CONTAINS SPOILERS
The action films that most return to are the ones where setpieces do narrative work rather than functioning as parallel attractions. Furiosa’s wheel turn early in Fury Road starts the picture’s plot. Hans Gruber’s fall at the end of Die Hard resolves a film that has spent its runtime teaching the viewer Nakatomi Plaza. Neo’s lobby shootout in The Matrix is the moment a reluctant character commits to violence for someone else. The five below pass the same test in five different ways, and critics keep returning to each one year after year.
Die Hard (1988)
Die Hard is the modern action film’s reference point. John McTiernan’s 1988 thriller earned a 94% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes and grossed roughly $141 million against a $28 million budget. Three and a half decades after release, the film still defines the working template every contained action picture is measured against. The plot places an off-duty New York cop, John McClane, inside a Los Angeles office tower on Christmas Eve, then traps him there with a crew of armed thieves led by Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber. The premise looks simple on paper, but McTiernan’s execution made it canonical.
Almost every action beat in the film does double duty. McClane’s barefoot run across broken glass shows his physical erosion and the audience’s mounting concern at the same time. His rooftop fire-hose drop solves a logistical problem and demonstrates what a man with no equipment is willing to do. Hans Gruber’s death by gravity is the resolution of a 131-minute exercise in spatial geometry, since the picture has used its full runtime teaching the viewer the inside of Nakatomi Plaza. Alan Rickman, in his film debut at age 41, gave the genre one of its first villains whose intelligence is a credible match for the hero’s, which is part of why the picture rewards repeated viewings. Rickman had spent most of his earlier career on the British stage and reportedly accepted the role after a single weekend reading of the script.
McTiernan and the writing team adapted Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, but the script earned its own credit for tightening the source into something more economical and more human. The opening reels make space for McClane’s marital tension before the hostage situation begins. By the time the radio kicks on and the first hostage falls, the audience already knows what the man wants out of the night, which is the only reason the rest of the film holds together. The cultural argument around the picture’s status as a Christmas movie is in some ways an after-life proof of its longevity. People keep arguing the Christmas question because they keep watching, and they keep watching because the action and the marriage are the same story.
Aliens (1986)
James Cameron took over the Alien franchise in 1986 with a script he later described as Vietnam in space, and the resulting picture earned a 94% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes and seven Academy Award nominations. The film won two of those, for visual effects and sound effects editing, and Sigourney Weaver received a Best Actress nomination for her work as Ellen Ripley, a recognition the Academy almost never grants a science-fiction sequel.
The military framing is part of why the action holds up. Cameron sends a squad of colonial marines onto the colony moon LV-426, then strips away their advantages one at a time. The hardware meant to make the engagement routine, motion trackers, pulse rifles, the dropship, the queen’s nest, is removed or compromised by the script’s halfway point. The remaining action sequences are not action sequences against the xenomorphs alone. They are action sequences against fear, against the limits of the platoon’s training, against a corporate hierarchy that has already decided the colonists are expendable. Every fight in the second half costs the marines something the audience can name. The picture grossed roughly $131 million worldwide on an $18 million budget, and Cameron used those numbers in subsequent interviews as evidence that an action film could be argued for as a character study without losing its commercial footing.
Ripley’s role inside that setup is the reason the picture rewards a second look. The character begins the film as a survivor with post-traumatic memory of the first film’s events, and the script lets her gradually take command of a unit that is not hers, on a vessel she cannot pilot, against a creature only she has seen in person. Her final confrontation with the queen, executed inside an industrial power loader, is action filmmaking that depends entirely on character arc. The audience is watching a woman defend a child she found two days earlier against a mother defending her own brood, and the visual symmetry of two mothers fighting in a cargo bay is what makes the scene work. The line “Get away from her, you bitch” is in the film for the same reason. The picture has earned it. Aliens demonstrated that an action sequel could deepen the original instead of merely extending it, and the industry has been trying to replicate that template, with intermittent success, for nearly forty years.
The Matrix (1999)
The Matrix opened in March 1999 on a $63 million budget, grossed roughly $467 million worldwide, earned an 88% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes, and won four Academy Awards covering visual effects, film editing, sound editing, and sound mixing. The Wachowskis wrote and directed the film, and they required the principal cast, Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, and Hugo Weaving, to train in kung fu and wire work for four months under the Hong Kong action choreographer Yuen Woo-ping before the first day of principal photography in Sydney. The training requirement was unusual for an American studio release of that budget tier, and it is one of the reasons subsequent action productions began to schedule rehearsal blocks of similar length.
The bullet time technique, developed for the film by visual effects supervisor John Gaeta, is the part of the picture most viewers remember, since the rooftop sequence in which Neo arches backwards in a frozen photogrammetric arc became one of the most parodied images of the late 1990s. The deeper value of the film is in what the technique was being used for. The bullet dodge happens at the moment the character has accepted that the rules of the room he is in have changed. The lobby shootout takes place after Neo has decided Morpheus is worth dying for. By the time the subway-station fight against Agent Smith begins, the character has stopped running. Each setpiece matches a beat in Neo’s arc, and the four-month training requirement is part of why the action looks like something the performers themselves had to absorb.
The lobby shootout, choreographed in a single hallway and timed to Don Davis’s percussive score, is the sequence most often cited by subsequent action filmmakers as the moment American studio cinema absorbed the Hong Kong school of choreography. The Wachowskis took wire-assisted choreography out of the regional market and made it the visual language of a major studio franchise. The original Matrix has stayed above an 85% Tomatometer score for more than 25 years, even as audiences and critics have argued about the picture’s sequels and television offshoots. Critics have returned to the first film year after year because the action vocabulary is still legible and the story it is illustrating still holds up under repeated viewing.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
George Miller spent more than 15 years trying to make Mad Max: Fury Road before cameras finally rolled in the Namib Desert in 2012. The film opened in 2015, earned a 97% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes, and went on to receive 10 Academy Award nominations, including a Best Picture nomination, of which it won six, the most for any film that year. Inside the action genre, Fury Road is the closest the 21st century has come to a single picture that synthesizes everything action filmmaking can do at scale.
The reason the film functions as well at home as it does in a theater is that almost every effect on screen is a thing that physically happened. Miller and stunt coordinator Guy Norris built and crashed a fleet of post-apocalyptic vehicles, including the War Rig, the Doof Wagon with its mounted speakers and flamethrower guitarist, and the Polecats, performers riding pivoting steel poles attached to moving cars. Miller chose the Namib Desert partly for the photographic flatness of the salt pans and partly for the absence of fixed-camera reference points that would make the chase look stitched together. What this approach produces is a chase movie whose physics is legible. The viewer can place every vehicle on the road at any given moment, which is what makes the action coherent rather than chaotic.
The character logic underneath the chase is what separates Fury Road from a pure spectacle exercise. Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron, drives the War Rig away from Immortan Joe’s citadel because she has decided to return the women he has enslaved to her birthplace, the Green Place. Max Rockatansky, played by Tom Hardy, is along for the ride against his initial will and is granted the supporting role in his own franchise. The film’s two-hour arc is essentially one long retreat followed by one short return, and the moral question of who deserves a place at the wheel and who deserves the back of the rig is the only argument the picture is making. Critics have returned to the film year after year because the genre is rarely allowed to make a moral argument that cleanly.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)
Tom Cruise broke his right ankle filming a single rooftop jump during production of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, then finished the take and walked off-camera before shutting down production for six weeks of recovery. The film opened in 2018, earned a 97% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes and an 86 Metacritic average, and was at the time the highest-rated entry in a franchise that had then run for 22 years. Christopher McQuarrie, the first filmmaker to direct a second Mission: Impossible film, used the production schedule and Cruise’s appetite for physical risk to make a picture that argues, in every setpiece, for the value of doing the thing in front of the camera rather than building it in post-production.
The aerial jump sequence, in which Cruise actually leaps from a military cargo plane into Paris airspace, took 106 takes to capture, since the cinematographer had to leap alongside him and the jump could only be done in a narrow window of light at dusk. The Paris helicopter chase, executed in working airspace with Cruise piloting, was filmed across the actual mountains of New Zealand’s Southern Alps, and the rotor-blade close-quarters sequence used real blades within feet of real performers. The bathroom fight scene, choreographed across narrow tile and chrome, is a 90-second exchange between Cruise, Henry Cavill, and Liang Yang that the production trained for months before shooting. None of this is hyperbole on the part of the marketing department. The press materials and post-release interviews document the count of takes, the number of broken bones, and the duration of the shutdowns in detail.
Fallout is the most recent of the five films above, and it argues by example that the action film at the top of its form is the one whose action is real. The setpieces are not separable from the plot, because the plot is built around what the production was actually willing and able to do. The same proposition has run through every film named above, from Die Hard inside Nakatomi Plaza in 1988, through Aliens on the colony moon in 1986, The Matrix on a Sydney soundstage in 1999, and Fury Road across the Namib salt pans in 2015. Across four decades and three continents, the films that hold up at home are the ones where the action is part of the story being told, and where the production stakes match the story stakes. The genre’s future will be written by the filmmakers who keep that ratio honest.