off everything that follows. The film bets everything on that choice and never gives Sun-woo an out, which puts it alongside Oldboy at the top of Korean crime cinema.

The action grows out of the consequences. Sun-woo is beaten and buried in mud, then strung up by his taped hands in a warehouse, and his escape is improvised from whatever sits within reach. Every fight builds on stakes the film already set, so nothing feels bolted on. The cold, clean frames of the opening get dirtier as Sun-woo does, and the look tracks his collapse without a line of exposition. By the final hotel shootout, every man in the room has been paying for one bad night since the first act.

Korean cinema of the early 2000s built its crime tradition on revenge and consequence, with Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy arriving two years before this. Kim took that seriousness and gave it the polish of a luxury hotel. Hollywood took the people. Lee Byung-hun went on to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and The Magnificent Seven, and Kim directed Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Last Stand in 2013. The film has one small flaw. The young woman at the center of Sun-woo’s choice stays more of an idea than a person.

This one grabs me by the collar, and I can barely find anything I’d change. Lee’s composure cracking one small piece at a time wrecks me more than any shootout could.

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14. I Saw the Devil (2010)

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I Saw the Devil is Kim Jee-woon’s 2010 revenge thriller, written by Park Hoon-jung, and it pushes violence further than almost anything else on this list. Lee Byung-hun plays Kim Soo-hyun, a National Intelligence Service agent whose fiancée is murdered by the serial killer Jang Kyung-chul, played by Choi Min-sik. Soo-hyun catches Jang early and beats him, then lets him go with a tracking device inside him.

He means to repeat the process until Jang breaks. The film belongs here because every fight costs somebody something, the hero included.

The capture and release pattern gives the film its escalation. The early captures look like a trained agent doing a hard job, and the later ones turn cruel enough that the audience starts dreading them. Kim stages the fights as ugly scrambles in cramped spaces.

The best known is a taxi scene in which Jang kills two men inside a moving cab while the camera circles the interior, and the geography stays readable in a space barely wider than the seats. A later fight at the house of another killer is just as rough.

Korean thrillers of the 2000s, from Oldboy to The Chaser, made revenge and serial murder their home ground, and I Saw the Devil took both to the limit. The Korean ratings board forced cuts before it could open at home. Hollywood took the director first. Kim made The Last Stand with Arnold Schwarzenegger three years later.

The ending is what sets the film apart. Jang dies, and Soo-hyun collapses into the grief the chase had only postponed. Kim denies the payoff the genre promises, and the film is braver for it.

Kim’s film flattened me, and by the end I wanted to look away from the hero as badly as from the killer. It’s a great film, and I’m in no hurry to put myself through it again.

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15. 13 Assassins (2010)

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13 Assassins is Takashi Miike’s 2010 remake of Eiichi Kudo’s 1963 samurai film, and it’s the most disciplined work of Miike’s career.

Koji Yakusho plays Shinzaemon Shimada, an aging samurai asked to kill Lord Naritsugu, a sadistic young lord whose kinship with the shogun puts him beyond the law. Goro Inagaki plays Naritsugu with a bored cruelty that makes the mission feel necessary. The film spends its first hour gathering its men and laying its plans, then gives roughly the last forty-five minutes to a single battle.

The preparation is what makes that battle work.

The thirteen take over a village and turn it into a trap full of barricades and dead ends, and Miike shows the layout clearly before the enemy arrives. When Naritsugu’s much larger escort walks in, the audience already knows where every gate leads. The fight escalates from arrows and rigged explosions down to swords in the mud, and the thirteen start to fall one by one. By the last stretch the survivors look spent, and their exhaustion reads as physical fact.

Its roots are in the jidaigeki tradition, and its structure follows the gathering of warriors that Kurosawa set down in Seven Samurai.

Hollywood took that template decades ago with The Magnificent Seven and has reused it ever since. Miike’s film sent it back with physical stakes that most American versions had lost. It premiered in competition at Venice in 2010, and Magnolia Pictures released it in the United States the following year. The atrocity scenes push to the edge of what many viewers can stomach, and they make the killing read as justice.

Miike grabs me by the collar here and doesn’t let go. By the end of that battle I feel worn out right alongside the actors.

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16. The Raid (2011)

“Pulling the trigger is like ordering takeout.”

Gareth Evans shot The Raid in Jakarta for about $1.1 million, and it hit the action world like a breaching charge. Iko Uwais plays Rama, a rookie on a police team sent into an apartment block run by the drug lord Tama. The team gets trapped halfway up with every tenant on the payroll hunting them. The plot fits on an index card. The fighting hits harder than almost anything put on film before it, and that’s why The Raid belongs on any serious list of the world’s great action movies.

The building is the map. Evans shows the floors early, so every climb up a stairwell reads as progress and every retreat gives ground back. Uwais and Yayan Ruhian choreographed the pencak silat themselves, and the fights use the rooms, including a hole Rama chops through a floor with an axe to escape a machete gang. The camera stays wide enough to follow every elbow. Ammunition runs out early and the fights drop to blades and fists, ending in a two-on-one against Ruhian’s Mad Dog that goes on long enough to hurt.

Indonesia had a martial arts cinema before this, but The Raid put pencak silat in front of the world. Evans and Uwais had tested their partnership on Merantau in 2009. Hollywood moved fast. The American release came out as The Raid: Redemption with a new score by Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, and Uwais, Ruhian and Joe Taslim later turned up in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. A Hollywood remake has drifted through development for more than a decade without ever matching the original’s reputation.

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17. The Raid 2 (2014)

The Raid 2 picks up hours after the first film and blows it open into a crime saga of about two and a half hours. Rama goes undercover in prison to get close to Uco, the restless son of the gangster Bangun, and stays under for years. Gareth Evans trades the tower for Jakarta’s gang wars, with a Japanese syndicate pushing in from the side. The sprawl costs it some of the first film’s purity. The action is bigger and meaner, and it stands with the best the genre has produced anywhere.

Evans builds each set piece around its own physical problem. The prison riot is staged in pouring rain and mud, so every fighter slips while the crowd crushes in. The car chase puts the camera inside the vehicle as Rama fights several men in a back seat with no room to swing. Julie Estelle’s Hammer Girl clears a subway car on her own. The final kitchen duel against Cecep Arif Rahman’s Assassin runs long, and by the end Rama is losing blood he can’t spare.

The sequel proved The Raid was no fluke and that Indonesia could produce action on a scale Hong Kong once owned. Its fighters fed the next wave of American action. Iko Uwais moved into Hollywood films like Mile 22 and Snake Eyes, and Yayan Ruhian and Cecep Arif Rahman played assassins opposite Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 3. Hollywood studied those long hallway fights and then hired the men who made them. American fight scenes got longer and rougher over the following decade, and this film is a big reason why.

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18. Train to Busan (2016)

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Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan puts a zombie outbreak aboard a KTX bullet train out of Seoul. Gong Yoo plays Seok-woo, a fund manager and absent father taking his daughter Su-an to her mother in Busan. The confinement is the point. There’s nowhere to run except the next carriage, and the film keeps the pressure on for nearly two hours. The father’s redemption follows a familiar shape, and Gong Yoo sells every step of it anyway. The rest is tight enough to make it the strongest zombie film of its decade.

The geography is simple and ruthless. Each carriage is a room with a door at each end, and doors can be sealed or breached.

Yeon adds rules the characters discover under fire: the infected are blind in darkness and hunt by sound, so a tunnel buys time. The best sequence sends Seok-woo, Ma Dong-seok’s Sang-hwa and a student forward through infected cars with taped forearms, crawling across the luggage racks. Every door they open raises the price, and the film starts taking the people the audience likes best.

Korean cinema spent the 2000s building a reputation for brutal genre films like Oldboy and The Chaser. Train to Busan took that toughness mainstream and gave it a class edge, with Kim Eui-sung’s businessman shoving strangers to the infected to buy himself another minute. Few movie villains make an audience want them eaten so badly, and the working-class passengers get enough character work to make each loss hurt. Yeon followed it with Peninsula, and Hollywood has spent years trying to develop an English-language remake, which says plenty about who’s borrowing from whom now.

Train to Busan grabbed me in a way most zombie movies don’t, and that coward in a good suit is a villain I wanted eaten. The workaholic dad’s redemption is the one familiar piece, and it’s why the film sits at an 8 for me instead of a 9.

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19. RRR (2022)

S. S. Rajamouli’s RRR is a three-hour Telugu epic set in 1920 British India, built on an imagined friendship between two real revolutionaries, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem.

N. T. Rama Rao Jr. plays Bheem, a tribal guardian who comes to Delhi to rescue a girl taken by the British governor. Ram Charan plays Raju, an officer of the Raj with a hidden agenda. The film is loud and completely unembarrassed by its own scale, and few filmmakers anywhere stage action with this much confidence.

Rajamouli stages myth with clear physical logic. The bridge rescue introduces the heroes as strangers who swing on a rope from opposite sides of a river to pull a boy from under an exploding train, locking hands in the middle. The interval raid turns a truckload of wild animals loose on a colonial party. Late in the film, Bheem hoists an injured Raju onto his shoulders and the two fight as one body. Each set piece raises the stakes and the absurdity together, and the film never blinks.

Telugu cinema has always liked its heroes larger than life, and Rajamouli’s two Baahubali films built the budgets and ambition that made RRR possible. Netflix brought it to Western audiences who’d never seen a Telugu film, and “Naatu Naatu” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Hollywood took notice of what Indian cinema has always known, that audiences will follow any amount of excess when the emotion is sincere and the geography is clear. Western blockbusters with ten times the money rarely stage a rescue this legible.

↑ All Films

20. Sisu (2022)

► Read the full review of Sisu (2022)

“Bills. Big ones, please.”

Jalmari Helander’s Sisu is set in Lapland in 1944, as the retreating Germans burn their way out of Finland.

Jorma Tommila plays Aatami Korpi, an old prospector who strikes gold and runs into an SS platoon under Aksel Hennie’s Helldorf. They take him for a tired old man. He’s a Winter War commando the Soviets nicknamed Koschei, the Immortal, and the rest of the film is the SS learning that the hard way. Helander commits to every ridiculous inch of it, and it’s the best war action film of the 2020s.

Helander shot the violence practically in real Lapland, and when a body hits the ground it has weight. The set pieces escalate with a straight face. Korpi turns a minefield against his pursuers and survives a hanging, and in a lake he slits soldiers’ throats to breathe the air from their lungs before the finale moves the fight into a plane in flight. Korpi speaks a single line in the film, so every tactic reads through his face, the patience of a man who has buried people before and expects to again.

Finnish war cinema has leaned solemn since The Unknown Soldier.

Sisu takes the Lapland War, a chapter most American audiences have never heard of, and runs it through Sergio Leone and grindhouse revenge. The Koschei legend frees the film from realism and lets Korpi become a figure out of folklore. American action films spend long scenes explaining why their heroes can’t die, and Sisu needs one nickname. The sequel, Sisu: Road to Revenge, brought in Stephen Lang and Richard Brake and kept Korpi as silent as ever.

Sisu is my kind of movie, an old prospector and his gold against an SS platoon that picked the wrong man to rob, and I grinned through most of it. The Koschei nickname is the smartest thing in the script, and Tommila’s near-silent Korpi is why it’s a 10 for me.

What Action Cinema Beyond Hollywood Gets Right

The films on this page share a conviction that Hollywood forgot for a long stretch: the audience should be able to see the action. Kurosawa put three cameras on a rainstorm so nobody would lose the fight. Jackie Chan let the take run so you could see he took the fall.

Gareth Evans kept a hallway fight in a single readable space. The effect in every case is trust, because the viewer believes what’s on screen.

Hollywood noticed. John Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark and Jet Li went west, Kurosawa was remade twice as a western, and fight coordinators trained in Hong Kong reshaped The Matrix, and the stunt team from The Matrix went on to make John Wick. The imports helped, but the originals are still better, and they’re a subtitle away.

This list matters to me because it shows that money doesn’t make an action film work. Planning, nerve and a clear picture of the space do. Every writer who stages a fight scene on the page should study how these filmmakers did it on a fraction of the budget.

Which Foreign Action Film Is Missing?

Which film from outside Hollywood belongs on this list? Where does your favorite rank? Drop a comment below and tell me what I left off.