Top Action Movies

George Miller returned to the wasteland thirty years after Beyond Thunderdome and won six Academy Awards, more than any other film of its year. The convoy chase was staged in Namibia with real vehicles and stunt performers, with digital work used largely to erase rigs.

Chad Stahelski, Keanu Reeves' stunt double on The Matrix, directed his first feature here and built the fights around long unbroken takes of judo and pistol work. The Continental and its coin economy gave the genre a working mythology that carried through three sequels.

John McTiernan trapped Bruce Willis inside a single Los Angeles high-rise in 1988 and came away with four Academy Award nominations, all in technical categories. Alan Rickman made his feature debut as Hans Gruber, a thief who talks like a scholar and steals like an accountant.

James Cameron's 1991 sequel won four Academy Awards, among them Visual Effects for Industrial Light & Magic's liquid-metal T-1000. Recasting Schwarzenegger's killing machine as the protector inverted the first film's premise without softening its violence.

The Wachowskis took four Academy Awards for a film that fused Hong Kong wire work, choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping, with the still-camera rigs that produced bullet time. Its four leads trained in martial arts for months before a frame was shot.

Sigourney Weaver's Best Actress nomination for Ripley was rare Academy recognition for a genre lead, and the film itself took two Oscars. Cameron traded Ridley Scott's haunted-house dread for a Marine platoon and a power loader, turning Ripley into the series tactician.

Daniel Craig's debut sent the series back to Ian Fleming's 1953 first novel and opened with a free-running chase across a construction site, with Sebastien Foucan doing the running. Martin Campbell shot the pre-title sequence in black and white, marking Bond before the licence.

Ang Lee's wuxia drew ten Academy Award nominations and won four, among them Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography. Yuen Woo-ping's wire choreography gave the bamboo forest duel a weightlessness nothing else here attempts.

Five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Russell Crowe, followed Ridley Scott's revival of the Roman epic in 2000. Oliver Reed died before completing his scenes, which were finished using a digital stand-in assembled from existing footage.

Michael Mann expanded his own 1989 television film L.A. Takedown into a near three-hour crime epic that put Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in a scene together for the first time. The downtown Los Angeles bank shootout was recorded with live gunfire on location rather than sweetened afterwards.

Shane Black wrote the spec script in his early twenties, and Richard Donner's 1987 film turned it into the template that mismatched-cop movies borrowed from for a decade. Pairing Mel Gibson's suicidal Riggs with Danny Glover's settled Murtaugh gave the formula an emotional engine.

Christopher McQuarrie became the first director to make two Mission: Impossible films, and Tom Cruise performed the HALO jump and flew the finale's helicopter himself. He broke his ankle on the London rooftop leap, a take kept in the film that halted production for weeks.

McTiernan's 1987 jungle picture opens as a commando mission and becomes survival horror once the squad works out it is being hunted. The original creature suit, worn by Jean-Claude Van Damme, was scrapped mid-shoot, and Stan Winston designed the mandibled replacement the franchise kept.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas built their 1981 serial homage around Harrison Ford, and it finished the year as the top-grossing release before winning four Academy Awards. The Peruvian temple prologue establishes everything about Indiana Jones before the title card.

Paul Verhoeven's Hollywood breakthrough was rated X for violence and needed cuts before it could open with an R, and it received a Special Achievement Academy Award for sound effects editing. Rob Bottin's suit and the stop-motion ED-209 carry a satire on privatised policing that still lands.

Jan de Bont shot Die Hard as cinematographer before making this his directorial debut, and it won two Academy Awards for its sound work. A bus rigged to detonate below fifty miles an hour keeps the tension mechanical, running on physics rather than a grudge.

Doug Liman's 2002 adaptation of Robert Ludlum's novel swapped gadgets for improvised close-quarters fighting, most memorably a pen against a knife in a Paris apartment. The Mini Cooper chase and the handheld camerawork pushed the spy genre, Bond included, toward realism.

Heath Ledger's posthumous Oscar for Best Supporting Actor is the headline, but Christopher Nolan's 2008 film also cleared a billion dollars worldwide and shot major sequences on IMAX cameras. The semi-truck flip in the chase was executed practically, on a closed Chicago street.