Action cinema was revolutionized throughout the 2010s. Advancing computer technologies have brought more and more CGI into the genre. In some cases, it’s been used by directors like George Miller and Christopher McQuarrie to polish the rough edges out of visceral shots of breathtaking practical stunt work. But in other cases, it’s merely been an excuse for laziness.
Overuse of CGI diminishes the adrenaline-fueled experience that watching action on the big screen can provide. This being the case, the 2010s brought some action movies that were great and some that weren’t so great. Here are the five best and five worst action movies of the decade.
Best: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
After years in development hell, George Miller finally got a fourth Mad Max movie made — and it was well worth the wait. Working from a series of storyboards in lieu of a traditional screenplay, Miller told much of Mad Max: Fury Road’s story visually, with minimal dialogue.
The movie is essentially one long car chase, and it keeps up that intensity from beginning to end, but it also follows a conventional narrative structure with clear, concise character arcs buried in the spectacle.
Worst: The Expendables 3 (2014)
No one in The Expendables franchise ever really felt like a well-rounded character, but the third installment took the cake by adding almost a dozen new one-dimensional stock characters to the roster (and Stallone was clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel, as Kelsey Grammer’s casting can attest to).
The CGI in the action set pieces is so blatant and low-grade that it looks more like a Syfy original movie than a $100 million blockbuster.
Best: John Wick (2014)
Chad Stahelski and David Leitch’s John Wick was a landmark for the action genre. The directors’ background in stunt work meant they really knew what they were doing, while Keanu Reeves committed himself wholeheartedly to the film’s fight choreography, and has maintained that commitment as the franchise has gone on.
The movie drew influence from a disparate range of cinema greats: Hong Kong action movies, spaghetti westerns, “gun fu,” and seminal thrillers like John Woo’s The Killer, John Boorman’s Point Blank, and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï.
Worst: Point Break (2015)
The great thing about the original Point Break (also starring Keanu Reeves) is that it didn’t take itself too seriously. As the story of an ex-football player FBI agent infiltrating a gang of surfers who rob banks, it’s pretty ridiculous, and Kathryn Bigelow leaned into that with over-the-top characters and ultra-fun action sequences.
But the 2015 remake was all dour and drab and serious for some reason. The soulless CGI-ridden set pieces didn’t grab audiences like the fast-paced Steadicam action of the original.
Best: The Raid (2011)
Of all the elite-squad-infiltrates-a-high-rise action thrillers that have been made over the years, Gareth Evans’ The Raid stands out as one of the greatest. It was followed by a sequel three years later, which deserves an honorable mention because it was just as intense, but on a grander scale.
Casting actors who were also gifted martial artists (including Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, and Yayan Ruhian, to name a few) meant that Evans didn’t have to cut around stunt doubles. The actors doing all the fight choreography themselves allowed Evans and his cinematographers Matt Flannery and Dimas Imam Subhono to capture visceral, pulsating action.
Worst: Taken 3 (2015)
The first Taken movie is a fantastic thriller whose gritty simplicity is its greatest strength. The second one was far from perfect, but it was, at the very least, an enjoyable ride.
The third one took a wild left turn with an insane plot that ignores the previous events of the franchise and rips off The Fugitive. Every scene in which Liam Neeson does something mildly physically challenging has a dizzyingly rapid succession of cuts.
Best: Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)
After the Burj Khalifa sequence in Ghost Protocol and the hanging-off-a-plane-as-it-takes-off opening of Rogue Nation, one insane Tom Cruise stunt per movie wasn’t going to cut it for Mission: Impossible fans anymore, so Cruise included one in pretty much every major set piece in Fallout.
From the HALO jump over Paris to the bone-breaking outtake that made the final cut, Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie really pushed the boat out with Fallout.
Worst: White House Down (2013)
Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen is an imperfect movie, but it’s a masterpiece compared Roland Emmerich’s White House Down. Emmerich’s movie is straight from the cookie cutter of Die Hard rip-offs: a guy in a white vest, a terrorist siege, a family member held hostage by the bad guys, etc.
There’s a cheesy storyline involving Channing Tatum’s dreams of joining the Secret Service that feels disingenuous in light of the life-threatening circumstances. The only added twist is the White House setting, and Olympus had already done that by the time White House Down hit theaters.
Best: Dredd (2012)
2000 AD icon Judge Dredd had already been adapted for the screen by Sylvester Stallone in a shameful PG-13 buddy comedy co-starring Rob Schneider when Karl Urban donned the helmet for a challenging hard-R outing. Directed by Pete Travis and written by Alex Garland, Dredd has some of the most extravagant ultraviolence ever put to film.
Dredd keeps his helmet on for the whole movie, as he said, and the emotional resonance comes from Olivia Thirlby as his moralistic if naive foil, Judge Anderson. The film interestingly transplants the familiar elite-squad-infiltrates-a-high-rise genre into a dystopian future setting.
Worst: A Good Day To Die Hard (2013)
Somehow, the only Die Hard movie that began its life as a Die Hard movie fundamentally misunderstands the John McClane character. In A Good Day to Die Hard, he’s not a regular guy caught in the wrong place at the wrong time; he’s a sociopathic burden on a generic, mindless, nonsensical action movie about black ops in Russia.
McClane has always been able to think on his feet, and it’s one of the things that makes him stand apart from one-liner-spouting action-movie supermen, but A Good Day to Die Hard completely ignores that.