Action films are a favorite of Hollywood, mostly because the genre is just so malleable. There's a hero (or antihero) at its core, tasked with taking care of business. But that business can be anything from snuffing out reams of Russian bad guys — see Bob Odenkirk in the left-field 2021 action surprise Nobody — to Arnold Schwarzenegger engaging in a fist fight with Sharon Stone (See, she's not really his wife, and she doesn't want him to go to Mars. But more on that later).
Ultimately, action movies are about escapism, pure and unadulterated. Few of us will ever fight an assailant on top of a moving freight train, or leap a motorcycle over an explosion. But we'll happily cheer for somebody doing that onscreen. Ready to escape? Here are our picks for the best action offerings from HBO Max.
"Kill Bill is just a funky, hermetic pulp bash," wrote EW's Owen Gleiberman in 2003. The first volume of Quentin Tarantino's revenge epic is indeed that, introducing us to the fractured world of The Bride (Uma Thurman), who awakens from a five-year coma with a singular thought: silence all of those who killed off her wedding party, her unborn baby, and who tried to snuff her out, too. It was the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad that did the Bride and her loved ones dirty, and she's soon locked in combat with members O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), Budd (Michael Madsen), and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah). But at the top of her kill list is — cue the title — Bill (David Carradine), the Vipers' former boss and the Bride's former lover.
Carradine doesn't even appear until Kill Bill: Vol. 2, which was released as an entirely separate film (QT's script for what became the two sections of Kill Bill was a whopping 197 pages long). But since both volumes are on HBO Max, this is your chance to combine them into a legendary watch party full of Tarantino's signature music cues, squirmy violence, deep text of cinematic pop culture reference points, and outre stylistic touches, like the O-Ren Ishii backstory in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 that becomes a gory anime vignette.
If you liked Kill Bill: Vol 1, you might also enjoy: Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), streaming on HBO Max.
The creative and financial apex of what's become an entire universe of film and television titles, Terminator 2: Judgment Day was the first expansion of the story told in 1984's The Terminator, making Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 cyborg killer from the future a father figure good guy to teenaged John Connor (Edward Furlong), son of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), who would grow up to lead the human resistance against sentient rogue intelligence Skynet and its world-conquering army of murderous machines. The storyline isn't the only thing that expands here. T2 director James Cameron took action filmmaking to incredible new heights with sequences that hurled massive semi-trucks through cement retention walls, smashed helicopters into government laboratories, and intensified the firepower at every turn.
This time around, the T-800 is tasked with protecting the Connors from a more advanced Terminator dubbed T-1000 (Robert Patrick) which is constructed from liquid metal and is utterly, totally relentless. The T-1000's arms that transform into blades were a particularly spectacular trick of CGI, still so new at the time. "The transformation effects are spectacular," wrote EW critic Owen Glieberman, "in part because there's real magic to them, a sense of technological wonder. By the end of the movie, we feel that this shape-shifting terminator, this sinister mass chameleonic metal, has an identity all its own."
If you liked Terminator 2: Judgment Day, you might also enjoy: Predator (1987), streaming on Hulu.
Christopher Nolan's stunning sequel to 2005's Batman Begins pitted Christian Bale's buff and brooding, caped and hooded vigilante, along with his allies James Gordon (Gary Oldman) and Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), against the anarchistic machinations of the The Joker, the legendary Batman villain brought back to life with vivid, tremulous energy and rank nihilism by Heath Ledger, who passed away a few months before The Dark Knight was released. Jack Nicholson will always have a seat at the Joker table, but Ledger's performance is the definition of must-watch, and rightly earned him a posthumous Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
The Dark Knight was the highest-grossing film of 2008, and has continued to resonate with audiences and critics as an example of superhero filmmaking that conducts itself with singular style and deeper, more lyrical intent. Owen Glieberman wrote that the film "exudes a predatory glamor that makes comic-book films that have come before it look all the more like kid stuff." And in a 2022 revisit, EW's Darren Franich highlighted the "merry destruction that starts from the opening bank scene, that tight criminal crew getting slasher-film'd mid-heist by their own boss," who of course was the Joker himself.
If you liked The Dark Knight, you might also enjoy: The Batman (2022), streaming on HBO Max.
Long before Jeff Bridges played a retired government spook and assassin who was suddenly forced back into the fight in The Old Man, a movie like Red tread similar territory. Starring Bruce Willis as former secret agent Frank Moses — he's marked with R.E.D. status, i.e. "Retired, Extremely Dangerous" — the film brings his old team out of moth balls to protect each other and neutralize some new threats. There's Helen Mirren in a hilarious, darkly comedic turn as the cold-blooded assassin Victoria, who blissfully boils down the remains of bad guys with acid in her bathtub; Morgan Freeman as the gallant retired CIA man Joe; explosives expert and resident eccentric/PTSD sufferer John Malkovitch as Marvin; and a pre-Succession Brian Cox as Ivan. Mary Louise Parker is also along as Sarah, Frank's love interest, who's caught up in the ass-kicking retirees' return to violent wet work.
All of the veteran actors here are having a lot of fun yukking it up to each other, and generally elevating the otherwise pretty basic script — Red is an adaptation of the DC Comics title of the same name — but what really shines are the film's action sequences directed with bullet-whizzing grit and chaotic glee by German director Robert Schwentke.
If you liked Red, you might also enjoy: Salt (2010), streaming on Peacock.
Bob Odenkirk? Action hero? Anyone who thought the Mr. Show and Better Call Saul star didn't have it in him will be proven wrong by Nobody, a delightfully bloody romp from director Ilya Naishuller and John Wick screenwriter Derek Kolstad. Odenkirk's Hutch leads a pleasantly benign life as a husband, father, and middle manager. But then a botched home invasion sets him on a violent backwards path to the life he used to lead, that of an assassin employed by numerous government agencies. And if viewers didn't anticipate Odenkirk taking this kind of role, their surprise is shared in Nobody by Yulian Kuznetsov (Aleksei Serebryakov), a ruthless Russian mafia chief who can't believe a seemingly milquetoast guy like Hutch is snuffing out entire squadrons of his best foot soldiers.
Action-wise, a chaotic, deftly comedic fight sequence set on a city bus is joined by the film's riotous finale, where Christopher Lloyd and rapper RZA appear as the father and brother of Odenkirk's character. The trio then handily deploy a litany of deadly booby traps, shotgun blasts, and explosive anti personnel devices against Kuznetsov and his gunmen. How crazed does that bus fight get? Take it from RZA: "Hutch gets thrown off the bus," he told EW. "When he gets back on that bus? The price of the popcorn is paid, a'ight? When Bob gets back on that bus? You got everything you came from, because that s--- is crazy."
If you liked Nobody, you might also enjoy: John Wick (2014), available to rent on Amazon Prime Video.
Ridley Scott's 2001 war film Black Hawk Down won Academy Awards for Best Film Editing and Best Sound, launched the career of Tom Hardy, and features an absolutely stacked ensemble cast including Josh Hartnett, Eric Bana, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, William Fichtner, Sam Shepard, and two actors who later found small-screen success: Ty Burrell (Modern Family) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones). When a US Army air and land operation in war-torn Mogadishu goes south in a hurry, the 1993 Somalia Civil War becomes personal for the Army rangers, Delta Force operators, and UH-60 Black Hawk flight crews that are pinned down in the city, running out of ammo, significantly outnumbered, and fighting for their lives.
With production from Jerry Bruckheimer and the direction of Scott, who has proven an expert grasp on action with such projects like Blade Runner and Gladiator, Black Hawk Down becomes an extended gun battle full of outsized slow-motion explosions, ringing automatic weapons fire, and the pockmarked infrastructure of scarred city Mogadishu seeming to collapse in real time around the soldiers' positions.
If you liked Black Hawk Down, you might also enjoy: Lone Survivor (2013), streaming on HBO Max.
Fascinated with the Indonesian martial arts discipline of pencak silat, filmmaker Gareth Evans decided to show it off in 2012's The Raid: Redemption, a stripped-down and economical actioner. Martial artists and actors Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, and Yayan Ruhian employ their feet, fists, necks, backs — basically, their entire physical selves, per the fighting aesthetic of pencak silat — in a grand melee that unfolds across multiple floors of a drug lord's apartment building headquarters. Uwais and Taslim are part of the police tactical team sent to take that big boss down. But they get much more than they bargained for when they're locked in and targeted by Ruhian and throngs of machete-wielding henchmen.
There are firearms here, too, plenty of them. But it's human-powered destruction that's the star of the show. Evans used handheld cameras for a close-in, verite feel to the fight sequences, which are often lengthened to the point that the plot is just sinew designed to hold together all the bone crunching, head stabbing, and neck snapping. The Raid: Redemption spawned a sequel, which featured the same level of insanity on a bigger budget. And Evans is involved in a long-gestating American remake of The Raid that is supposed to appear later this year on Netflix, for which he's also directing Tom Hardy in the upcoming action-thriller Havoc.
If you liked The Raid: Redemption, you might also enjoy: The Raid 2 (2014), streaming on HBO Max.
Not to be confused with David Ayer's 2016 film Suicide Squad (even though there's quite a bit of character crossover), James Gunn's quasi-do-over version of The Suicide Squad is unabashedly crass, unspeakably violent, happily weird, and faithfully committed to its DC Comics source material. How committed? Well, as a longtime fan of the comics, Gunn was sure to include some ringers on his armed-up task force of foul-mouthed and vaguely psychopathic miscreants: King Shark (voiced by Sylvester Stallone), for example, along with Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), and Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), who is in complete control of the lowly varmint world.
This rogue's gallery joins Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), Bloodsport (Idris Elba), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), and Peacemaker (John Cena) on a (suicide) mission to vanquish a stories-tall alien starfish before things really get out of hand. And, as it turns out, the best way to do that is with plenty of bloodshed and firepower — and a lot of laughs along the way. Gunn's film smashed the pandemic-era box office, and the director later took Cena and the Peacemaker character to the small screen with a well-received limited series for HBO Max.
If you liked The Suicide Squad, you might also enjoy: Birds of Prey (2020), streaming on HBO Max.
It was a few short years after Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, and Keanu Reeves was fighting against his reputation as a dumb dumb. And while Johnny Utah is still one of the goofiest names in mainstream cinema, Reeves' steely performance in Point Break as the young FBI agent who infiltrates a band of bank-robbing thrill-seekers helped launch him into the Hollywood stratosphere. It also helps that the film itself seeks to thrill. The late Patrick Swayze is mesmerizing as Bodhi (like Bodhisattva, get it?), a charismatic rogue who bonds with Utah over their shared quest to feel the rush and vanquish wanderlust.
The Pacific Ocean might as well be a character here, with extended bouts of surfing — Reeves learned to surf for the film — and pickup football games played on a beach by firelight. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Point Break was also revolutionary at the time, taking its actors to the skies for an extended, artful, and thrilling skydiving sequence. Even so, Lawrence O'Toole wasn't as enamored of Point Break back in 1992, writing that there were "more slow-motion shots than a week of MTV," decrying an "absurd" plot and the "extensive explorations of the, ahem, spiritual side of standing on a surfboard." OK, but still! Point Break in retrospect is arguably action movie royalty, with some reboots to show for it.
If you liked Point Break, you might also enjoy: Speed (1994), available to rent on Amazon Prime Video.
Director Paul Verhoeven followed the success of his 1987 classic RoboCop with Total Recall, a big budget, effects-heavy dystopian sci-fi action movie that starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as a construction worker in the future whose innocent wish to visit a colonized Mars via memory implant goes violently awry. Turns out, he's already been there and his brain can't tell the difference. As the confused but determined Quaid, Schwarzenegger has plenty of chances to go full Action Hero, taking down ten guys in a metro station attack, and, in a thrilling extended fight sequence, squaring off against Sharon Stone when his supposed wife is revealed to be an agent of the evil forces looking to take over Mars for themselves. Meanwhile, representing the fellow villains are Ronny Cox and Michael Ironside, who are both fantastic.
When the action moves offplanet, Total Recall gets a ton of mileage out of balancing all of its bruising and errant gunfire against the mortal threat of exposing the colony's built environment to the deadly wastes and choking atmosphere of Mars. Celebrating the 2012 release of the film on Blu-Ray, Chris Nashawaty called Recall one of his favorite "Ah-nuld" movies, and the "most unrelentingly violent film the strapping cinematic sadist ever served up."
If you liked Total Recall, you might also enjoy: RoboCop (1987), streaming on Showtime.