Is Mad Max or Police Story the greatest action franchise of all time?

Jackie Chan or Max Rockatansky? Who will walk away from our Action Franchise Tournament still alive for a sequel?

By Jacob Oller | September 5, 2025 | 12:00pm

Photo: Warner Bros., Miramax

Film Features Action Franchise Bracket

Is Mad Max or Police Story the greatest action franchise of all time?

This is it. The hordes of lackeys were dispensed with. The love interest’s betrayal has been accounted for. The MacGuffin has been tracked down. The sociopathic second-in-command has died in spectacular fashion. All that’s left is the final boss battle. After a contentious first, second, third, and fourth round, The A.V. Club‘s Action Franchise Tournament enters into its final fight with two all-timers ascending towards the throne: It’s Police Story vs. Mad Max.

Jackie Chan’s three-ring Jackass stunt circus or George Miller’s ridiculous death race—only one of these decades-spanning juggernauts will hold the title of the greatest action franchise of all time. You, the readers, still have a chance to decide the fate of your chosen winner in our poll, but after the fall of the near-deities Ethan Hunt and Neo, we’ve found our final champion.

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It’s not surprising that neither of these last two action franchises are American. Hollywood has always been a pioneer in the realm of blockbusters and franchises, but its abilities with and interest in adding action to that mix have always come second to what that action serves: A perpetual-motion machine whose replicable formula of set pieces, heroic quips, and boilerplate plots consistently prints money and fill the molds of action figures. So many American action franchises bury their stunts in other genre elements, or shoehorn action sequences into otherwise unrelated intellectual properties in order to give them a four-quadrant summer-flick zing, that the relatively recent resurgence of more action-forward fare has been greeted with a renewed popular and professional appreciation for stunt performance as a discipline.

But the best action is often the purest—and representing Hong Kong and Australia are two of the most primal action franchises ever made. Jackie Chan’s cop stories are so boiled down to their base components that his character is alternatively called Chan Ka-kui or Chan Kwok-wing or Zhong Wen or simply Kevin or Jackie. These films aren’t named for him, but so vaguely titled they’re almost anonymous: Their star is simply an incredible cop who gets disgraced, maintains his personal dignity and devotion, then redeems himself through incredible feats of individual effort for the greater good. Similarly, even if Tom Hardy didn’t replace Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky, the internal timeline of the franchise makes him being a single person living through the films’ desiccated nightmare nigh impossible. He’s an idea, a symbol. These aren’t people so much as they are vessels made for motion, bodies built to be endangered.

And yet, through this purity, the franchises approach different thematic philosophies. The Mad Max films live in defiance of authoritarianism, which the franchise fears will inevitably raise its iron fist when the world falls apart. Officer Rockatansky, beaten-down nihilist highway patrolman, gives way to Max, semi-hopeful wanderer. He faces down gang leaders and self-appointed dictators alike as he searches for the remnants of his humanity, this pattern culminating in Furiosa’s (Charlize Theron) revenge mission against Immortan Joe. “As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?” asks Furiosa. For Miller’s ecologically devastated world, reinvention, adaptability, and unfussy collaboration is key in order to survive, and to confront the unflinching despots at the top.

Police Story, though, is mostly about a single supercop’s superior coppage, and all the jokers around him who get in his way with their “rules” and “laws.” It’s unsurprising that a series named Police Story, a franchise that is the baby of an increasingly conservative director/star in Chan, has always had a regressive streak—one that gets more grim and personal as the series goes on. (It’s not a coincidence that Police Story: Lockdown involves the lead’s estranged relationship with his gay daughter.)

It would actually prevent that series from being the platonic cop franchise ideal, though, if it had any bigger ideas or a more progressive perspective. It is a power fantasy, plain and simple, one of personal injustices being overcome through singular feats of physical prowess—of might quite literally making right. It’s just silly enough, in most of its films at least, that the pricklier parts of its subgenre go down smooth.

Well, that, and the Police Story movies contain some of the best stuntwork ever captured by cameras, bar none. It’s amazing that Jackie Chan is still alive. The two-and-a-half-minute credit sequence of behind-the-scenes action from the first movie is better than most full action films, and probably contains more broken glass:

These supercut outtakes don’t do justice to do-it-all China Drama Academy student Chan’s ability to tell stories with his fights, to make jokes with his blows, and to add drama to his stunts. If Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd have a direct modern descendent, it’s Jackie Chan. The plots of the Police Story movies don’t matter because the only narrative that’s needed is baked into the action sequences. (This is also how Chan and Edward Tang wrote the first film: Props and locations and action ideas first, the bits of plot linking them together later.) When Michelle Yeoh joins in for Supercop, and is so good in it that she gets her own spin-off, it’s the only kind of step forward the series needs: A miraculous new addition who can actually hang with Chan’s energy and elegance, expanding a virtuoso performance into a double act.

Apart from Yeoh’s freak-matching, though, Police Story finds itself running out of ways to one-up itself over the course of its run—and its increasingly sour repetitions are less enjoyable than those of Mad Max, which iterates in imaginative new directions even as the chases and fights and fascists blur into one another. As George Miller expounds upon humanity’s cartoonish id, positing that the end of the world will in fact be dumb as hell and full of silly names (a prediction that clocked some recent governmental developments from decades away), his movies only become more impressive and more mythic. The flame-spitting, guitar-swinging, Cirque du Soleil chases that eventually grow from the early Outback muscle-car grit feed into an industry’s desire for sequel extravagance, but they also reflect that when times become dire, the fables we tell ourselves only get bigger and more urgent. When things fall apart, normalcy doesn’t rise—a Thunderdome does.

Just as Police Story has some of the jumps and crashes to end all jumps and crashes, Mad Max has chases to end all chases featuring vehicles to end all vehicles. Fury Road, a perfect there-and-back film Frankensteined from two epic chases welded together, uses every filmmaking trick in the book (and the dedication of a massive group of technicians suffering in the desert) to capture speed, distance, and danger with a clear eye and a full heart.

And that means Fury Road, the best film of its decade, can’t lose. Its impeccably realized dystopia sparkles with hope, glinting at a finish line its ensemble reaches together against all odds. Max and Furiosa and War Boy Nux (Nicholas Hoult) and all the practical effects and seamless VFX wizardry that support them—they band together at the climax of a series that dreams of our demise. The trilogy before it and the prequel following it might not achieve its majesty, but they serve different purposes. They ground the legend, show how a person can become something greater than themselves, while goosing our heart rates so that they beat in rapid unison. We leave the theater impressed, inspired, exhausted, in awe. The Mad Max movies are quintessential underdog stories, flooring it in the face of doomsday—action-movie power trips worth taking to the end of the road, and beyond.

Winner: Mad Max

Readers Poll

But you don’t have to wander the wasteland with us if you don’t want to. The favorite among a certain vocal commentariat, the quintessential secret agent James Bond, could steal the whole thing right out from under George Miller’s nose—nonchalantly quipping and breaking stunt records all the way. Here’s where you can finalize your selection for the winner in our poll, and decide if 007 and his Aston Martin outrace the death machines of Mad Max: