Action Countdown Bonus: Best Action Franchise of All Time
This summer, MovieJawn is counting down our 25 favorite action movies of all time! We will be posting a new entry each day! See the whole list so far here.
Today we are taking a break from our countdown before the top 5 in order to share our picks for the best action franchise of all time.
If you ever need 10,000 words on the Fast & Furious franchise, I'm your guy. A couple years ago I bit off more than I could chew by covering the franchise for Moviejawn's Racing issue, and the resulting article was so sprawling and unhinged it didn't even make the zine. MJ's beneficent editors threw me a bone and released a truncated version on the website, but it fails to capture just how deep I had gone down the F&F rabbit hole. I've written a lot about how the best action movies are self-aware of their own stupidity, and how that self-awareness is what liberates the best of these movies and allows them to lean into storytelling and set-piece insanity while also suspending the audience's disbelief. No franchise understood this better than Fast & Furious at its peak. The installments from Fast & Furious (the 4th film in the franchise) and The Fate of the Furious (the 8th, duh) are a murderer's row of chaos-infused, unrealistic set pieces, overblown emotional Vin Diesel speeches, and 100% pure, uncut, slaphappy entertainment. If you are willing to unmoor your brain from good taste and logic, the Fast & Furious franchise is one of cinema's great escapes.
The Fast & Furious franchise hinted at its future reality detachment in the first three films in the series but never leaned into the untapped potential that was sitting right there. The Fast & The Furious is a dumb cop movie with lots of vroom-vroom car races. 2 Fast 2 Furious leans into the dumbness but the only cool car-related moment happens in the last 5 minutes of the movie. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift shakes things up by moving the setting from LA to Tokyo, but the only memorable thing about that one is that it introduces us to the series' best character, Han Lue. Conversely F9 and Fast X are an Icarian cautionary tale that proved the Fast & Furious franchise's best days were behind it. The latter movies are simply too goofy and too detached from reality even for a series built on those traits. Worst of all, they're BORING (with the exception of the bit in F9 where Ludacris and the yokel from Tokyo Drift attach a jet engine to a 1984 Pontiac Fiero and fly it into outer space, which was dope).
4 thru 8 though? 4 thru 8 are movie magic, and criminally derided by those who think they’re above the franchise. It's a cosmic gumbo of car racing, heist movies, espionage, and most importantly, familia. New characters (played by action legends like Jason Statham and the Rock, whose Hobbs & Shaw spinoff is included in this range of acceptable F&F flicks) come, old characters die and come back to life. The family keeps growing, and the plots become more and more unhinged. And yet the action set pieces are some of the best I've ever seen in all of cinema. The one in Fast 6 that takes place on an airport runway. The one in Fast Five where they pull a giant vault out of a bank using only muscle cars. A car flies out of an Abu Dhabi skyscraper in Furious 7. Under the cool and collected hand of Justin Lin, the Fast & Furious franchise became something truly special: a series of movies where even relatively smart people can spend two hours LARPing as someone with a caveman brain.
To put it simply: I never let things get too serious with action movies. I’d order in for a nice and extra cheesy rom-com over an action flick any day of the week. As someone who has seen this one and only action movie franchise all the way through, I know I am by no means the authority on this question. In a way though, I think that’s even more of a testament to the allure of Mad Max.
Don’t let my earlier statement lead you astray. I’ve shopped around with a fair number of action films. But as far as something catching my attention and creating enough momentum to move me forward to the next entry in the franchise? Max is the only one that’s made that happen. Well, I did have a brief affair with Terminator 2, but that was really only because I’d been set up on a blind date by Syd Field after reading his analysis of the script. Aside from that, my heart belongs to only one man.
But to be honest? I’ve begun to question if that man is Max. The thing is, I’m not sure I find him all that interesting. He’s got all those pent-up emotions that leave him constantly teetering on the edge of toxic masculinity which I find super unappealing. Plus, he just seems like he’d make terrible dinner conversation. Now George Miller, the man who directed him… at the risk of sounding like a gerontophile: that’s someone I’d give a shot.
When I think of the most memorable characters of the franchise, it’s Furiosa, Auntie Entity, hell, even that little feral girl in the Road Warrior was more compelling to me than our main man. Basically, men ain’t shit and George Miller seems to know that. His mind is also just kookier than a kookaburra, and I love him for it. Forget Chris Hemsworth, Miller is the real Australian hearthrob that’s got me head over my spiky, steampunk heels!
I won’t say as much on this question because I know a lot of us picked it and for good reason. Other than maybe the James Bond series, I can’t think of another action franchise that has lasted decades, kept the same star, consistently turns the volume up to eleven, and then manages to find a new eleven. And, the fact that it started with an initial entry directed by Brian De Palma—there’s just something about that that really makes me laugh. But seriously, It’s objectively the best franchise. I don’t necessarily like that it is, and there’s a million other action movies I would recommend before any of these—but the question was the question, and I feel like this is the answer. What a silly John Woo/Limp Bizkit/Boy Bands/Eminem/MTV Movie Awards time that was.
As I mentioned in my previous entry in the Action Countdown on Mission: Impossible – Fallout (dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 2018), Mission: Impossible is one of the few legacy franchises still pumping out bangers. You can read why I think these movies work so well in my Fallout article, but here’s a quick refresher on the series, just to remind you of how good these movies are:
Mission: Impossible (dir. Brian De Palma, 1996): De Palma’s excellent deconstruction of the ensemble structure and Cold War values of the show as well as the introduction of Ethan Hunt (him hanging from the ceiling in the computer room remains undefeated as the iconic stunt of the series).
Mission: Impossible 2 (dir. John Woo, 2000): While this is more of a Woo movie than a Mission: Impossible movie, the master of action still gives Ethan the coolest motorcycle fight against rogue IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott).
Mission: Impossible III (dir. J.J. Abrams, 2006): Ethan tries to quit the IMF to get married and live a “normal” life but meets Philip Seymour Hoffman instead.
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (dir. Brad Bird, 2011): Ethan returns to the IMF and is coerced into a new team despite still struggling with the trauma of losing the old one. Plus that jaw-dropping climb up the Burj Khalifa.
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 2015): Ethan goes rogue (again) to root out an international network of treasonous agents and technically drowns while infiltrating an underwater vault, only to be revived for one of the funniest car chases in cinema.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout: Ethan navigates the dangerous underworld of weapons trafficking to prevent a nuclear device falling into the wrong hands and flies a helicopter through narrow ravines.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (dir. McQuarrie, 2023): My personal favorite of the franchise, this film is the Bond movie that the Broccolis have been trying to make for the past two decades. Ethan goes up against a sentient AI (the cool kind from fiction) and parachutes onto (into?) a runaway train, only to have to survive the resulting crash.
Just thinking about these movies makes me want to watch them again.
I knew of James Bond before I’d even seen a frame of the films. I watched the cast of Arthur make their own movie about the version of the character in their universe: James Hound. Later, there were countless schoolyard games of 007 with kids in my elementary school. The first film I was aware of was Quantum of Solace, though I was still too young to see it at the time of its release.
My proper initiation into the Bond-verse would be in high school, during the intersection of the 50th anniversary of the franchise with the release of Skyfall. TIFF was doing a retrospective of the films at their cinema, as well as an exhibit, and I was lucky enough to be introduced to cinematic Bond as the rest of the world was back in the day, by watching Dr. No. I may not have been the most typical 2010s teenager when it came to taste in films and music, but I think it shows that the film and its signature theme song stand the test of time by the fact that I was drawn in from the very first moment. I could understand how audiences in the 60s were irrevocably drawn to the character from then on, because so was I.
While the Bond franchise now counts 24 films (if you only count the Eon productions) and it certainly has its formula, there’s something about it that still feels different from other multi-film action franchises and keeps the films from feeling too or formulaic in a way that detracts. Maybe it’s a manufactured mystique, maybe it’s the fact that it keeps evolving with changes in directors and cast members, but it keeps me coming back and brings a sense of intrigue and fun that I can’t quite get anywhere else. I say all this while recognizing that it can be less than favourable in its depiction of women and racial minorities. The series’ politics perhaps lack nuance at times, and play on anxieties of the times in which they are made. But there’s no denying what it does well. The action sequences are well-executed, with carefully crafted explosions and elaborate set pieces (see: the dam sequence at the beginning of GoldenEye), never shoddily put together. The theme songs are hits and the best of them transcend the films themselves (see: “Live and Let Die”), getting stuck in our heads even if we haven’t seen their corresponding movie. Bond is the action genre par excellence, its own subgenre.
I hope James Bond will return for many years to come.
Matrix numero uno has bullet time and Carrie Ann Moss saying “dodge this”. Leaving revolutionary politics/transness aside for a second, the film knows that being cool is what matters. Sunglasses and a trenchcoat is a must, as well as chilling out and having friends to save your ass. As someone born post-bullet time it’s hard to conceive of a world without it, but the very nature of slowing down to assess the situation blows the gates open the same way that ballet dancer Cheng Pei-pei starring in Come Drink with Me did in the 60’s.
The Animatrix comes in between as the one franchise spinoff, and I’ll give a special shoutout to the short World Record, which understands what action in The Matrix is all about: push your body to the limit and you push the world to its limit.
Reloaded gets a little strange and divides itself into alternating blocks of action and pop psychology. It’s great, but if I’m being honest I talk more about the Merovingian than the highway fight.
Revolutions might be in my top ten films just generally speaking. It’s a two point five hour third act to everything the Wachowskis have been building so far, and there’s enough room for moments of love and connection between people we’ve barely seen so far as the human militia makes what might be its last stand. Every shot is gorgeous and it made me cry my eyes out last viewing.
Resurrections is almost adamantly not an action movie: maybe because the Wachowskis aren’t working with fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping anymore; maybe because it’s about how sometimes you get older and the only superpower you have left is LOVE for your WIFE.
In the recent documentary Enter the Clones of Bruce, about Brucesploitation and the hole that Bruce Lee's sudden death left in action cinema, interviewees talk about how it took Jackie Chan's rise for the world to really move on after Enter the Dragon marked Lee's final full-length performance. It's pointed out that Chan was able to get over by doing what Lee wouldn't, and there are intricacies there, but it essentially translates to "Jackie Chan was willing to get his ass handed to him."
Once Lee's star was high enough, he wouldn't lose on camera, and that isn't something you necessarily notice, even during a martial arts-binge, because it makes sense-- he's water. Nobody believes an actor like Steven Seagal can actually destroy a room of people young enough and strong enough to play hired goons. Seagal moves like Grimace and looks like his own wax figure, and there's clearly more ego than reality involved in his characters' on-screen victories. If you saw anybody beat Bruce Lee up, it would feel equally cartoonish, like a sloth body slamming an elephant. He's just too good.
Rather than follow that lead, Jackie Chan got thrown through a bunch of tables. And then he picked up the splintered table legs and used those to fight until he got thrown through a bunch of glass walls. And when the director (often Chan himself) yelled cut, Jackie's body was in worse condition than his characters'. He was a slapstick ragdoll legend.
Police Story-- specifically the first three and Supercop 2-- is my favorite action series because Jackie Chan doesn't play himself off as a fighting god. He survives, he saves the day, but almost everybody he runs at for a one-on-one match-up gets some good hits in. There's a tension in the Police Story movies because Chan can and will be stopped. When he's hanging onto the side of a bus, it looks like he could fall off at any moment. As much fun as I have watching Chan and Michelle Yeoh on the train at the end of Supercop, they both look sincerely terrified.
My favorite action setpiece in the series is probably an easy pick, but I love the mall sequence in the first film. I love the neon and I love the glass. Today, the set looks like Instagram nostalgia porn, but then the mall in Commando can have the same impact, just by virtue of being a mall. The joy here is watching Chan do everything he can with a big, populated location. The fight crashes through multiple department stores, down escalators, into tiny hallways and a big, open atrium. Chan jumps on a motorcycle at one point. It's during all of this that you may realize Jackie Chan staked his claim by doing what Bruce Lee wouldn't, but it also wouldn't matter what Lee had done in the first place: Chan does everything. He does everything other action stars-- from Buster Keaton to Sammo Hung-- could do and he does everything they couldn't, too. The Police Story movies are his best sandbox, the place he could try to break bones he hadn't up to that point. Few things are so stunning.
Back in 2011 when Rise of the Planet of the Apes was released, I wasn’t especially interested. We were just ten years removed from the abomination that was the Tim Burton reboot, James Franco was certainly not anyone I cared about, and the rest of the cast was filled with people I either didn’t know at the time or wasn’t going to coerce me into buying a ticket (Lithgow and Cox). Sure, there was Smeagol doing that motion capture thing, but the world still hadn’t truly caught up to the idea that mo-cap was a legitimate form of acting and that Andy Serkis was simply the best at doing it.
When I got around to watching it when it came out on DVD (probably hoping for a few laughs at how bad it was), Serkis’ amazing performance is what sealed the deal. I connected so god damned much with Caesar and his plight of understanding himself, humanity, and his relationship with it. This installment, on its own, is more sci-fi drama than action for me. But that drama is the heart of the series.
As we move on to 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, this film is able to reach back to the drama of the first film to make you care about the action that is happening there. It doesn’t have to spend as much time to make you care about the characters because you already do. Instead, you get a nearly nonstop thrilling adventure.
Three years later we got War of the Planet of the Apes and I was a bit disappointed. I felt that the film got caught between being too wild and all over the place or not getting wild enough. It’d lost some of its heart, but mostly I just wished it’d gotten weirder. I mean, you’ve got Woody Harelson right there. You want off the rails? Look no further. Anyhow, it was still a serviceable film. While a bit unsatisfying, it felt like a natural end, and there’s way worse ways to end a good series.
So, when I saw ads for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes around the holidays, I got a pit in my stomach. I thought for sure they were gonna ride this series into the ground. Really, the only reason I ended up going to see it was to explore this beautiful, old theater it was playing at in Northern Michigan. However, I was pleasantly surprised. Not as much as when I watched the Rise, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. This was another big adventure tale and, after all the rage and bloodshed of War, it reminded me of the hope I’d had coming out of the first two films. (Maybe War worked into the story arc better than I’d thought it had.)
Really, if you take out the 2001 entry, the entire series is great. There’s not a stinker in the bunch and you can pretty much take the whole family to them (they’re all PG or PG-13). The worst sin the original series commits is being dated (and maybe spawning that TV series). If you gave me the choice of sitting down to watch all of one series and it’s either Hobbits or Apes…well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.
Arguably, the best action movie franchise is the Crank series, developed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. The filmmakers grafted Run Lola Run with D.O.A. and Speed, to develop this adrenaline rush. Hitman Chev Chelios (Jason Statham), has been poisoned in his sleep as revenge for a murder he was assigned. Injected with a fatal “Beijing cocktail,” Chev must keep moving or he will die. Nevaldine and Taylor shoot Crank in a hyperkinetic style with split screens, speeded-up images, Dutch angles, and other visual gimmicks as the film portrays Chelios snorting coke off a floor, getting into a series of bloody fights, and even having sex in public to maintain a high enough heart rate. As Chelios loads up on Red Bull, is chased through a hospital, races a motorcycle through the streets of L.A., and gets involved in shootouts, the film is both breathless and relentless. The sequel, Crank 2: High Voltage, offers more of the same as Chelios is given an artificial heart (against his will, ‘natch) and chases after the guys who took his ticker. Mayhem ensues as Chelios uses jumper cables (on his tongue and nipples) and other power sources to stay charged and in charge. The Crank series is absolutely ridiculous (and unfortunately, racist), but with the right mindset, it is also incredibly fun.
For me, this decision came down to one of two great action franchises: Mad Max and The Matrix. Nothing else even entered my mind, so much so that I assumed our “Best Franchise” list would just alternate between the two. I’m glad it’s not, but part of me feels I should’ve gone with The Matrix just to provide it with a bit more representation. Alas, like Max Rockatansky, I’m cursed to live with the decisions I’ve made.
I’ll be honest: I don’t really like the current conception of franchise filmmaking; I don’t like how obsessed it is logical consistency across films and I don’t like how overly reverent it is of the past. I think that’s why I landed on Mad Max as my selection for best franchise, because George Miller and his collaborators have shown disinterest in taking that approach to. And so, somehow, even though the world of Fury Road and Furiosa is vastly different from that of 1979’s Mad Max (or, really, 1981’s Mad Max 2), they do feel part of the same broader mythos.
It’s hard to discount how humble the franchise’s beginnings were. Who doesn’t love an underdog, after all? And it’s easy to forget, with the more recent entries looming so large, that the first Mad Max was not too great a leap from the 70s exploitation films that came before. It’s a pretty normal movie about a pretty normal guy whose wife and child get killed by a biker gang, and then he’s driven to the edge by his desire for revenge. That could be the plot of a Death Wish film; throw in a bit of late-70s energy crisis and near-future societal collapse and there you have it. Even the environment of the first two films isn’t that detached from reality. The original Mad Max just filmed at ordinary (if dilapidated) locations around Melbourne. Mad Max 2 moved further into the outback, but there’s still plenty of plant life remaining at the periphery of the action.
But the Mad Max films are so much more than a sum of their parts. Production and costume design have been such effective parts of the storytelling from the very start, and it’s the individuality of each member of Toecutter’s gang that sets it apart from other biker gang baddies that came before. Visual storytelling has remained so important to of all of the Mad Max films, especially since Mad Max 2, and I don’t think any other action franchise (or perhaps any other franchise, full stop) does it better.