Action films have always been close to my heart, I grew up on watching them and all of my friends enjoy action films, often will reference them and talk about them. Carrying on the Top 5 series Action films can spawn different emotions, and I often think can look great on a big TV or cinematic experience.
The List was very difficult to do, arguably my most challenging one, I have to break it down into the ’80s and 90’s first, with later decades to come but to be honest I should have done just each decade because it covers so much, what I noticed when speaking to friends about this that we seem to favour certain actors thus the list can favours towards those actors, below you can see a little trend, I could have had every Arnie film for example, but I’ve tried to narrow it down, some of these could easily appear on another list in the future.
Table of Contents
Predator
From 1987, Its probably top of the pile of action films, and arguably one of my favourite films in history, I like so much of this, Arnie was on top form in this era, the action was solid, one-liners were great, it spawned one of the biggest Sci-fi and action Characters, with multiple sequels and a franchise to this day, including a cross over with Aliens, (though Aliens should be in this list). This made many of my friends lists and if you like action films, I think you would have watched this.
Commando
Continuing the Arnie era, in 1985 a spectacular year of films saw Films like this and then later with True lies etc are classic one-liners, and in fact, this film is full of Meme and Liners, and hundred of youtube clips because of it. However this film is just continuous action and one-liners, the story is fine but it’s not what you are watching it fore at all, it’s tremendous.
Top Gun
From 1986, One of the more cult action films from the 80’s era, unlike perhaps most of the others in this list, this does try to focus on a story and emotions, but with the planes it brought action, and at its time action that we hadn’t seen the level of detail, it was one of the films that Tom Cruise became a worldwide star, and with the sequel coming very soon, it shows to you how this film is still well-loved.
Die Hard
So…Die Hard is a Xmas film, lets put that to the side a minute, I’m grouping this as a franchise over the first 3 anyway from 1986,1990, and 1995, Vengeance is still one of my favourites but it’s less action than perhaps the other two, again lots of one-liners and over the top action, and most action fans seem to like all 3, some prefer the second over the first and vice versa, the third is still fine for action but just lots of comedy, bruce Willis big action films showed that he could do action, perhaps for me the peak of his films but that’s a conversation for another day.
Robocop
Another action film that’s basically a Sci-fi film, but in its day this was groundbreaking and a cult film from 1987, still to this day the image of Robocop is widely known, it was a very graphic and violent film in its era, it had those one-liners that seem to be littered in action films, but it’s great, I watched this when I was young (naughty) and I loved it, I hadn’t seen anything like this and was amazed by it.
Overall
Like I said before action films spn across so many other Genres, and thus there are so man films that can make this list and no doubt is on yours, I deliberately held back a couple that was close to this list as I know there on others coming up, but still, its an action-packed list, that done right gets your heart pumping and exciting to see the action.
The Alternatives that could have made the list
Face Off | I love this film and this could and should be on my list, its story is silly but I don’t care
Rambo | I think i missed the big hype about this film but i still enjoy them
Terminator 2 | It’s great and is on another list (spoiler) but I still think this is fantastic and I’ve let one of the others take centre stage
Con Air | Terrific film, one of Cage’s best films
Running Man | One of the earlier films i can remember, one liners galore.
