It can be tricky to pin down where an idea first started, but first popularized? That’s a little bit easier. Parkour existed well before Pierre Morel’s District B13 premiered in 2004, and it was that film – and the freerunning virtuosity of its star (and original Parkour co-founder) David Belle that captured audience and industry attention alike, transforming the idea of a simple foot chase into a feat of acrobatic insanity seen repeatedly since in films like The Bourne Supremacy, Casino Royale, Fast Five and now Brick Mansions, the American remake of District B13 released this weekend.
Historians may quibble about the particulars, but certain films just seem to mark a historical shift: there were films before them, and films afterwards. The action genre in particular has seen multiple generations evolve over time, frequently punctuated by films we now consider the most influential action movies of all time. We may have got the idea for this article from District B13, but its influence is relatively minor compared to the 25 films – not all of them great or even particularly good – that changed the face of one of the most popular genres on the planet and the many subgenres that lie within it.
So here they are, CraveOnline‘s picks for The 25 Most Influential Action Movies of All Time. To keep things (relatively) simple, we’re focusing on films that influenced the way movies were made and the genres that would become popular, not films that necessarily shot a star to popularity, and in particular films that influenced western filmmaking… regardless of their country of origin.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
The 25 Most Influential Action Movies of All Time
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The Great Train Robbery (1903)
One of the most influential movies in any genre, Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery is credited as being one of the first long-form motion pictures (at a whopping 10 minutes!), and innovating such now-familiar techniques as location shoots and cross-cutting between two different scenes. The modern action genre - and pretty much every motion picture you've ever seen - wouldn't exist without this thrilling heist caper.
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King Kong (1933)
Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack's King Kong, the iconic tale of a giant ape kidnapped from his island of monsters and taken to New York City in chains, falling in love with the beautiful Fay Wray in the process, was an enormous step forward in visual effects, combining still-impressive stop-motion animation (courtesy of Willis O'Brien) with live-action actors, and a score by Max Steiner that synchronized with the action, a technique swiftly appropriated and still used today. This is the birth of the VFX blockbuster.
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The 39 Steps (1935)
The already prolific thrill master Alfred Hitchcock tore up the box office with this, one of his first (and still one of his best) "wrong man" thrillers, starring Robet Donat as a bystander who falls prey to a secret society of spies after he's framed for murder. Chases across the countryside, the love interest who refuses to believe his story, and the constant ratcheting of suspense made The 39 Steps an enormous financial success that helped define the action thriller for decades to come.
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Stagecoach (1939)
How's this for one of the most influential films ever made? John Ford's firecracker western, starring John Wayne as an outlaw teaming up with a mismatched band of travellers to fend off attacks on their stagecoach, was watched by Orson Welles over 40 times while he was making Citizen Kane, one of the most influential dramas ever made. Stagecoach's cavalry charges, tense set pieces and the combination of real locations and studio sets continue to influence the action genre to this day.
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Seven Samurai (1954)
Akira Kurosawa didn't just influence the modern action genre, he essentially defined it with Seven Samurai, a men on a mission movie that matched nobility with cynicism, thrilling and epic fight sequences with macho character arcs, and even spawned innovations as simple as cutting between slow-motion and normal frame rates to increase suspense. Frequently referenced, and sometimes outright remade, but never, ever topped.
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Yojimbo (1961)
After inventing the "men on a mission" movie and inventing new cinematic language for action sequences, Akira Kurosawa directed yet another influential masterpiece in Yojimbo, a subversion of white-hat Hollywood western tropes featuring an amoral antihero laying waste to two rival gangs in feudal Japan. The then-extreme violence and striking, noirish protagonist inspired spaghetti westerns and Hollywood hero films to follow suit with more complex stories, more conflicted heroes and darker action movies overall.
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From Russia with Love (1963)
Movie audiences first met James Bond in 1962's Dr. No, a slower-paced but effective spy thriller that spawned this superior sequel that redefined the way fight sequences were filmed. Director Terence Young and editor Peter R. Hunt used rapid cutting and striking angles to make the final duel between Bond (Sean Connery) and his nemesis Grant (Robert Shaw) stand out from endless fist fights shot in long takes without flourish or, frankly, often much excitement. Other filmmakers took notice, and the approach quickly became the standard.
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Goldfinger (1964)
After reinventing the fight scene in From Russia With Love, the James Bond genre reinvented the action thriller with Goldfinger, the kind of big, brassy, go for broke, macho fantasy action adventure that became synonymous with the franchise until the 2006 remake of Casino Royale. For many, Goldfinger came to represent the very idea of cinematic male power fantasies, and swiftly became the boilerplate for many films in the mainstream action genre.
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Bullitt (1968)
Car chases were not car chases until Peter Yates' Bullitt, which featured a nearly 11-minute car chase using real locations and speeds of up to 110 mph. Before Bullitt, car chases relied on rear-projection. After Bullitt, the "you are there" realism became the norm, spawning every cool car chase that follow, from 1969's The Italian Job to 1971's The French Connection to every other car chase you probably love to death. The rest of the movie is pretty good too.
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Dirty Harry (1971)
Clint Eastwood had played antiheroes before, particularly in films directly or indirectly inspired by Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies, but Don Siegel's Dirty Harry was a new entity, a post-Miranda Rights pseudo-vigilante who defended the innocent even if doing so made him act a little villainous (especially by old school Hollywood standards). The action genre gradually evolved into one filled with renegade cops and other urban heroes who played by their own rules.
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King Boxer (1972)
Bruce Lee gets most of the credit (we'll get to him in a second), but Chang Ho Cheng's King Boxer introduced American audiences to the Chinese martial arts genre for the very first time in 1973, when it was released under the flashier title Five Fingers of Death. The film's success with western audiences inspired an influx of kung fu movies, paving the way for the superstardom of Bruce Lee and directly inspiring the works of Quentin Tarantino and beyond.
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Enter the Dragon (1973)
Bruce Lee was already blowing up with hit films like The Big Boss and Fist of Fury, but the east-meets-west fight tournament spectacular Enter the Dragon was the film that cemented him as a timeless action icon, brought Americans like John Saxon and Jim Kelly into the mix, and proved that Chinese martial arts had a permanent place in the mainstream American action genre that continues, in various forms, today.
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Star Wars (1977)
The pervasive influence of George Lucas's original Star Wars cannot be understated, transforming action-adventures into lucrative marketing franchise, ushering in a new age of visual effects and teaching Hollywood that the types of sci-fi/fantasy stories previously relegated to cheap serials and kids TV shows were now four-quadrant, reliable blockbuster material.
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Project A (1983)
Jackie Chan was already a big deal in China thanks to the success of films like Drunken Master, and it would take another decade for mainstream American audiences to accept him as their action icon as well, but Project A was in many respects his real gamechanging, codifying the kung fu comedy genre and featuring stunts that placed the film's actual actors in danger to thrill audiences and make certain that Hollywood's usual, safety-conscious techniques wouldn't impress anybody anymore.
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Die Hard (1988)
Directly responsible (as you might expect) for the popular "Die Hard in a [Blank]" genre - which features heroes in confined spaces fighting off disproportionate numbers of bad guys - Die Hard also proved that action movies could have a real heart, thanks to a then-unexpected heroic turn from comedy actor Bruce Willis and real character-driven drama driving the thrills.
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Batman (1989)
Superman: The Movie was the first big blockbuster comic book movie, but it mostly inspired other Superman movies. Tim Burton's original Batman forced moviegoing audiences to take costumed crimefighters seriously, ushering in a new wave of operatic cinematic pulp heroes, and directly inspired "Batman: The Animated Series," which transformed animated superhero storytelling for western audiences. The modern superhero genre begins here.
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The Killer (1989)
John Woo started developing his special blend of melodrama, masculine introspection and balletic gunplay with the likewise excellent A Better Tomorrow movies, but his magnum opus The Killer (and its follow-up, Hard Boiled) transformed movie gun fights from take-cover standoffs and short bursts of violence into handsomely choreographed set pieces all their own. "Gun fu" was here to stay.
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Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
James Cameron's groundbreaking combination of practical effects, smart storytelling and CGI creations opened up a whole new world for visual effects in the action genre and beyond, setting a new gold standard for VFX and setting in motion a filmmaking revolution that led to Jurassic Park and beyond.
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Cutthroat Island (1995)
Not every influential movie has a "positive" influence. Renny Harlin's mega-bomb Cutthroat Island lost around $100 million, bankrupted CarolCo Pictures (despite previous mega-hits like Total Recall, Terminator 2 and the original Rambo trilogy), and taught Hollywood two unfortunate lessons: 1) that the pirate genre was dead, and most egregiously 2) that audiences weren't interested in female action heroes, setting gender roles in the action genre back to this very day.
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Blade (1998)
After the notorious failure of Batman & Robin the year previous, Hollywood had just about given up on superhero movies. But then a modestly-budgeted vampire flick based on a largely unknown hero made an unusual amount of money, proving that there was potential for any superhero to break into the mainstream, not just the biggest icons. All of a sudden, the playing field was open to films featuring heroes other than Batman and Superman, and Marvel's massive film library was being exploited left and right to mimc Blade's success. Most of those Marvel movies made money, and the rest was history.
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Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
The Matrix may have seemed like the big action movie gamechanger from 1999, sweeping the technical Academy Awards and making audiences worldwide go "whoa," but its influence - apart from mostly-lame bullet time rip-offs - has actually been fairly minimal. The influence of The Phantom Menace has been, in contrast, nearly incalculable. Now, sci-fi/fantasy environments were suddenly being made entirely in computers, motion-captured CGI creations were getting equal screen time with human stars, and theaters across the country were shifting to digital projection.
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The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Before The Lord of the Rings, studios made one action movie and then just hoped for the best. But Peter Jackson's enormous gamble to shoot three films simultaneously paid off, meaning New Line had one guaranteed blockbuster after another for years without having to worry about waiting for their actors' schedules to line up or concoct a new screenplay. Long-term franchise planning became par for the course for films based on already successful properties, transforming the production paradigm.
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Spider-Man (2002)
Superhero movies were already making headlines and lots of money before 2002, but Sam Raimi's Spider-Man shot the genre into a new direction, emphasizing character and romance and attracting audiences far and wide, not just the geeky target demographic. After one of the biggest opening weekends of all time, Hollywood began to not just make superhero movies, but make them the driving force of their tentpole summer releases and, by extension, the most visible, reliable action subgenre around.
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The Bourne Identity (2002)
Hollywood was starting to take superhero movies seriously, so why not spies? Doug Liman's drastic reimagining of The Bourne Identity emphasized realistic action and psychologically tormented heroes, and it success (combined with hit follow-ups The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum) forced every mid-range action thriller - and particularly anything to do with espionage - to respond in kind. Batman Begins would be the Bourne Identity of superhero movies, Casino Royale would bring Bond back to his roots by playing off of a supposed imitator. Doug Liman's film is still the template on which hardboiled thrillers are based.
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Avatar (2009)
James Cameron's Avatar did for 3D what George Lucas's Star Wars prequels did for digital distribution, forcing cinematheques worldwide to adopt a new technology to attract event-loving audiences, immerse them in fantastic worlds and inflate ticket prices to compensate for otherwise dwindling theatrical turnouts. Every four-quadrant movie, it seems, now has to be distributed in 3D (even if they weren't filmed that way) to make exta money and justify the global technological changeover. And a new era of blockbusters officially began.
