Entertainment
10 Genuinely Perfect Action Thrillers, Ranked
Action and thriller work so well together because tension needs momentum, and a good thriller already runs on momentum before a single punch gets thrown. The action gives you the release, the thriller gives you the dread leading up to it, and when a movie nails both, you stop noticing the runtime entirely.
Every one of the films on this list earns its place due to their brilliant and actual character work first, so by the time things blow up or a chase kicks off, you’re invested in who survives it and who doesn’t. Let’s get into some of the best action thrillers that figured out exactly how to balance both halves of their own name.
10
‘North by Northwest’ (1959)
This one’s from 1959, and it’s actually one of the funnier movies on this list, which nobody really brings up. Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) gets mistaken for a spy who doesn’t even exist, some guy just says the wrong name in a hotel lobby, and now a bunch of people are trying to kill him over it. Alfred Hitchcock keeps slipping dry one-liners into scenes where people are actively trying to kill Thornhill, jokes right in the middle of a chase, which is a strange thing to pull off and he does it anyway.
The crop-duster scene is the one everyone remembers. It’s just an open cornfield, nowhere to hide, and a plane trying to run one guy down in broad daylight, no music playing under it at all. Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) keeps you guessing about whose side she’s on right up until the end, and by the time it’s over, half this plot doesn’t actually hold up if you think about it for more than a minute. I still don’t care. I’ve watched it probably ten times.
9
‘The French Connection’ (1971)
I like this one, but I get why some people bounce off it, the main guy is just not likable. Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) is paranoid, reckless, and honestly kind of a bully to everyone around him, including people just trying to help him do his job. The movie never tries to fix that either, which I actually respect.
William Friedkin shot it on real New York streets without bothering to get all the permits, and you can tell, the car chase under the elevated train tracks still looks dangerous because it basically was. Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) is the calmer partner trying to keep Doyle from doing something stupid, and the ending just stops cold, no resolution at all, which was a strange choice for 1971.
8
‘The Fugitive’ (1993)
This is comfort food to me, honestly, I’ve seen it a bunch of times and it never gets old. A guy gets wrongly convicted of killing his own wife, and the only reason he even gets a shot at proving it is a bus crash that frees him completely by accident. Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) spends the rest of the movie hunting the real killer, while Marshal Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) hunts him right back, and neither one of them is really the bad guy here.
Andrew Davis directed it, and the dam jump is the stunt everyone remembers, but what actually makes this movie work is how tight the plotting is. Every little clue Kimble finds actually pays off later, nothing’s just there for the sake of it, so you hardly find any loophole. Jones won an Oscar for this, and honestly it’s deserved, that role could’ve been forgettable in a worse script.
7
‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ (1991)
This one’s better than the original, mostly because of how much bigger it swings without dropping what made the first movie good. The Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) comes back, except now he’s protecting the kid instead of hunting his mom, and that flip is honestly why I like this version of the character more. James Cameron built the real danger this time around the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), a liquid metal killer who just keeps reforming no matter what hits him.
Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) comes back much harder and more paranoid, and her storyline, trying to stop a war she already knows is coming, gives the movie real stakes underneath all the action. The effects still look good today too, which says a lot, and the truck chase down the flood channel is still one of the best action sequences anyone has ever seen.
6
‘Heat’ (1995)
There’s a code the thief at the center of this one lives by, never get attached to anything you can’t walk away from in thirty seconds flat, and that discipline is what everyone wants in their real life being honest. Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) is always one step ahead of Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), a detective whose own personal life is falling apart just as badly as any criminal’s.
Michael Mann shoots that diner scene where the two of them finally sit down together so quietly and calmly that it almost feels anticlimactic, until you notice how much they’re saying to each other without raising their voices. The bank heist shootout downtown is loud and chaotic, and you can still follow exactly what’s happening at every second, which most action scenes can’t pull off.
5
‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)
Everyone already loves this movie, and I’m not adding it here just because it’s popular, I actually think it holds up. Most villains still want something specific, money, power, revenge, but the Joker (Heath Ledger) just wants to watch the whole city fall apart for no reason at all. Ledger’s performance hits harder knowing it was one of his last, and I don’t think that’s just hindsight talking.
Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) gets the saddest storyline in the whole trilogy, going from the city’s actual hope to Two-Face over the course of one movie, and Christopher Nolan spends more time on that fall than on Batman himself. Gordon (Gary Oldman) holds things together while everyone around him gets compromised, and the truck-flip stunt downtown, done with almost no CGI, still looks more real than most action scenes made today.
4
‘Sicario’ (2015)
Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is an FBI agent who actually follows procedure, and that turns into a serious liability the moment she’s surrounded by people who decided a long time ago that procedure doesn’t apply to them. Denis Villeneuve shoots the empty desert roads and silent border convoys with a lot of dread, so nothing in this movie ever feels like a break from what’s coming.
Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) and Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) both bend rules whenever it’s convenient for the mission, something Kate can’t bring herself to do, and the movie eventually makes it clear that her honesty is exactly what gets her used by both of them. It’s a bleak, cold movie about a war nobody involved actually believes can be won.
3
‘The Raid: Redemption’ (2011)
An entire apartment building offers free rent to any criminal who is willing to fight for the crime lord running it, which tells you immediately how bad things are about to get for the rookie cop who just walked in. Rama (Iko Uwais) has to survive one floor at a time, and Gareth Evans built the fight choreography around pencak silat, an Indonesian martial art that makes every hallway brawl look inventive and brutal.
Tama (Ray Sahetapy) is the crime lord who is controlling the building, and he barely leaves his own apartment, since the henchmen he sends after Rama do plenty of damage on their own. There’s almost no plot padding either, no long dialogue scenes, no subplots slowing anything down, just escalating fights that keep finding new ways to top the one before it, stripped down to just motion and consequence.
2
‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015)
The person actually driving this story isn’t the guy whose name is in the title, it’s the one-armed rig driver who decides, almost on a whim, to smuggle a warlord’s five captive wives across the desert. Furiosa (Charlize Theron) carries the movie more than Max (Tom Hardy) does, and George Miller was seventy years old when he built almost the entire two-hour chase using real vehicles and real stunt performers instead of CGI.
Nux (Nicholas Hoult), one of the warlord’s fanatical soldiers, switches sides about halfway through, and the shift happens gradually enough that it never reads as a cheap twist thrown in for shock value. The movie barely explains its own backstory out loud either, letting costumes, vehicle design, and background details do that work instead, without a single line of exposition.
1
‘Die Hard’ (1988)
John McClane (Bruce Willis) shows up barefoot to his estranged wife’s office Christmas party just hoping to patch things up, and instead gets trapped in a high-rise once a group of thieves posing as terrorists take the whole building hostage. He bleeds, gets exhausted, cuts his feet on broken glass, and keeps talking to himself just to stay calm, which is exactly why the character never feels like a typical invincible action hero.
Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), in his very first film role, plays the villain with so much calm, articulate menace that basically every action movie villain since has been measured against him in some way. John McTiernan kept the whole story contained to one building and one night, without any subplots stretching outside it, and that restraint is a big reason nothing since has really matched it.
Die Hard
- Release Date
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July 15, 1988
- Runtime
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132 minutes
- Writers
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Jeb Stuart, Steven E. de Souza, Roderick Thorp
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