The best action movies on Netflix

In the November 1939 issue of Detective Comics, six months after creator Bob Kane first introduced The Batman, Kane and uncredited collaborator Gardner Fox attached a two-page prologue to the otherwise unmemorable adventure “The Batman Wars Against The Dirigible Of Doom.” Subtitled “The Legend Of The Batman—Who He Is And How He Came To Be!” the intro reveals Batman’s previously untold origin story, taking him from a happy rich kid to a grim creature of the night in what must be the 12 most emotionally wrenching panels of comics’ golden age. In Batman Begins, which reboots the Batman film franchise eight years after the disastrous Batman & Robin, director Christopher Nolan (Memento), co-writer David S. Goyer, and star Christian Bale draw liberally from different periods of Batman’s history, but their film most resembles those two pages: It treats Bruce Wayne’s transformation into, as that story put it, a “weird figure of the dark” as a logical response to the darkness around him. [Keith Phipps]

Stream it now

The most significant shot in Casino Royale—the Daniel Craig revamp of the James Bond franchise—comes early, while the new Bond is getting his Parkour on and hopping from beam to beam at a construction site in pursuit of a terrorist bomber. When Craig severs a cable so he can rise up on a pulley, there’s an insignificant insert shot of the pipes Craig cut loose, now tumbling on the ground. But it’s only insignificant from a plot perspective. From a thematic perspective, the falling pipes reflect the mission statement for this new Bond: “Actions have consequences.” This is a messier Bond than we’d seen in a while. He’s impulsive, he miscalculates, and when he kills someone, he gets blood on his hands, his face, and all over his clothes. In Casino Royale, 007 has plenty of chances to get bloody. [Noel Murray]

Stream it now

It’s no accident that the skyline of Gotham City figures prominently in so many scenes in The Dark Knight, the second Batman movie from director and co-writer Christopher Nolan. It’s seen from above when Batman glides from building to building, and from below as the Joker skulks through streets that the residents deserted in panic. But it’s just as conspicuously present in the film’s many scenes of executives and city officials meeting high above the general populace, like gods determining the fates of those below. Where Batman Begins was largely about the considerable personal toll exacted by its hero’s decision to fight back against the forces of evil while adhering to a code of honor, The Dark Knight expands those weighty themes to city scale. [Keith Phipps]

Stream it now

The Foreigner is a good, lean cut of meat—in other words, a typical Martin Campbell movie, expeditious and cold-blooded in its cross-cut, cloak-and-dagger plotting and violence. A bomb explodes into a cloud of black smoke and glass, leaving 12 dead bodies in London’s posh Knightsbridge boutique district and scrambling various minor characters (journalists, political bigwigs, Scotland Yard officers) in search of information about an unknown Irish republican splinter group that calls itself “the Authentic IRA.” That’s when Liam Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan, who debuted as James Bond in the Campbell-directed GoldenEye), the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, enters the picture. He’s a shrewd political operator—the kind of character American audiences are used to seeing in municipal and state-level politics, but not in terrorist-chasing thrillers. The guy is part wheeler-dealer, part guerrilla, and a dead ringer for Gerry Adams, the real-life leader of the Irish nationalist party Sinn Féin. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

Stream it now

There’s something not quite right about David (Dan Stevens), the title character of Adam Wingard’s wickedly entertaining thriller The Guest. At a glance, he seems like the model man in uniform—a polite, soft-spoken war veteran, blessed with both the all-American good looks and aw-shucks charisma of Chris Evans’ heroic Steve Rogers. Arriving without notice on the doorstep of the Petersons, to “look after” the family of his fallen brother-in-arms, David ingratiates himself immediately: The bereaved parents (Sheila Kelley and Leland Orser) see a little of their slain son in this accommodating visitor, while their meek youngest child, Luke (Brendan Meyer), gains a protective, surrogate older brother. Only teenage daughter Anna (Maika Monroe, a terrific Final Girl) senses what the audience does about this mysterious soldier, though her judgment is quickly clouded by a rush of hormones, the only sensible response to such rock-hard abs and old-fashioned congeniality. Who but the most iron-willed could resist the charms of this dashing military man? [A.A. Dowd]

Stream it now

In Jupiter Ascending—an imaginatively goofy, Rococo space opera written and directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski, the sibling duo behind The Matrix, the live-action Speed Racer, and most of Cloud Atlas—an Anglo-Russian housecleaner is whisked away from Chicago by a pointy-eared, half-albino dog-man, and finds herself embroiled in a convoluted conspiracy that involves intergalactic tax codes, inheritance law, pseudo-incestuous marriage, an economy that takes human capital literally, and characters with names like Titus Abrasax and Chicanery Night. It is, in other words, just a few musical numbers and a whiff of marijuana smoke short of being the Thomas Pynchon book of big-budget, effects-driven movie sci-fi. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

Stream it now

Based on a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is a manga-doodle that draws from the wellspring of popular culture, viewing youthful infatuation through a filter of indie rock, action comics, and a selection of classic arcade and Nintendo games. It’s a series steeped in irony, bestowing magnificent powers on an ineffectual Canadian who can barely muster the courage to talk to a girl, yet reluctantly does battle with her ex-boyfriends. There’s perhaps no better director to bring it to the screen than Edgar Wright, whose Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz are similarly informed by a culture-addled mind, and he brings a great elasticity to Scott Pilgrim, which stretches the medium to accommodate O’Malley’s comic-book universe. [Scott Tobias]

Stream it now

Politically, there are no shades of gray in Shadow, the latest from Hero and House Of Flying Daggers director Zhang Yimou. You’re either on the side of the patriotic freedom fighters who dream of liberating the walled city of Jingzhou from its occupiers, or you’re on the side of the spoiled, cowardly king of Pei (Zheng Kai), who glorifies his own selfish inaction in the form of an epic poem called “Ode To Peace” painted on screens placed around his throne room. Morally, things are a bit murkier. “Some things don’t have a right and wrong,” says the wife of the king’s right-hand man Commander Yu (Chao Deng, in a dual role), who has been secretly training a body double to take his place in court and on the battlefield ever since a festering combat wound forced him onto the sidelines of both. Visually, the film is nothing but shades of gray—so much so that the tones of the actors’ skin, and the blood pouring from their wounds, are the only other colors in Yimou’s palette. [Katie Rife]

Stream it now

Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson take their well-worn personas back to the groovy days of afros, butterfly collars, disco, and long sideburns in Starsky & Hutch, a delightfully silly resurrection of the ‘70s cop show/camp touchstone, helmed by Old School director Todd Phillips. Typecast to perfection, Stiller plays a more macho version of his usual diminutive bundle of seething neuroses. Desperate to live up to his mother’s legendary reputation in law enforcement, Stiller’s by-the-books control freak is saddled with a new partner in Wilson, a sweet-natured space cowboy complete with a likable kid sidekick (who’s straight out of Wilson’s films with Wes Anderson) and a laissez-faire attitude toward crime prevention. Together, Wilson and Stiller inch their way toward the crime ring of Vince Vaughn, a drug lord who, in the time-honored tradition of villains everywhere, hides his nefarious evil under an immaculate façade of upper-class philanthropy. Beyond merely upgrading his Wilsons, from mopey Luke to loopy-genius Owen, Phillips has improved considerably as a co-writer and director since Old School. His new film looks better, is brisker and breezier, and doesn’t telegraph and belabor gags as clumsily. It would be hard to find a better cast, too. [Nathan Rabin]

Stream it now

The voice of Marlon Brando, lifted from his performance as Superman’s father Jor-El in 1978's Superman, opens the immense revival Superman Returns, echoing through the heavens with a godlike authority. What he says isn’t that important—in fact, his mush-mouthed musings sound a little like Apocalypse Now outtakes—but this nod to the original film sets a tone of pop classicism that’s rare in modern superhero movies. Director Bryan Singer isn’t interested in adding dark inflections to the legend, like Batman Begins, or even harnessing the whiz-bang energy of the Spider-Man movies or his X-Men entries. Instead, he intends to restore this mightiest of heroes to his full iconic glory, with one majestic image after another of the Man Of Steel literally carrying the world on his shoulders. Singer’s reverence for the 1978 version edges perilously close to mimicry, as if he has no new ideas to bring to the table, but he succeeds in drawing out the Superman myth with simple power and a refreshing absence of irony. [Scott Tobias]

Stream it now

Nothing about Timo Tjahjanto’s career has been measured. The writer-director’s full-length debut, Macabre (co-directed with Kimo Stamboel and based on their award-winning short, “Dara”), is a grisly slasher, the first Indonesian film ever to be banned in Malaysia for “excessive violence.” It seemed a new master of horror was on the rise. After teaming twice more with Stamboel, Tjahjanto struck out on his own with The Night Comes For Us, an organized-crime yarn that proves the director to be among the finest purveyors of can-you-top-this mayhem working today. What first comes across like it’s going to be Tjahjanto’s homage to Asian gangster movie royalty like John Woo and Johnnie To quickly reveals itself to be a madcap bloodbath, more in line with the wilder tendencies of Takashi Miike. While cut from the same stylistic cloth, Evans has slowly gravitated toward more operatic bombast (The Raid 2, The Apostle), whereas Tjahjanto’s proclivities have remained laser-focused: The messier, more gruesome, and more uproariously chaotic, the better. [Alex McLevy]

Stream it now

With The Old Guard, Love & Basketball and Beyond The Lights director Gina Prince-Bythewood helms an action-fantasy hybrid that takes the beauty marks—and warts—of each genre and creates a sequel-starter for Netflix. The film follows an idealistic cadre of heroes who all share a common thread: They can live for centuries. The titular group is led by Andy (Charlize Theron), with Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari), and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) making up the rest of the crew. When a new immortal warrior, Nile (Kiki Layne), joins them, she sparks a reckoning with the Guard’s ideals—and the rosy picture they try to uphold. Early in the film, Andy gifts Booker with a copy of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which makes sense: A novel whose central ethic is individual goodness amid an errant society fits right in among this league of extraordinary Samaritans. The Guard has been around for ages, fighting (and dying) for humankind. At some point, they each found others like them, and banded together to secretly rescue humanity from itself ad nauseam. From stopping nuclear bombs to rescuing child hostages, Andy and company are guardians of the same mortals who would detest them if their powers were found out. The rub is that there’s a cap on their so-called immortality—one day, wounds just stop healing. It’s at this point that this superhero movie becomes a changing-of-the-guard Western, ruminating on what we leave to the next generation and what ideals it prioritizes. [Anya Stanley]

Stream it now

Popular consensus holds that Pierce Brosnan’s best outing as James Bond is his first, 1995’s GoldenEye. It’s hard not to wonder if there’s a halo effect from the beloved video game adaptation affecting its reputation when 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies is sitting right there. More than two decades later, Brosnan’s second appearance in the role stands out as both the most ’90s Bond movie and the rare entry that has elements of prescience, rather than pure trend-chasing. Actually, prescience versus trend-chasing neatly encompasses the motives of the best villain of the Brosnan run: media baron Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), a somewhat more megalomaniacal version of Rupert Murdoch, intent on starting World War III for the benefit of his broadcasting empire. Satirical skepticism of the media (and its fixations on ratings, sensationalism, etc.) is a fashionable remnant of the Natural Born Killers era, while the threats of conglomerates and consolidation have only gotten scarier and more vivid in the years since. Tomorrow Never Dies isn’t exactly incisive in its treatment of Carver; he is a Bond villain, after all. But Pryce gnashes his teeth with style, and it’s satisfying to see 007 take on a Murdoch stand-in without completely demonizing real journalism. [Jesse Hassenger]

Stream it now

Time does not always move forward in a linear way. History comes in fits and starts—sometimes jumping forward, sometimes easing back. Die Hard and its descendants eventually killed off the ultraviolent, megabudget, burnished-steel style of ’80s mainstream action movies—or, at the very least, it forced them to adapt and evolve. But this didn’t happen all at once. It wasn’t like Arnold Schwarzenegger sat down to watch Die Hard and then started looking into employment options in California state politics. And one of the finest, most excessive examples of ’80s action-movie excess didn’t come out until 1990. Looking back, it’s a terrible shame that Schwarzenegger only made one movie with the mad Dutch director Paul Verhoeven. The actor and director were made for each other. They were both amazing at a certain form of gory, tactile stylized violence, and they were both bone-deep cynics. There’s never been any sentimentality in a Verhoeven movie, and the sentimentality that’s appeared in Schwarzenegger movies has been so nakedly manipulative that it almost seems more cynical. Verhoeven’s Hollywood movies were both violent spectacles and commentaries on the idea of violent spectacle, and Schwarzenegger was always fine with the idea of being a commentary on himself. We’re lucky we got to see Verhoeven film Schwarzenegger holding Michael Ironside’s severed arms aloft while smirking and delivering a one-liner, but we should’ve seen that exact same thing happen at least three more times. [Tom Briehan]

Stream it now

A stunt coordinator turned prolific director of DTV action, Jesse V. Johnson wastes no time setting Triple Threat in motion, with less than five minutes passing between studio logos and the first shot fired in a jungle-raid opening set piece. The title promises, and delivers, a showcase for three performers: Indonesian Silat fighter Iko Uwais (The Raid), Muay Thai master Tony Jaa (Ong-bak), and Chinese martial artist Tiger Chen, a choreographer who’s only recently made the leap to performing onscreen himself. The plot doesn’t bear much consideration, with those three versus evil Western forces (led by Johnson’s regular collaborator Scott Adkins) trying to kill a humanitarian-minded princess (Celina Jade). “Maha Jaya,” i.e. Thailand, is the setting, where plentiful bursts of gunfire are deployed with musical and soothing regularity. In between all the shooting, Johnson captures a number of martial arts face-offs with increasingly rare and graceful coherence. In a time-honored B-movie paradox, Triple Threat’s comparative modesty of resources increases its tangible satisfactions: Everything you see has been generated through grunt work rather than outsourced for computer rendering. [Vadim Rizov]

Stream it now

Don’t let the “Orphan Black knockoff” vibes sway you from checking out this baldly silly yarn, set in a a future where environmental devastation has led to a strict global “one child per family” law. Noomi Rapace stars as seven identical septuplets named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.; each leaves the house one day a week, all under the same shared identify, which of course has disastrous consequences. The main draw is seeing Rapace pull off the delightful juggling act of seven different personalities, but director Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow) also orchestrates gleefully over-the-top action and chase sequences. He’s staged a crowd-pleasing game of cat-and-mouse, jazzed up by sci-fi flourishes and a high concept. [Alex McLevy]

Stream it now