The 15 Best Female Movie Assassins Of All Time Ranked

The 15 Best Female Movie Assassins Of All Time, Ranked

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1 The 15 Best Female Movie Assassins Of All Time, Ranked

Female assassin movies are a genre unto their own, featuring some of the best, most memorable, and most badass women in film history.

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One of the most popular movies to hit Netflix over the past year or so was Ava, the female assassin film starring Jessica Chastain in the title role. Directed by Tate Taylor, the story follows Ava, a ruthless lone assassin who takes on the biggest assignment of her career following an eight-year respite as a professional killer.

The story takes all sorts of twists and turns but the real highlight is getting to see Chastain at her best. Her role as the titular Ava puts her in some pretty exclusive company among the greatest female assassins to ever be put on film.

Updated on November 11, 2021, by Kevin Pantoja: There’s a long history of female assassin movies that a lot of audience members might not have realized. Some of these girl assassin movies date back decades but the majority of great ones have actually come in recent years. It seems like there’s more of a demand than ever to see tough women depicted on-screen and viewers are happy about it. Although picking out the best female assassin in movies can be a difficult, almost impossible task, you can rest assured that they are going to be from this badass group of women.

15 Ava – Ava (2020)

Stream on Netflix and Kanopy

Casting Jessica Chastain as the lead character in Ava was a stroke of genius because she has already played tough women in plenty of other films. Whether it’s a superhero movie villain in Dark Phoenix or a take no prisoners hustler in Molly’s Game, Chastain brings it on the screen. Ava is her most violent role for sure though.

There are scenes in this movie that are pretty shocking in terms of how graphic they get. Ava holds nothing back as she takes out everyone in her path. That includes a pretty memorable fight against Colin Farrell’s Simon.

14 Samantha Caine – The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

Stream on Hoopla

Also starring in Ava is Geena Davis, who Tate Taylor must have cast on the strength of her performance as the amnesiac assassin Samantha Caine in The Long Kiss Goodnight.

Directed by Davis’ then-husband Renny Harlin from a Shane Black script, Samantha Caine is a suburban schoolteacher who begins to remember bits and pieces of her past life after bumping her head. When she comes to, she realizes she is a highly skilled government assassin whose old partners are now out to kill her and keep her quiet for good. Of course, Caine has other plans.

13 Anna – Anna (2019)

Stream on IMDb TV

If it has to do with action that will leave you breathless, there’s a good chance that Luc Besson is involved. The filmmaker is behind such classics as Leon: The Professional and The Fifth Element and in 2019, he wrote and directed Anna.

The movie follows the titular Anna (Sasha Luss), a woman who escapes a life of domestic abuse and joins the KGB. After years as a skilled assassin, she wants an out but isn’t granted it, sending her on a mission to free herself. Along with her brutal nature in the field, Anna also proves herself to be among the smartest killers out there.

12 Mary Goodwin – Proud Mary (2018)

Stream on AMC+, Tubi TV, and IMDb TV

It seems like the talented Taraji P. Henson has played every kind of role out there from a hip-hop mogul to a police officer to a genius mathematician. She added hitwoman to her impressive resume in 2018 by portraying Mary Goodwin in Proud Mary.

Along the same lines as some other female assassin movies, Proud Mary sees the protagonist take care of a young kid following a case where a job goes wrong. Though reviews weren’t great, Henson delivered her usual quality performance and Mary had some standout action sequences.

11 Kate – Kate (2021)

Stream on Netflix

Following the success of Ava, Netflix looked to bring more women assassin movies to the streaming service. 2021 saw two of them, with one being Kate, starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the titular character. Some critics felt that this movie hit too many tropes from similar films.

However, one thing that helped Kate stand out was that she was an expert sniper, though her best scenes were when she got up close and personal with her targets. While on a mission to execute a yakuza boss, Kate is poisoned and has one day to find out the truth and get revenge. Along the way, she has some truly badass moments and takes on a young protégé.

10 Sam – Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)

Stream on Netflix

The other girl assassin movie to hit Netflix in 2021 arrived a few months prior but was met with a better reception from critics. Gunpowder Milkshake centers on Sam (Karen Gillan), a hitwoman who teams up with her mother (Lena Headey) and other ladies to protect a young girl.

The cool twist in this movie was that Sam was the one who murdered the father of the girl she is now protecting. That made for complex relationships but of course, the action scenes are where this film shines. Watching Sam dispatch of multiple attackers while most of her body was numbed made for a creative scene, while her joining forces with the other women was another highlight.

9 Cataleya Restrepo – Colombiana (2011)

Stream on IMDb TV

A number of high-quality female assassin movies were released in 2011, including Olivier Megaton’s Colombiana. Written by the master of the female assassin subgenre, Luc Besson, the film stars Zoe Saldana as an ice-cold professional hit-woman.

Upon witnessing her parents’ barbarous murder as a child in Colombia, Cataleya grows up to vow revenge on those who took her more precious relatives away. Cataleya becomes one of the world’s most formidable assassins under the tutelage of her uncle, as well as a moonlighting murderer out to provoke the mobster who took her parents’ life.

8 Lorraine Broughton – Atomic Blonde (2017)

Rent on Apple TV, YouTube, and Vudu

While she also played a list-worthy hit-woman in Æon Flux in 2005, Charlize Theron upped the assassinating ante in Atomic Blonde, directed by David Leitch of John Wick fame.

Lorraine Broughton (Theron) is a top-ranking MI6 Agent who uses her disarming sexuality as a weapon when sent to Berlin to investigate the murder of a colleague. When she isn’t killing with a look, she engages in hand-to-hand combat or employs a high-tech arsenal to dispatch legions of traitorous double agents.

7 Lucy Miller – Lucy (2014)

While Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional is one of the all-time best movies about the trade of assassination, the film’s female killer Mathilda (Natalie Portman) isn’t all that formidable herself. Therefore, Lucy Miller makes more sense to include.

Besson’s Lucy stars Scarlett Johansson in the title role as an ordinary citizen who is transformed into a super-assassin upon taking a radical new synthetic drug after a smuggling scheme goes awry. With her newfound skills intact, Lucy mounts a relentless revenge campaign on those who made her carry the drug in the first place.

6 Sook-hee / Chae Yeon-soo – The Villainess (2017)

Stream on Fubo TV, Vudu, Hoopla, and Tubi TV

As mentioned, Luc Besson is incredibly influential when it comes to the genre of female assassin movies and that is clear in The Villainess. According to writer and director Jung Byung-gil, it was Besson’s La Femme Nikita that inspired this film.

This South Korean action flick stars Kim Ok-vin as the protagonist, a woman who was trained as a killer since childhood. However, she wants a new life, especially after giving birth to a child of her own. The Villainess was praised for the action scenes and characters, while also reportedly receiving a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival.

5 Fox – Wanted (2008)

Stream on TNT, TBS, and TruTV

Angelina Jolie has played ultra-skilled assassins several times in her career. Her first came via Mr. and Mrs. Smith in 2005 and her last in the 2010 film Salt. However, it’s her turn as the mentoring hit-woman Fox in Wanted that featured her best female assassin.

Wanted traces the exploits of Wesley (James McAvoy), a boring office employee who one day learns his father was a covert hitman. With the help of Sloan (Morgan Freeman) and the wily Fox, Wes soon taps into his supernatural assassin abilities in order to replace his father.

4 Hanna – Hanna (2011)

Stream on Peacock

In the movie that inspired a 2019 TV series of the same name, Saoirse Ronan stars as Hanna, a precocious 16-year-old girl raised as a cold-blooded assassin by her father Erik (Eric Bana) while living in rural Finland.

Directed by Joe Wright, the plot picks up when Erik sends Hanna on her first mission in Europe. As Hanna keeps a low-profile while on a collision course with the equally-icy intelligence agent Melissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), she begins to reexamine her upbringing and question her role in the world.

3 Nikita – La Femme Nikita (1990)

Stream on Kanopy

In a story that inspired an American remake and two TV series, Luc Besson’s Nikita features one of the all-time best female assassins ever recorded on film. French actress Anne Parillaud stars as the titular killer who assumes a new identity en route to assassinating her assailants.

Nikita is a hardened criminal who is given the option of going to jail or becoming a trained killer for the French government. When she opts for the latter, she exhibits dazzling skills as an unscrupulous murderer while taking down one mark after another.

2 Beatrix Kiddo – Kill Bill (2003-2004)

Stream on HBO Max and Max Go

With the sole mission to Kill Bill in Quentin Tarantino’s martial arts masterwork, Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thruman) proves her badass status as a top-tier female assassin.

Kiddo not only succeeds in her epic mission but she does so by waylaying a series of collegiate hitmen and hitwomen in the process. Rather than using high-tech weaponry, Kiddo’s brand of assassination entails Samurai swords and brutal hand-to-hand combat. After undergoing arduous training in Japan, Kiddo comes out stronger and more dangerous than ever.

1 Yuki Kashima – Lady Snowblood (1973)

Stream on HBO Max

Tarantino’s Kill Bill and Chan-wook Park’s Lady Vengeance trilogy owe a great deal to the two Lady Snowblood Japanese films from the 1970s, which feature one of the first and still the best female assassins of all time.

Meiko Kaji plays Yuki Kashima, a gorgeous Japanese woman raised as a child to become one of the deadliest professional killers alive. As Yuki matures and acquires the ability to assassinate a mark in a matter of moments, she sets out to serve gory comeuppance to the thieves that ruined her family as a child.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/ava-greatest-deadliest-female-film-assassins/

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