The best action movies to watch on Amazon Prime Video right now

The best action movies to watch on Amazon Prime Video right now

Get your blood pumping with these action-packed films, from Alien to Independence Day

ByThe A.V. Club

Action movies on Amazon Prime Video: Dr. No; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Logan; Independence Day; Train To Busan — Clockwise from top left: Dr. No (Screenshot); Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Screenshot); Logan (20th Century Studios); Independence Day (Screenshot); Train To Busan (Screenshot)

Every streaming service offers a wide range of film genres, but Amazon Prime Video seems to be particularly focused on the action-adventure sector. If you’re looking for pulse-pounding, edge-of-your-seat thrills, the streamer makes for a solid starting point. From mainstream popcorn fare like Independence Day to deserves-to-be-mainstream hits like Train To Busan, you’re likely to find something at Amazon Prime that satisfies your urge for action. Just click through to get the latest rundown on the best action fare the service has to offer.

This list was updated on May 13, 2022.

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2 / 31

48 Hrs.

48 Hrs.

Eddie Murphy

Because 48 Hrs. was directed by economical genre specialist Walter Hill, it moves relentlessly, with scarcely a wasted scene or shot in its 96 minutes. And because it’s an early example of the buddy-cop movie, it features multiple scenes and elements that later became cliché, as when Nick Nolte’s shouty African-American boss tells him he needs to be “more of a team player and less of a hot dog.” It would be a solid actioner even without Eddie Murphy, anchored by the almost-as-colorful Nolte, whose character is so disheveled and abrasive that he’s constantly threatened with arrest by cops who don’t realize he’s one of them. As Nolte baits Murphy with racially charged insults (some overt, some subtle), 48 Hrs. plays with the question of which of these two men has the power in their relationship: the washed-up authority figure, or the smooth-talking law-breaker? But as good as Nolte is in this movie, there’s really no contest. As soon as Murphy steps out of his cell, it’s clear he’s planning to stick around. [Noel Murray]

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3 / 31

Alien

Alien

Image for article titled The best action movies to watch on Amazon Prime Video right now — Photo: Sunset Boulevard (Getty Images)

Released in 1979 at the tail end of a wave of science-fiction films, Ridley Scott’s Alien filled the future with a monster borrowed from the oldest reaches of the psyche, a pitiless creature dedicated only to devouring and reproducing, designed by H.R. Giger for maximum Freudian implication. Scott has said he set out to make a cross between 2001 and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and his wish is reflected in the result: a nightmare set in the chill of a disappointing future. [Keith Phipps]

Coming July 1 (now streaming with ads on IMDB TV)

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4 / 31

Aliens

Aliens

Gun? Check.

If there’s a glimmer of hope that James Cameron won’t be wasting his talent with four more rounds of Avatar, it lies in the knowledge that this maestro of blockbusters is also, generally speaking, a master of sequels. The director knew how to expand his stone-cold Terminator into an awesome multiplex epic. Before that, he achieved the even more daunting feat of pulling a new sci-fi classic out of the shadow of an old one. Rather than try to replicate the glacial deep-space dread of a Ridley Scott movie arguably even better than Blade Runner, Aliens stomps on the gas, stranding an unfrozen Ripley (tough-as-nails Sigourney Weaver) on an outpost crawling with acid-bleeding creatures, alongside a platoon of over-armed but severely underprepared space marines. Few action or war movies released in the decades since can match Aliens for sheer adrenaline-junkie intensity, but there’s something affecting about its emotional arc, too—about the way Cameron turns the déjà vu storytelling logic of sequels into warped immersion therapy, allowing Ripley to overcome the trauma of Alien (and the loss of her daughter) by rushing back into the monster-blasting fray. It’s not a redo. It’s a rebirth, bursting bloody and triumphant from the cold body of a perfect genre specimen. [A.A. Dowd]

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5 / 31

Alien³

Alien³

Sigourney Weaver

If Ridley Scott’s deep-space classic Alien and James Cameron’s superlative, action-packed Aliens were perfect genre specimens, Alien³ is something else entirely: gloriously imperfect art, bursting bloody and beautiful from the carcass of a blockbuster boondoggle. By now, the film’s troubled gestation has become the stuff of legend, a Hollywood cautionary tale. Whole screenplays, creative teams, and narrative directions were tossed out before David Fincher, then a music-video veteran with no features under his belt, landed at the helm of this doomed vessel. The director, who sparred with both the studio and star Sigourney Weaver, would end up disowning the movie. Audiences were lukewarm, resulting in lackluster box-office. Reviews were mixed at best. As far as just about everyone was concerned, Alien³ was stillborn. But the film’s flaws, the telltale signs of its tumultuous production, can’t obscure the singularity of its vision. More DOA “mistakes” of franchise extension should be so bold. [A.A. Dowd]

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6 / 31

Apocalypto

Apocalypto

Image for article titled The best action movies to watch on Amazon Prime Video right now — Photo: Apocalypto

Leading a mostly unknown cast, Rudy Youngblood stars as a young Mayan warrior living in an unspecified Mesoamerican jungle shortly before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors. Gibson and co-writer Farhad Safinia take their time in developing the low-key hunter-gatherer pacing and rituals of Youngblood’s enclave, from its friendly, rough humor to Youngblood’s relationships with his father, allies, and pregnant wife (Dalia Hernandez). Once Youngblood’s home begins to feel real, director Mel Gibson and Safinia destroy it: Manhunters descend, burning homes, slaughtering men, raping women, and largely ignoring children, then hauling the survivors off to a bustling Mayan city for sale and sacrifice. Ultimately, Youngblood flees, trying to escape his pursuers and return to his wife and son before they succumb to the protective trap in which he left them. From there on in, Apocalypto is just a primal game of murderous tag, Rambo with bone earrings and an alien dialect. [Tasha Robinson]

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7 / 31

Armageddon

Armageddon

Armageddon’s Charlton Heston-voiced opening narration, an account of how an asteroid seems to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, is an ominous touch in every sense. The speech sets the stage for the threat of mass destruction promised by the movie’s title, while Heston’s voice assures that the threat will be addressed in the most American way possible. And it is, thanks to a ragtag but photogenic bunch of misfits headed by Bruce Willis. Willis plays the world’s greatest oil driller, recruited by NASA head Billy Bob Thornton to plant a nuclear bomb in the belly of an Earth-bound asteroid. Will Willis overcome his creepy attachment to his daughter (Liv Tyler), and reconcile with her oil-drilling lover (Ben Affleck) in time to save America and the rest of the world? Of course, the suspense in Armageddon lies elsewhere, including whether director Michael Bay (The Rock) will continue to find an excuse to place an American flag in every other shot. [Keith Phipps]

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8 / 31

Casino Royale

Casino Royale

Daniel Craig

The most significant shot in Casino Royale—the Daniel Craig revamp of the James Bond franchise—comes early, while the new Bond is getting his Parkour on and hopping from beam to beam at a construction site in pursuit of a terrorist bomber. When Craig severs a cable so he can rise up on a pulley, there’s an insignificant insert shot of the pipes Craig cut loose, now tumbling on the ground. But it’s only insignificant from a plot perspective. From a thematic perspective, the falling pipes reflect the mission statement for this new Bond: “Actions have consequences.” This is a messier Bond than we’d seen in a while. He’s impulsive, he miscalculates, and when he kills someone, he gets blood on his hands, his face, and all over his clothes. In Casino Royale, 007 has plenty of chances to get bloody. [Noel Murray]

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9 / 31

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Zhang Ziyi

The wire effects of Crouching Tiger—the heroes who can basically fly—were nothing new to audiences in Hong Kong or China. Lee, from Taiwan, had grown up watching movies like that, and Crouching Tiger was, in some ways, the realization of a childhood dream for director Ang Lee, who’d spent the previous few years making English-language interiority dramas like Sense And Sensibility and The Ice Storm. But Lee knew that he was making something new for Western audiences, for people who hadn’t seen those wire effects create dream-realities in movies like The Heroic Trio or The Bride With White Hair. And so that first action scene was, among other things, an intentional challenge to the movie’s Western audiences. Lee was telling us that we were entering a world where the rules were not the same, where fighters could drift slowly through the air and where nobody would act like that was a weird or unnatural thing. It worked. It all worked. [Tom Briehan]

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10 / 31

Dr. No

Dr. No

Sean Connery

In lieu of the elaborate, expensive set pieces that would dominate later entries, Dr. No shows James Bond (in this case, Sean Connery) engaged in actual spycraft. Before leaving his hotel room, he sprinkles powder on the latches of his briefcase and attaches a hair to one of his closet doors, so that he’ll know whether someone searches his room in his absence. (Someone does.) When an enemy poses as his ride at the airport—apart from a quick London check-in, the entire film is set in Jamaica and surrounding islands—he discovers the truth by cleverly… phoning the people who allegedly sent the ride and confirming that they did no such thing. There’s more shoe leather involved than usual, to the point where the movie occasionally feels as if it’s mostly Bond striding confidently across various rooms in exquisitely tailored suits. Even Dr. No’s plan isn’t especially diabolical, compared to those of future villains like Blofeld and Goldfinger; had Bond failed to stop him, the doctor would merely have set back Project Mercury a few years, in all likelihood. (World domination may be S.P.E.C.T.R.E.’s ultimate goal, but the present-tense stakes here are quite low.) It’s all pleasingly modest, combining the freshness of something new with the relaxed assurance of something well-established. When the Bond franchise starts to seem oppressive, Dr. No is the ideal palate-cleanser. [Mike D’Angelo]

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11 / 31

The Expendables

The Expendables

The Expendables

With The Expendables, a rejuvenated Sylvester Stallone set out to make not just an action movie, but the action movie. To aid his quest to create the gold standard by which all other cinematic bloodbaths should be compared, he assembled a cast straight out of a 12-year-old boy’s fevered fantasies, bringing together multiple generations of action heroes, including Jason Statham, Jet Li, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Terry Crews, Gary Daniels, Bruce Willis, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, Mickey Rourke, and more. He even managed to snag a much-ballyhooed cameo from a towering icon who seemingly abandoned Hollywood to pursue lesser work, like governing California. The once-in-a-lifetime cast has raised the expectations of ultra-violence fans to almost prohibitively high levels, but The Expendables delivers pretty much exactly what its audience wants and expects: big, dumb, campy fun so deliriously, comically macho, it’s remarkable that no one in the cast died of testosterone poisoning. [Nathan Rabin]

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12 / 31

The Hitman’s Bodyguard

The Hitman’s Bodyguard

The Hitman’s Bodyguard, which bears the tagline “Get triggered” and is essentially a dumber, tackier Midnight Run, was destined to be one of those Neanderthalic, faux-merican EuropaCorp action movies, like The Transporter or From Paris With Love—except fate fumbled, and the film ended up as a coasting-on-star-power Hollywood programmer directed by The Expendables 3’s Patrick Hughes. At least it manages to be sort of amusing. Ryan Reynolds plays the Robert De Niro role, only instead of being a prickly, Sinatra-belting bail bondsman and former Chicago cop who’s still hung up on his ex-wife, he’s a finicky, Ace Of Base-yodeling bodyguard-for-hire and former CIA agent (aren’t they all?) who’s still hung up on his ex-girlfriend. We’re introduced to him living in one of those glass modernist shoeboxes that all of today’s elite big-screen gunmen seem to live in, until one pesky sniper round to a tycoon’s forehead downgrades him to babysitting drug-addled fugitive bankers. The Charles Grodin role—at least narratively, since the character dynamics are reversed—is in turn filled by Samuel L. Jackson, whose character isn’t a mob accountant with a five-day bond forfeiture deadline in Los Angeles, but a world-class contract killer who has less than 24 hours to get to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsk]

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13 / 31

Inception

Inception

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Leonardo DiCaprio

There are only a handful of filmmakers capable of infusing spectacle with ideas, and among those, director Christopher Nolan feels uniquely tapped into the anxieties of the day. Two separate but related millennial fears drive Nolan’s ambitious, mostly dazzling new opus Inception: We have no control over our lives, and reality as we used to understand it no longer exists—or at least has been fundamentally destabilized. Squaring the beautifully engineered puzzles of Memento and The Prestige with the chaos and anarchy brought by the Joker in The Dark Knight, Inception takes place largely in a dreamscape where thieves of the mind fend off attacks from rebellious agents that clutter the subconscious. It’s a metaphysical heist picture, staged in worlds on top of worlds like nothing since Synecdoche, New York, and executed with a minimum of hand-holding. [Scott Tobias]

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14 / 31

Independence Day

Independence Day

Independence Day is a distinctly pro-president movie. But it’s also a movie that knows how much fun it is to watch shit blow up. Forty-five minutes into the film, we see those flying saucers unleash their blue light-beams, obliterating New York and Los Angeles and Washington in a few scant minutes of screen time. Millions die, but the movie barely asks us to be sad. None of the major characters are killed off in those blasts. A few comic-relief side characters get zapped, but even the film’s one dog gets a dramatic escape scene, somehow evading the apocalyptic explosion by jumping into a closet.

Independence Day is not a horror movie. Director Roland Emmerich never asks us to be afraid or disturbed or empathetic. Instead, he speaks the language of the summer blockbuster. Characters react to incomprehensible mass death by firing off one-liners or vaudevillian comic bits; the moments of emotion are stagey and hackneyed, as if Emmerich can’t wait to check them off the list and leave them in the past. He knows that we came to revel in the euphoria of complete annihilation, to watch buildings go boom, and he delivers. [Tom Breihan]

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15 / 31

Logan

Logan

Wolverine uses his claws in Logan. He uses them the way that fans have always dreamed he might, the way the movies and certainly the cartoons and even the comics have never entirely allowed. They’ve always been a little ornamental, Wolverine’s claws: three per hand, harder than steel, sharper than diamond, but usually sheathed before they can do real damage. When the gruffest, toughest, and most Canadian of the mutants does cut loose, as in the show-stopping mansion rampage of the second X-Men movie, it’s cleaner than it really would or should be: Blades go in, blood doesn’t come out. But there’s nothing clean about what Wolverine does with his claws this time around. His knuckle sandwiches leave stumps, stains, and a body count. [A.A. Dowd]

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16 / 31

The Mask Of Zorro

The Mask Of Zorro

Mask of Zorro starring Antonio Banderas — Antonio Banderas in The Mask Of Zorro

Many filmmakers have attempted to emulate Steven Spielberg; it’s an occupational hazard of being the most commercially successful movie director of all time. But few of these imitations, even those shepherded by Spielberg himself as an executive producer, have approximated his pop sensibility as surely and satisfyingly as The Mask Of Zorro. Director Martin Campbell, an able journeyman who occasionally resembles a contemporary Michael Curtiz when he connects with the right material, competently mimics Spielberg’s flair for swift, Rube Goldberg-infused stunts that follow a minutely intricate physical chain reaction to an explosive punchline. When Zorro seizes several soldiers’ drawn guns with his whip, for instance, the firearms are diverted so that they point to the opposing side of the screen to inadvertently fire, killing another rampaging bad guy who was fixing to do the hero in from an altogether different vantage point. This tumbling-dominoes approach to set pieces particularly benefits the witty and exciting sword fights, which—like Spielberg’s action films—strike just the right balance between kinetic pathos and slapstick. [Chuck Bowen]

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17 / 31

Minority Report

Minority Report

Tom Cruise

“What keeps us safe, keeps us free,” declares a propagandistic advertisement for the controversial Pre-Crime Division of the Washington D.C. police force, a unit that uses three visionary “Precogs” (short for “precognizant”) to apprehend would-be killers before they kill. The inherent contradiction of the “safety is freedom” proverb seems as lost on the leaders of 2002 as it does on the ones in 2054, which is only part of what gives Steven Spielberg’s astonishing Minority Report such enormous relevance and power. Expanding on a Philip K. Dick short story, the film could be the mirror image of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, only instead of violent crime being deterred after the fact, the perpetrators are arrested before it happens. Free will is lost in both cases, but the certainty is enough for Tom Cruise, a “future crimes” detective who synthesizes the visions of three Precogs like he’s conducting a virtual orchestra. Few directors are capable of marrying ideas and entertainment—one is often sacrificed for the other—but Spielberg peppers one gripping action setpiece after another with trenchant details about a near-future robbed of the most basic freedoms and privacy. [Scott Tobias]

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18 / 31

Next Day Air

Next Day Air

Omari Hardwick

Donald Faison wanders through Next Day Air in a stoned haze as the unlikeliest of catalysts. The baby-faced Scrubs veteran plays a fuckup so incompetent that he can barely hold on to a job where his mom is his boss. Even his smoke-buddy Mos Def has the initiative to steal from his employers and customers, but Faison’s ambitions begin and end with toking as much weed as possible without losing his job. Faison sets Next Day Air’s plot in motion when he accidentally delivers a package containing a small fortune in cocaine to a trio of stick-up kids with more balls than brains: Wood Harris, Mike Epps, and a sleepy thug who spends so much time on the couch dozing that he’s become part of the furniture. Scenting a big payday, these small-timers decide to immediately sell the coke to Epps’ cousin, a paranoid mid-level dealer looking to make one last score before leaving the business for good. But the intended recipient of the package isn’t about to let Faison’s screw-up go unpunished, nor is the hotheaded Hispanic kingpin whose drug shipment has mysteriously gone missing. A very pleasant surprise, Next Day Air is the rare crime comedy that does justice to both sides of the equation. [Nathan Rabin]

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19 / 31

Ronin

Ronin

Robert De Niro

Whether it’s laying out its ambush-and-heist schemes or racing through French city streets at breakneck speeds, Ronin expects viewers to keep up. John Frankenheimer’s film makes the groan-worthy mistake of explaining the significance of its title twice—first in a textual introduction, and later via an expository conversation between two characters. Yet in all other respects, the movie is a work of no-nonsense proficiency, moving at a fleet pace that allows the audience to revel in the sights and sounds of freelance ex-military professionals and criminals adeptly concocting and executing elaborate smash-and-grab plans. The heists initially involve Irish beauty Natascha McElhone conspiring (on behalf of boss Jonathan Pryce) to steal a briefcase from a moving caravan in Nice. To accomplish this endeavor, they enlist the help of an international team that includes reliable Jean Reno, skittish Sean Bean, calculating Stellan Skarsgård, and calm, composed Robert De Niro. [Nick Schager]

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20 / 31

Salt

Salt

Angelina Jolie

Directed by Phillip Noyce from a script by Kurt Wimmer, Salt stars Angelina Jolie as a CIA operative whose already-dangerous life takes a peculiar turn when a man claiming to be a Russian defector (Daniel Olbrychski) walks into her office building with a story about a society of genetically selected deep-cover operatives trained from birth by the KGB to plot the overthrow of the United States. The twist of the tale: He claims Jolie is one of them. Fearing repercussions of this allegation and seeking to secure her husband’s safety, Jolie goes on the lam. Or maybe she has other motives for running. Was the Russian telling the truth? Borrowing a page from the North By Northwest playbook, Salt is essentially one endless chase scene, one that doesn’t let up and that refreshingly relies far more heavily on real-world stunt work than obvious CGI assistance. Metal twists, flames crackle, and it all feels disarmingly tangible. [Keith Phipps]

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21 / 31

Shanghai Noon

Shanghai Noon

Owen Wilson and Jackie cHAN

Even in the summer of 2000, Shanghai Noon felt a bit outdated. On multiple levels, it’s a throwback: to the kinds of odd-couple action-comedies that littered the multiplex in the’80s and ’90s, but also to the silly ’60s Westerns that trafficked in broad stereotypes about native people and pioneers. The movie’s schtick is slick and satisfyingly familiar but creaky. Still, that’s where having a great cast helps. Liu brings uncommon poise and dignity to the thankless role of the damsel in distress, while Roger Yuan and Xander Berkeley make suitably cocky villains. There’s even a small, hilariously nutty Walton Goggins turn as the loose cannon in Roy’s gang. Yet what mostly makes Shanghai Noon so easy to rewatch 20 years later is that director Tom Dey lets his leads do their thing. Chan gets to be the overlooked little guy with the big talent, performing dazzling stunts with crack comic timing. And Wilson gets to be the lovable dreamer, who gives us the essence of The Owen Wilson Experience when he survives a near-death experience and then becomes all sappy, saying, “I’ve never noticed what a beautiful melody a creek makes. I’ve never taken the damn time.” [Noel Murray]

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22 / 31

Skyfall

Skyfall

Daniel Craig

Skyfall doesn’t forget it has to be an exciting spy film above all, but from its first scene, it ratchets up the drama in ways that have little to do with action. Stumbling into a mission gone wrong into Turkey, Bond (Daniel Craig) finds a badly wounded agent. He wants to stay and help, but M tells him to pursue the enemy instead. After pausing, briefly but noticeably, he does what he’s told. Then, at the end of one of the most breathless opening sequences in the series, another agent (Naomie Harris) does what M tells her to do, leaving Bond in a position where others can assume he’s dead. He isn’t, because that would make for a short movie. But he isn’t entirely himself either, and when he’s drawn out of retirement by the actions of Javier Bardem—playing an embittered ex-agent who doubles as a dark reflection of what Bond might have, and might still, become—he isn’t the same man anymore. [Keith Phipps]

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23 / 31

The Terminator

The Terminator

Arnold Schwarzenegger

It’s strange to return to The Terminator after years of sequels that resemble it only in overarching narrative. The original is small, spare, unforgiving, and closer in spirit to creeping horror than shoot-’em-up action on the sliding genre scale. Set pieces, like the Terminator’s grisly rampage through an ill-equipped police station, inspire more pit-of-the-stomach dread than adrenaline rush. The nocturnal timeframe also enhances the supernatural terror of the material, as do gory shots of the villain performing surgery on himself. Even the fiery finale resembles the final scenes of a slasher movie more than the slam-bang climax of a Hollywood blockbuster. The film’s real special effect is its marquee star. Conan The Barbarian had already catapulted Arnold Schwarzenegger into the limelight, but it was The Terminator that made him an action hero. His take on the character isn’t robotic, exactly; he’s remorseless but not quite emotionless, judging from the occasional flare of volcanic, bestial anger. Cameron sees more of an alien quality in Schwarzenegger’s iron-thick accent, halting delivery, and impossible physique; he’s the mechanical man as hostile new species—and Schwarzenegger, draining his eccentric star persona of any warmth, has never been so frighteningly well-utilized. (In fact, the series as a whole has made marvelous use of the actor, finding menace, humor, and even poignancy in his superhuman otherness.) [A.A. Dowd]

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24 / 31

Tomorrow Never Dies

Tomorrow Never Dies

Popular consensus holds that Pierce Brosnan’s best outing as James Bond is his first, 1995’s GoldenEye. It’s hard not to wonder if there’s a halo effect from the beloved video game adaptation affecting its reputation when 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies is sitting right there. More than two decades later, Brosnan’s second appearance in the role stands out as both the most ’90s Bond movie and the rare entry that has elements of prescience, rather than pure trend-chasing. Actually, prescience versus trend-chasing neatly encompasses the motives of the best villain of the Brosnan run: media baron Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), a somewhat more megalomaniacal version of Rupert Murdoch, intent on starting World War III for the benefit of his broadcasting empire. Satirical skepticism of the media (and its fixations on ratings, sensationalism, etc.) is a fashionable remnant of the Natural Born Killers era, while the threats of conglomerates and consolidation have only gotten scarier and more vivid in the years since. Tomorrow Never Dies isn’t exactly incisive in its treatment of Carver; he is a Bond villain, after all. But Pryce gnashes his teeth with style, and it’s satisfying to see 007 take on a Murdoch stand-in without completely demonizing real journalism. [Jesse Hassenger]

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Train To Busan

Train To Busan

Train To Busan

South Korea’s Yeon Sang-ho found a fresh take on the zombie-breakout flick by narrowing and elongating its shape; he constrains most of the action to a single high-speed rail, challenging a band of human survivors to safely pass from car to car. Yeon clearly establishes the rules governing his flesh-eaters early on and works within them well (one clever set piece involving a climb through the luggage racks will leave one’s nails in shreds), though his humans don’t have that same thought-through quality. (Pregnant woman and dutiful husband? Check. Workaholic dad and precocious young daughter? Check. Tragic teenage lovers? Check.) But a zombie movie content not to aspire to any loftier subtextual readings needs little more than a skilled choreographer of action, and there’s plenty of evidence that this film had one in Yeon. Ooh, do “demons in a submarine” next! [Charles Bramesco]

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Traitor

Traitor

Don Cheadle

Throughout his career, Don Cheadle has proved himself a superlative minimalist, a man with a gift for effortlessly conveying a deep, complicated inner life. That skill is put to good use in the international thriller Traitor, with Cheadle brilliantly playing a man of fierce intelligence, focus, and efficiency whose allegiances are shrouded in mystery, especially in the early going. Cheadle stars as a devoutly Muslim former U.S. Special Ops officer who began associating with radical Islamic terrorists during a stint in Afghanistan. Since then, he’s effectively operated off the grid, popping up during a botched arms deal, a prison break in Yemen, and a terrorist bombing in France. Cheadle’s sinister deeds put him on a collision course with Guy Pearce, an FBI agent whose background echoes that of the shadowy man he’s pursuing. [Nathan Rabin]

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Unstoppable

Unstoppable

Image for article titled The best action movies to watch on Amazon Prime Video right now — Screenshot: Unstoppable

High-speed trains careening out of control. Unstable chemicals. Heartless corporate lackeys. Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as reluctant partners with sad personal histories. Rosario Dawson putting her hair up and then letting it back down, scene after scene. Ethan Suplee as the slackest employee in railroad history. Kevin Corrigan as the meek safety expert. Pointless helicopter shots and frequent cuts to TV news reporters who recap the audience on what’s happened in the movie so far. Interludes at Hooters. A wildly incongruous club track over the closing credits. Unstoppable takes a pretty decent idea for a B-thriller and adds a bunch of unnecessary junk, and yet in spite—or perhaps even because—of its excess, it was one of the most purely fun mainstream movies released this year. [Noel Murray]

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Warrior

Warrior

Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton

The naturalistic camerawork, gritty urban environments, or brutal setting of mixed-martial-arts fighting may mislead viewers away from the truth: Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior is a man-weepie of the highest Hollywood order, a would-be Rocky for an empire in decline. It’s irresistible, but how could people resist when Warrior comes packing double-barreled underdog arcs in the form of brothers played by Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton? They’re estranged from each other, but not as much as they’re estranged from their alcoholic father (Nick Nolte), who terrorized them and their mother until she ran away with her younger son, prompting her husband to eventually get sober. Hardy is a distraught former Marine who washes up on his dad’s Pittsburgh doorstep and starts training at the local MMA gym, beating the consciousness out of what turns out to be a highly ranked fighter in what was meant to be a casual sparring match. Edgerton is a Philly physics teacher and family man struggling to pay the bills, a former UFC pro who moonlights in parking-lot matches for extra cash to throw an upside-down mortgage. These two archetypes of bruised American masculinity are played by a Brit and an Australian, and played well—particularly in the case of Hardy, who’s been poised for stardom since 2009’s Bronson. He’s riveting here, a little boy lost with the hulking build of a minotaur; his dialogue would scarcely fill a few pages, but his character speaks volumes with his fists. [Allison Willmore]

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World War Z

World War Z

In terms of pure scope, there’s never been a zombie movie like this one. Made for close to $200 million, the film spans several continents, flooding the streets of major cities with hundreds, maybe even thousands of extras, and giving audiences a taste of the mass chaos and hysteria movies like this normally skip past. The wow factor arrives early, with a Philadelphia traffic jam that escalates into a full-blown mob scene. As retired UN operative Brad Pitt attempts to navigate his family out of the outbreak zone, the camera pulls back and up, and the panoramic view—of bodies in fevered motion, of the dead in hot pursuit of the living—is pretty stunning... [A.A. Dowd]

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Wrath Of Man

Wrath Of Man

Is making movies about blokes threatening to shoot each other, and sometimes actually shooting each other, an act of penance for Guy Ritchie? After spending a decade as a franchise man, starting one hit series and failing to start two more, Ritchie scored his biggest hit ever with the Aladdin remake—and promptly went back to basics. Make that very promptly: Aladdin came out two years ago, and he’s already made two R-rated crime movies, with another one not just threatening to shoot but already shot. If The Gentlemen was Ritchie’s attempt to recapture the lads-being-lads joshing of his Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels days, Wrath Of Man feels more like a lost Jason Statham vehicle he never got around to directing circa 2010. [Jesse Hassenger]

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