The best action movies of all time

Director: Corey Yuen Kwai

Cast: Jet Li, Josephine Siao Fong-fong, Zhao Wen-zhou

Best quote: “Don’t worry, Mom’s here!”

The killer scene: A fight on a tower turns into combat on the heads and shoulders of the spectators.

All you need is Mom
Some action movies are super serious orgies of violence, but The Legend does a charming tap dance on their heads. Jet Li plays Fong, a young martial artist who loves showing off and chasing girls. When wealthy Tiger Lu holds a tournament wherein whoever beats his wife in combat gets to marry his daughter, Fong loses—but his mother (played by 46-year-old comedian Josephine Siao Fong-fong) refuses to let family honor die. So she disguises herself as Fong’s brother and winds up not only winning the contest, but also the heart of her opponent, Mrs. Tiger Lu herself. A gender-swapping head-spinner, The Legend overflows with breezy invention; it’s the kind of movie where things get so complicated that the only way to sort it all out is for an adult to show up on horseback, swinging her sword and settling everybody’s hash.

Director: Johnnie To

Cast: Anthony Wong, Simon Yam, Lam Suet

Best quote: “I know people call you the Ice, but do you have to be so coldhearted?”

The killer scene: A shoot-out in a shopping mall at closing time becomes an exercise in modernist abstraction

In the line of fire
Only genre maestro Johnnie To would have the confidence to tackle a project that dispenses with the high-octane carnage de rigueur for a Hong Kong crime movie, turning it instead into a serene exercise in self-referential cool. After a crime boss survives a hit, he pays the five baddest henchmen around town to form a team to protect him and find the would-be killer—a plot so ordinary it’s hardly worth spending time on. So To doesn’t bother. Rather, he lays out a fresco of paranoia as the gun-wielding quintet keep up their individual and collective guard while waiting for the next ambush. And when the action does come, To applies the same Melville-meets-Antonioni mood of studied anomie to the exchanges of fire, turning anticipated set-piece shoot-outs into deconstructed fragments of grace and danger. It’s an action movie about action movies, and all the more fascinating for it.

Directors: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis

Best quote: “The universe is so much bigger than you realise.”

The killer scene: Michelle Yeoh battles an office of malicious tax preparers, all with a googly eye stuck to her forehead.

Across the multiverse
True to its title, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s (aka ‘The Daniels’) second feature is many things at once: a multiversal sci-fi mind-bender, a moving family drama, an absurdist comedy. But you don’t cast Michelle Yeoh if you don’t also intend for it to kick ass. And that it does, albeit strangely: as mentioned above, this is a movie whose most iconic moment involves Yeoh – mild-mannered immigrant laundromat owner turned interdimensional martial arts avenger – tearing up a tax office with a googly eye pressed to her forehead. There are also fights involving fanny packs. And dildos. And a butt plug. It’s wilfully weird and silly, sure, but the scenes are executed with as much breathless energy as anything Yeoh did back in Hong Kong. They’ll still leave your head-spinning – and your own eyes looking a bit googly.

Director: Brian De Palma

Cast: Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer, Steven Bauer

Best quote: “Say hello to my little friend!”

The killer scene: Tony Montana goes out with a bang.

The world is his
Fresh off the boat from Cuba, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) is already raising hell, talking down to immigration agents and raring to climb the ladder of the land of opportunity. Miami, he says to his best bud Manny (Steven Bauer), is “like a great big pussy just waiting to get fucked.” But Tony wants the world, and director Brian De Palma and screenwriter Oliver Stone are happy to give it to him (for a price) in their unapologetically violent remake of Howard Hawks’s 1932 crime film. In turn, the ’83 Scarface became an iconic touchstone for hip-hop culture excess. Everything is as over-the-top as the foot-high mound of cocaine that a never-crazier Pacino dips his head into. De Palma orchestrates all the carnage like a master composer: a tense, chain-saw-wielding set piece in a bathroom; a botched assassination in a nightclub; and an absolutely certifiable climax in which Tony takes on a gaggle of hit men with a grenade launcher.

Director: John Sturges

Cast: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson

Best quote: “We deal in lead, friend.”

The killer scene: James Coburn’s knife-slinging cowboy gets called out by a cocky gunman—guess who prevails in the showdown?

Japanese import, retooled
Making movies can be an international conversation spanning cultural differences and economic divides. Was Akira Kurosawa was the most important director of Westerns to never actually make a Western? His 1961 Yojimbo would go on to directly inspire Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (and launch Clint Eastwood’s entire movie career). Meanwhile, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, an instant classic upon its 1954 release, was quickly the subject of a Hollywood remake—and the result was this rousing horse opera, loaded with star appeal and panache. A Mexican farming town suffers regular fleecing of its crop by evil bandito Calvera (Eli Wallach, persuasive despite being a Jewish actor from Brooklyn). Enter seven men, hired by the desperate community to make their last stand. All action fans have their favorite of the seven, but recognition should be given to the eighth magnificent guy off camera: composer Elmer Bernstein, whose galloping theme music entered the public consciousness in a deeper way than anything onscreen.

Director: Ringo Lam

Cast: Chow Yun Fat, Simon Yam, Anthony Wong

Best quote: “Why don’t you masturbate in Hell!”

The killer scene: A Bangkok car chase that’s all hurtling Detroit steel

A he-man opera so virile, viewers might get pregnant
Saying Full Contact was the first movie to utilize the now-overused bullet cam is a bit like saying that Jesus made some really nice chairs—it kind of misses the point. The Aerosmith of action movies, Full Contact is as iconically all-American as muscle cars and machine guns. Chow Yun Fat plays Jeff, a bouncer who falls in with a trio of fabulous psychopaths led by the amazing Judge (Simon Yam), who pulls a double cross and leaves him for dead. Nope. Next stop: high-caliber revenge. Imagine Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name character versus meth-addled versions of Christopher Nolan’s Joker, Bane and Catwoman, slather the whole thing in feedback; fill it with gun fu; then knock it back like a shot of Jack Daniels.

Director: Jonathan Mostow

Cast: Kurt Russell, J.T. Walsh, Kathleen Quinlan

Best quote: “You better pray she’s alive.”

The killer scene: An 18-wheeler goes over a bridge, but it doesn’t fall.

Keep on truckin’
Yuppies, beware: Jonathan Mostow’s unbearably tense thriller posits middle America as a parched haven for gun-toting rednecks who will kidnap your wife for ransom. Polo-shirt–clad nice guy Jeff Taylor (Kurt Russell) experiences just that after his Jeep breaks down in the desert and his spouse (Kathleen Quinlan) vanishes with too-eager-to-assist trucker “Red” Barr (J.T. Walsh). Taylor’s suspicions that something nefarious is up prove true when Barr and his crew track him down and demand a hefty payoff. But the tables quickly turn. Boasting some of the best vehicular carnage since Steven Spielberg’s Duel (the literally cliff-hanging finale will have your heart in your throat), Breakdown also features a quintessential everyman performance from Russell (an all-American counterpoint to his eye-patch-sporting loner Snake Plissken from Escape from New York) and a truly chilling one from the late, great Walsh, who gives new meaning to the term “quiet menace.”