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

This maximalist sledgehammer of a film—something of a cross between Cloud Atlas, Enter The Void, Kung Fu Hustle, and a full season of Rick And Morty—has the energy, insanity, and exuberance of and the shock value of their “farting Daniel Radcliffe corpse” movie Swiss Army Man. Hopefully this serves as a warning that it is defiantly not for everyone. For those who revel in chaos, however, this movie is a gift. The film, which uses the gimmick of jumping between parallel universes to explore, essentially, how to be your best self, is awash in zany sci fi culs-du-sac, sly movie references, and a deranged high fructose attitude that scoffs at the idea of everything but the kitchen sink. The Daniels want infinite kitchen sinks. []

Despite shedding two definite articles and replacing “and” with an ampersand, 2009’s Fast & Furious, the third sequel in the improbable Fast And The Furious series, was far from the model of sleek economy its title suggested. Due to Vin Diesel’s on-and-off involvement and an ever-increasing cast of characters, a franchise built on the simple thrills of fast cars and hot bodies had taken on weight—a word like “mythology” should never have to applied to material this frivolous. By bringing back virtually all the major characters from the previous films and adding another block of concrete in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Fast Five would seem to exacerbate the problem, but it does the opposite. Like a proper action sequel, it’s bigger, louder, and sillier than its predecessors, but it’s more streamlined, too, smartly dumping the tired underground racing angle in favor of a crisp, hugely satisfying Ocean’s Eleven-style heist movie. []

Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden is a fiendishly clever, sinfully funny con-job melodrama, the kind that keeps yanking the rug out from under everyone on screen and off. If that’s all the film was, it would still be a must-see, at least for those who don’t mind a little graphic violence and kinky sex to go with their misdirection. But for all its twists, turns, and betrayals, the most shocking thing about the film is that it’s also, quite possibly and quite improbably, a genuinely romantic movie. That’s right: The extreme South Korean director of and made a love story, one where the lovers aren’t related or vampires or anything! To get to it, you just have to peel back all the layers of deception, just like the characters do. The movie is based on Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel , with which Park takes some creative liberties, including moving the story from Victorian era Britain to the Korea of the 1930s, when the country was occupied by the Japanese. Tamako (Kim Tae-ri), a poor villager, is hired to serve as the new handmaiden for wealthy Japanese heiress Lady Hideko (’s Kim Min-hee), who lives with her old, lecherous uncle (Cho Jin-woong) at a vast country estate. No sooner has the young woman arrived, however, than Park cues up the first of many flashbacks, revealing that Tamako is actually (dramatic pause) Sook-hee, a pickpocket working with a con man, Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), to cheat the heiress out of her fortune. The plan involves convincing Lady Hideko to marry the count, then throwing her into a loony bin and splitting the inheritance. There’s just one tiny little snag: The two women have gotten closer and closer—and Sook-hee may be falling in love with her mark. []

The Hitman’s Bodyguard, which bears the tagline “Get triggered” and is essentially a dumber, tackier , was destined to be one of those Neanderthalic, faux-merican EuropaCorp action movies, like or ­­—except fate fumbled, and the film ended up as a coasting-on-star-power Hollywood programmer directed by ’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 () 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 , 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. []

Executed in high style, with a narrative coherence that sometimes eludes Park, opens with serial killer Choi Min-sik (star of Oldboy) claiming his latest victim, a female driver caught with a flat in a snowstorm. Turns out the woman’s fiancé, played by Lee Byung-hun, is an ass-kicking special agent who receives the news stoically, then sets about finding the perpetrator and making sure he pays dearly for the crime. Using a high-tech GPS capsule that makes him constantly aware of Choi’s location, Lee seeks to torment before he kills, hoping to make Choi feel the same fear and pain he inflicted on Lee’s wife-to-be. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game that twists and turns and escalates in tension as it unfolds. Though director Kim’s penchant for black comedy makes it more palatable, I Saw The Devil is still a nasty piece of work, extreme even by the hair-raising standards of extreme Asian cinema. But for stout-hearted genre aficionados—“sickos,” if you will—it’s essential viewing. []

Coming after a long purgatory in half-hearted B-pictures and TV land, where he directed episodes of Miami Vice and the Crime Story pilot, Abel Ferrara’s operatic 1990 gangster film King Of New York confirmed his affinity for the morally wayward and contradictory. A businessman, a philanthropist, and an executioner rolled into one, Christopher Walken elects himself mayor of the streets, which to him means confusing greed with altruism: Once he controls the city’s drug trade, by any bloody means necessary, the other sleazy kingpins will be eliminated and a portion of the proceeds will finance community projects like an underfunded hospital in the South Bronx. After serving a long prison sentence, the scarily opaque Walken and his cronies (Laurence Fishburne, Steve Buscemi, and Giancarlo Esposito, among others) seize their turf through a sweeping coup, eliminating their competitors by force. With the police hogtied by procedure, rogue cop David Caruso and a few of his fellow officers (including Wesley Snipes) try to stop Walken’s gang on their own, over the objections of by-the-book lieutenant Victor Argo. A Martin Scorsese discovery who appeared in five other Ferrara films, Argo is arguably the audience’s lone surrogate in a shady urban landscape; his earthy features and self-effacing style make him a memorable foil to the flashier Walken. Without his quiet authority, King Of New York might be written off as an unrepentant gangsta playbook, all sleaze and decadence without the ballast of common decency. []

Pretend for a minute that Christopher Nolan’s extraordinary Memento is nothing more than a gimmicky noir exercise, grinding out its plot with cool efficiency and hollow mechanics, devoid of any larger significance. Disregard its mind-bending profundities about the nature of memory and existence and what it means to be human. Even if all these things were willfully ignored and Memento were simply reduced to an architectural blueprint, it would still be akin to watching Bobby Fischer play chess, seeing the board several moves ahead of his opponent. It’s an exhausting experience just to keep up—be sure to arrive on time and stay seated until the credits roll—but for Nolan to dream up a scenario this complex and yet work it out so thoroughly seems almost inconceivable. More than just a shallow mindfuck, the twist in Memento is that there’s more going on than the head can hold. [Scott Tobias]

Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, the series’ fourth film, charges director Brad Bird with the task, betting that the animator behind and would have similar luck with flesh and blood in his live-action debut. The bet pays off. And then some. Bird brings a scary amount of assurance to Ghost Protocol. His action scenes are clean, coherent, thrilling, and visceral, never more than in a mid-film sequence in Dubai that piles setpiece atop setpiece as the action moves in, around, up, and down the Burj Khalifa skyscraper—the tallest building in the world. As Tom Cruise clings to the side of the building using malfunctioning equipment, and a sandstorm looms in the distance, the question shifts from whether Bird can direct an action film to whether there’s anyone out there who can top him. []

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. []

Adapting a Warren Ellis-penned comic series, director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan, The Time-Traveler’s Wife) brings the same sort of casualness to . When a heavily armed kill team attempts to take out laid-back retired CIA black-ops specialist Willis, he kidnaps the terrified Parker to keep her from becoming a target, and seeks out the elderly associates of his spy-adventures heyday, including Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, and Brian Cox as a former Russian adversary. While they attempt to puzzle out the conspiracy that led to the kill order, current CIA agent Karl Urban, doing his best ice-faced Terminator impression, tries to track Willis down and finish the job. Many shootouts result, but between action setpieces, the characters engage in the languid, pause-filled conversations of retirees with no commitments or deadlines in sight. This gives the film’s first half-hour a charming, ambling feel, but becomes increasingly awkward as Red continually veers between high energy and low. There’s a restrained cool in pretending that these characters are so capable that they never feel pressure or break a sweat, but if they aren’t challenged, what’s the point? []

Like an indie analog to —and set, in fact, in a cabin in the woods—the meta-horror movie Resolution makes its own creative crisis the star, trying to make something original out of elements so hackneyed, the filmmakers can’t bear to reproduce them. What starts as the simple story of one friend trying to wean another off drugs by force becomes freighted, gimmick by ridiculous gimmick, a willfully absurd dogpile of horror-movie scare tactics—escapees from an asylum down the road, ominous old photographs and 8mm movies, webcam footage from an unseen camera. And the whole thing is set on an Indian reservation! That last element recalls Stanley Kubrick’s own seeming mockery of the genre in The Shining, in which an Indian burial ground adds more grim mythology to a hotel that has plenty already. Though its commentary is slight, Resolution makes a clever appeal to viewers who have seen it all. []

It’s all but impossible to watch Pelham’s first 90 seconds and not think, “Oh, man, this is gonna be awesome.”Fortunately, the movie delivers. Adapted from a best-selling novel by John Godey (the pen name of Morton Freedgood), it depicts, nearly in real time, the hijacking of a New York subway train by four identically disguised and heavily armed men (Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, and Earl Hindman) who refer to each other using color-based code names: Mr. Blue, Mr. Green, etc. (Somewhere in Los Angeles, nearly 20 years later, a video store employee named Quentin was .) As the transit cop in charge of the hostage negotiations, Walter Matthau tones down his patented sardonicism in favor of an immensely appealing rumpled professionalism—a bold move, considering that he’s constantly in danger of being upstaged by his blinding yellow necktie. The hijackers demand [Dr. Evil voice] one million dollars in cash, with Shaw’s no-nonsense leader warning that he’ll kill one hostage for each minute that the payment is late. While Gotham’s feckless mayor (Lee Wallace) eventually agrees to pay, the real question is how the hijackers plan to escape with the loot, given that they’re trapped in an underground tunnel. []

In any case, subversive intentions would mean very little if Sicario failed to deliver what it promises, which is heart-pounding excitement. One can easily ignore the film’s ambitious subtext and enjoy it strictly on the basis of its terrific performances and nonstop intensity. Brolin, as the cocksure Matt (who wears flip-flops to top-secret meetings), is hilariously yet frighteningly callous, while Del Toro turns in his steeliest work since, well, Traffic. And while director Denis Villeneuve (,) orchestrates multiple high-octane set pieces—the most harrowing is an ambush that takes place in a traffic jam at the U.S.-Mexico border crossing—he also manages to make ostensibly mundane establishing shots seem ominous. The tiny shadow of a plane, viewed from above as it heads into Mexico, carries almost as much weight as the muzzle of a gun placed under someone’s chin. In the end, though, it all comes down to Blunt’s Kate Macer, and her inability to fulfill the role she seems to have been assigned by long-standing Hollywood convention. This is not a failing. It’s the whole point. []

Gallons of ink have been spilled on Paul Feig’s female-focused approach to comedy, so why isn’t one of the year’s best vehicles for women getting more press? Starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively in a twisted tale of suburban intrigue, A Simple Favor pioneers the subgenre of mommy-blog noir. But while it lives in the mundane realm of play dates and PTA meetings, the film also recognizes that, while they might spend a lot of time with kids, its characters (and target audience!) are still intelligent adults with sophisticated tastes, from dry gin martinis to designer menswear. []

Stonehearst Asylum is the kind of hothouse psychological thriller that frames itself around unexpected reveals, and it’s hard to say much of substance about the movie without disclosing the first of its many plot twists. On his first night on the asylum grounds, intern Newgate (Jim Sturgess) discovers that the superintendent, Dr. Lamb (Ben Kingsley), the groundskeeper, Finn (David Thewlis), and the rest of the staff are actually patients who have deposed the asylum’s real superintendent, Dr. Salt (Michael Caine), and imprisoned him along with his staff in dank basement cells. This is where the movie’s source material, the Edgar Allan Poe short story “The System Of Doctor Tarr And Professor Fether,” ends, but it’s where Stonehearst takes off, subverting genre expectations by turning the inmates into representatives of modernity. The presence of Kingsley—as well as all the ornate cabinetry and shadowy atmosphere—might suggest , but the real referent appears to be Tod Browning’s Freaks, with its complicated mixture of fear and sympathy. []

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 affecting its reputation when 1997’s 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 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. []

It’s a remarkable effort in an extraordinary film that evokes the iconography of its 1986 predecessor. But exceeds the original technically, while circumventing naked jingoism in an era when depictions of the military can (or maybe should) no longer be unambiguously celebratory. Joe Kosinski () matches his well-established architectural precision with suitably nostalgic but never pandering emotionality, while Cruise commands the screen in a performance that leverages his multimillion-dollar star wattage to brighten the entire film. []

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]

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. []

A popular mantra in the digital era is “You have a smartphone, you have YouTube, no excuses.” But that’s only half the truth. The flip side to this accessibility is that, while making a movie is easier than ever, it’s still difficult to stand out in an oversaturated media landscape. Just finishing the thing is an achievement, to be sure. But if you’re serious about getting it seen, you’ve got to understand both your strengths and your limitations and apply them in a way that will make your vision distinct. For an object lesson in the matter, aspiring filmmakers would do well to examine self-taught director Andrew Patterson’s debut feature, The Vast Of Night. Set in the tiny border town of Cayuga, New Mexico (pop. 492) sometime in the 1950s, The Vast Of Night proceeds from an archetypical—some might even say clichéd—sci-fi premise. All you need to hear are the words “New Mexico” and “1950s” to figure out where the plot is headed, which does make its inevitable conclusion feel a little bit, well, inevitable. But that’s a minor issue, as the appeal of this story lies not in its twists and turns but its telling. Patterson, along with screenwriters James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, apply their influences and inspirations to The Vast Of Night in ingenious ways, making for a film that feels fresh despite being composed of classic elements. []