20 of our favorite subversive action films

By the time Bruce Lee made his final film in 1973 he was already an international star thanks to his role as Kato on The Green Hornet and films like Fists Of Fury and The Way The Dragon. But if anyone thought they knew what they were getting when they walked into the theater to see Enter The Dragon, they were in for a momentous revelation. Now considered the pinnacle of kung fu cinema, the film takes elements of spy thrillers, crime dramas, even blaxploitation, and remixes them into something unique. Lee plays a Shaolin monk recruited by a British spy to infiltrate a fighting tournament hosted by a ruthless crime lord on his private island. He’s joined by fellow competitors Roper (John Saxon), Williams (Jim Kelly), and a motley collection of other cool-ass characters in this crazy stew of mixed cultures and genres. Its influence on pop culture is immeasurable.

If you don’t think Predator is subversive, try watching it again with director John McTiernan’s words in mind: “The whole point is the impotence of all the guns. Which was just exactly the opposite of what I believed I was being hired to sell.” McTiernan took a bunch of brawny men with gleaming muscles, threw them into a jungle with a lean and cunning alien, and demonstrated how ineffectual their heavy weapons and warfare tactics were against a formidable enemy. Essentially, Predator was made to poke fun at the macho stereotypes of its era. Or, as McTiernan puts it, “To quietly ridicule the desire to see pictures of guns firing.” To really make his case, McTiernan stacked the cast with imposing physical specimens like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, and Jesse Ventura. So don’t feel bad if you find yourself rooting for the Predator; that’s sort of the idea—one that the subsequent sequels and other media certainly picked up on.

Paul Verhoeven was another important voice in 1980s action cinema, and many of his societal critiques remain stubbornly apt today. In RoboCop, Verhoeven and screenwriters Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner envisioned a likely future in which people are disposable and a police department could become a subsidiary of a corrupt megacorporation. OCP’s plan to replace the human workforce with a brigade of killer robots powered by a fatally flawed AI doesn’t sound so far-fetched anymore. As Officer Alex Murphy/RoboCop, Peter Weller nails his character’s development from man to machine and back to man again. And the colorful succession of villains he goes up against—played with relish by guys like Kurtwood Smith, Ray Wise, Paul McCrane, and Ronny Cox—is one of the best rogues galleries ever assembled in an action flick.

“I have come here to kick ass and chew bubble gum. And I’m all out of bubble gum.” You know the line, but did you know it came from They Live? That iconic phrase was originally delivered by wrestler-turned-actor “Rowdy” Roddy Piper as Nada, a drifter whose eyes are opened to a vast alien conspiracy when he puts on a special pair of sunglasses. They reveal that aliens are living among us and subliminal messages hidden in the media, like a billboard that simply reads “OBEY.” Director John Carpenter intended They Live to be a commentary on consumerism and the politics of the Reagan era. Little did he know it would become a cult classic that’s retained its relevance three decades later.

Luc Besson’s stylish action classic La Femme Nikita takes on the time-honored femme fatale archetype and puts her front and center as a main character. Anne Parillaud stars as Nikita, a drug-addicted teenage delinquent recruited by the government to become a covert operative. Taking advantage of her natural violent tendencies and unassuming physicality, her handlers transform her into a well-mannered assassin. But all that training can’t extinguish her humanity, and she becomes torn between the two sides of her double life. The film was so impactful it inspired several international remakes (including the inferior English-language Point Of No Return) and two TV series. There’s still nothing quite like the original, though.

The most subversive thing about El Mariachi may be that it exists at all. Robert Rodriguez’s debut film is a radical act of low-budget filmmaking that could only have been made outside of Hollywood. Shot on 16mm film on location in the Mexican state of Coahuila for around $7000, the Spanish-language action film was a hit and wound up grossing $2 million at the box office, after Sony stepped in as distributor (thanks to positive word of mouth) and invested a bit of its own money to transfer and clean up the original print. A simple story of revenge and mistaken identity—a musician and a dangerous ex-con arrive in a small town at the same time, both carrying guitar cases—El Mariachi is part action, part crime thriller, part neo-Western. Mostly, though, it will be remembered as a hell of a calling card for the 23-year-old Rodriguez.

In case anyone missed the satire of action-hero tropes in Predator, John McTiernan teamed up with Arnold Schwarzenegger once again to skew the genre and its conventions, this time way more explicitly. Depending on who you ask, Last Action Hero is either one of the biggest misfires in Hollywood history or an underappreciated post-modern gem that was ahead of its time. We’re talking about a film in which a fatherless kid (Austin O’Brien) literally escapes into a movie starring his favorite action hero (Schwarzenegger), who later jumps into the real world and eventually meets up with the real Schwarzenegger. Maybe audiences weren’t ready for that kind of self-reflexism. Or maybe they were put off by the bad jokes, clunky dialogue, wild tonal shifts, and nonsensical plot holes. Whatever the case, don’t underestimate the restorative power of time and nostalgia on a film’s lasting impression.

Jackie Chan didn’t invent the action comedy, but boy did he perfect it. His classic The Legend Drunken Master (as Drunken Master II was called in America) is still a fantastic demonstration of his ability to deliver punches and punchlines at the same time, without sacrificing the integrity of either. Loosely based on the true story of folk heroes Wong Fei-hung (Chan) and Su Hua-Chi (Yuen Siu-tien), sometimes known as Beggar So, Drunken Master is the story of a mischievous young man who betters himself (reluctantly) through grueling training in the boxing style inspired by “The Eight Drunken Immortals.” Fei-hung starts out as a chaotic disaster and takes a lot of hits in the beginning, before he finally gets it together. It’s Jackie Chan, though, so you know he’ll come out on top in the end, and use every prop in sight to get there.

While the action films of the 1980s locked in the conventions we now associate with the modern form of the genre, the next decade saw filmmakers start to deconstruct and dismantle them. In 1996, director F. Gary Gray followed up his successful directorial debut Friday with Set It Off, a heist film starring an elite quartet of anti-heroines played by Jada Pinkett, Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox, and Kimberly Elise. Each forced into a corner by different circumstances—including family obligations, prejudice, and financial hardship—they come to the conclusion that the only way out is bank robbery. It’s a tragic tale with a socially conscious message, great action scenes, and characters you genuinely care about.

At this point, the anti-authoritarian message in Starship Troopers has been thoroughly covered, and yet it doesn’t ever seem to get less relevant over the years. Loosely based on a novel by Robert Heinlein, it’s set in a future in which the world is run by a unified military organization and propped up by an ongoing war with an alien species, colloquially referred to as “bugs.” Through a carefully controlled stream of propaganda, everyone is encouraged to join the military industrial complex and do their part to protect Earth. If that’s not enough incentive, it’s also a guaranteed path to citizenship, which must be earned in this society. As you might expect, considering this is a Paul Verhoeven movie, there are multiple levels of meaning here to uncover. He made the film with many of the same crew members he’d worked with on RoboCop, including writer Ed Neumeier and creature designer Phil Tippett. Fresh-faced Casper Van Dien stars as Johnny Rico alongside Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Clancy Brown, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris, and Michael Ironside. Together, they make for a pretty wild game of “Where are they now?”

It goes without saying that The Matrix represents a significant milestone in the evolution of the action genre. It changed the game with its VFX-enhanced fight scenes and sleek, techno-inspired cyberpunk aesthetic. That much was evident when it first came out 25 years ago. But after Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s transitions, critics have also come around to an interpretation of the film as a trans allegory. When Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) explains to Neo (Keanu Reeves) that something feels off about the world (which he doesn’t yet know is The Matrix) and he’s trapped in a “prison” of his own mind, he could be describing the experience of gender dysphoria. Other online communities may have co-opted the “red pill/blue pill” dynamic, with the red pill representing an awakening to formerly hidden knowledge, but the Wachowskis have confirmed that the gender transition metaphor was indeed their intention. Once you see it, it’s hard to ignore.

This Japanese cult sensation was so influential it changed the common meaning of the term “battle royale” from a crowded wrestling match to a survivalist fight to the death in which only one winner gets to walk away with their life. The premise doesn’t seem as novel now as it was when Battle Royale was released—we’ve seen many different versions of it play out in films like The Hunger Games and games like Fortnite—but it’s still jarring to go back and watch it now. The film’s excessive violence is intentionally over-the-top, even satirical at times, to make a point about adolescent drama heightened to deadly extremes. There’s no getting used to seeing a bunch of middle schoolers take each other out in increasingly gruesome and inhumane ways, and we’re not supposed to.

If you know anything about Takashi Miike and his work, it should come as no surprise to find one of his films on this list. The choice of Izo may seem to come a little out of left field, though. While films like Audition and Ichi The Killer have been scrutinized and condemned for their violence and disturbing themes, Izo is more notable for its experimental form and structure. There’s no coherent plot, just a series of fights without much purpose or explanation. The film’s central figure (it’s a stretch to call him a character), Izo Okada, was a real historical figure in Japan, a samurai who lived during the late Edo period. Like his historical counterpart, Izo (Kazuya Nakayama) is executed at the beginning of the film for crimes of violence. That’s where the similarities end, because this Izo somehow lives on, slipping through time and space, madly wandering from one fight to the next on some sort of existential quest. Armed with nothing but a sword, he battles a grandiose collection of opponents throughout the ages, including yakuza, armored SWAT teams, ninjas, and actual demons. Is Izo trapped in purgatory? Is he an enraged spirit doomed to roam the Earth, fighting off attackers for eternity? Is he an allegorical embodiment of violence and aggression? All of these interpretations are valid, and Miike doesn’t commit to any one of them. He leaves it up to the audience to decide.

Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle is proof that you can gently poke fun at a genre while paying deep respect to it at the same time. Just a few years after expanding his considerable fanbase with the hybrid sports-action-comedy Shaolin Soccer in 2001, Chow wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Kung Fu Hustle, his tribute to Hong Kong action cinema. Rivaling Jackie Chan in his flair for combining complex fight choreography with impeccable comic timing, Chow delivers a pastiche of wuxia films, martial arts films, and Hollywood-style blockbusters with a wink and a Buddhist Palm technique. Set in Republic-era Shanghai, it follows Chow’s character Sing and his best friend Bone (Lam Chi-chung) on a quest to become fearsome gangsters (which they are very much not). Chow packs the film with direct references to Chinese culture and film history, but you don’t have to get any of them to enjoy it. There are plenty of visual gags, cool fights choreographed by famed stuntmaster Yuen Woo-ping (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix), and memorable characters who practically leap off the screen.

When talking about Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World in interviews director Edgar Wright has often compared his film adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel to a musical. In musicals, when the characters are feeling too much emotion for words, they sing and dance; in Scott Pilgrim they fight. It’s a sharp comparison, and explains the film’s campy, hyperreal tone. Comics and video games are also a clear influence on the visuals, sound design, and storyline, which has awkward drip Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) going up against seven evil exes to win the literal girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). There’s a fancy term for Wright’s approach to the film: transmedia storytelling. Basically, it just means that he blends techniques from many different mediums into a single work. Despite being considered a box office bomb (or should that be Bob-omb?), audiences have been coming around to it in recent years, enough to justify last year’s critically acclaimed Netflix animated series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.

The term “elevated horror” gets thrown around a lot these days, but you don’t hear much about “elevated action.” Such a category would have to include Hanna, an action film with a lot more on its mind than gunfights and chases. It still has those, to be sure, they’re just tied up in a fairytale coming-of-age story. Saoirse Ronan, who previously worked with director Joe Wright on Atonement, plays the title character, a genetically enhanced super kid raised in the wilderness by an ex-CIA operative (Eric Bana). Cate Blanchett is chilling as the ruthless senior officer tasked with bringing them in, coded throughout the film as a fantastical villain who’s part big bad wolf and part evil witch. Enhanced by a propulsive score by The Chemical Brothers, Hanna escapes the confines of a typical action thriller in order to say something profound about the struggles of adolescence and the constant conflict between nature and nurture.

Bong Joon-ho weaves in one of his favorite recurring themes of class inequality into the futuristic action thriller Snowpiercer, a dystopian journey aboard a train continuously circumnavigating the globe. Said train holds the last remnants of humanity after a manmade global disaster has rendered the planet frozen and uninhabitable. The commentary isn’t subtle. The train is divided into highly stratified sections—the impoverished masses are kept to the back while the privileged upper crust live in luxury up front. Chris Evans stars as Curtis, an inhabitant of the rear section, who leads a group of rebels up to the engine room. The confines of the train make for some fantastic and fast-paced fight sequences, including a standout blackout fight staged in total darkness and partially filmed through the night-vision goggles of the masked guards ordered to quell Curtis’ revolt. Besides Evans, the impressive cast roster also includes Song Kang-ho, Tilda Swinton, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, John Hurt, and Ed Harris.

Edge Of Tomorrow is what you get when you combine an action movie with the time-loop premise of Groundhog Day. It’s a fun twist on the genre, but that’s not the only thing that makes it subversive. The film also uses Tom Cruise in a way that plays off his tough-guy heroism in films like Top Gun and the Mission: Impossible franchise. His character, Maj. William Cage, starts off as a coward, a PR stooge who will do anything to avoid actual combat. It’s Emily Blunt’s Sgt. Rita Vrataski who’s the real hero of the story. It’s her job to train Cage while he levels up video-game style, going back to the start each time he dies. Director Doug Liman makes sure that the repeated scenes aren’t too repetitive, and maintains a balance between lighter moments and high-stakes drama so it doesn’t ever outstay its welcome.

One (perhaps unintended) side effect of the recent release of Furiosa was reminding everyone how great Mad Max: Fury Road was. It’s hard to believe that next year we’ll be celebrating a decade since its release. George Miller’s high-octane epic, once described by The A.V. Club as “quite simply, the greatest action movie ever made,” still feels as revolutionary as the day it premiered. Miller expanded on the junkyard punk style he established in the earlier Mad Max films and pushed it even further. After a brisk opening setup to establish where we are in the world, he thrusts Max (Tom Hardy) into the middle of a chase scene and barely lets up on the gas for the rest of the film’s duration. Most of the action was shot practically, and you can feel the difference in every frame. It’s visceral. And then there are the feminist undertones (or maybe just tones) amplified by Charlize Theron’s undeniable screen presence as Furiosa. It’s almost a bait and switch, as she turns out to be the real hero of the film. It’s no wonder Miller wanted to explore her story more.

It’s rare for an action film to be nominated for an Academy Award for best picture (as Fury Road was), let alone win one. That’s the power of Everything Everywhere All At Once. The not-so-secret secret to the Daniels’ (that’s the directing team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) success is that they use science-fiction, action, and comic tropes as window dressing for an intimate, character-driven drama about an immigrant family coming to terms with both the light and the darkness that coexist inside them. Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh is astonishing as Evelyn, a frazzled woman whose life gets turned upside down when she’s pulled into a series of parallel worlds. Surrounded by a supporting cast of fellow Oscar winners and nominees—Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis—she kicks and punches her way through spectacular fights both silly (we’re talking dueling butt plugs here) and solemn, ultimately arriving at a place of understanding with her daughter that feels oh-so-earned by the end.