The 5 Best (& 5 Worst) 80s Action Movies

The 5 Best (& 5 Worst) ’80s Action Movies

The 1980s made huge stars out of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger and produced iconic action hits. But the decade had some duds too.

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With both Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger making their names in Hollywood, the 1980s were a great decade for action cinema. The ‘80s brought on the rise of the quippy one-liner, some terrific pre-CGI practical effects, and a reinvention of the everyman action hero in the form of John McClane.

But not every action movie of the ‘80s was a classic. Every great actioner that the decade brought along was buried under a slew of lazy, cliché-ridden stinkers and followed by a handful of derivative knockoffs. So, here are the five best and five worst action movies from the 1980s.

10 Best: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)

Long before George Miller would use an increased budget and modern technology to top himself with Mad Max: Fury Road, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior set a high benchmark for the franchise.

From its bleak vision of a post-apocalyptic wasteland to its intense, visceral car stunts, The Road Warrior is one of the most influential action movies ever made.

9 Worst: Iron Eagle (1986)

Iron Eagle is a movie about a teenager who teams up with Louis Gossett, Jr. to take a couple of F-16s across the Atlantic Ocean to rescue his captured father, and it’s exactly as dumb as that sounds.

Released in the same year as Top Gun, it’s hardly an earth-shattering newsflash to say that Iron Eagle was the lesser-praised aerial warfare film at the time.

8 Best: First Blood (1982)

Before the second Rambo movie turned the character into a one-dimensional gun-toting maniac, the first one was a poignant, socially conscious drama about the effects of the Vietnam War.

In First Blood, John Rambo returns from the war and finds that all his friends have died and he’s an outcast from society. When some cops try to run him out of their small town, he snaps during a PTSD attack and they hunt him through the woods.

7 Worst: Rambo III (1988)

Although none of the sequels to First Blood have matched its smarts or dramatic resonance, First Blood Part II was at least an enjoyable, explosive, adrenaline-fueled actioner. By comparison, Rambo III was a bitter disappointment.

The premise was simple enough as John Rambo headed to Afghanistan to rescue a captured Col. Trautman, but the execution had absurd leaps in logic and something called “sheep ball.”

6 Best: Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)

Harking back to the adventure serials of the 1930s, Raiders of the Lost Ark has transcended the trappings of the action genre to be hailed as one of the greatest movies ever made, period.

Steven Spielberg directed Raiders as an American answer to the Bond films (which was brilliantly effective), Lawrence Kasdan wrote a fantastic script with plenty of great set pieces and an airtight seven-act story structure, and above all, Harrison Ford made the Indiana Jones character an unforgettable icon.

5 Worst: Missing In Action (1984)

It may be one of the cornerstones of the Chuck Norris oeuvre, but Missing in Action is not a good movie. It’s about a Vietnam veteran returning to the P.O.W. camp he escaped from a decade earlier to liberate the remaining prisoners.

The story is excruciatingly derivative — it was the first of many rip-offs that followed the success of First Blood Part II — and the action is lazy and uninspired. Butt-kicking Norris is the only thing to enjoy in this movie.

4 Best: Aliens (1986)

When James Cameron was tapped to write and direct a sequel to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror masterpiece Alien, he knew he could never top Scott’s work in the horror genre. So, he switched gears and turned the sequel into one of the greatest action movies ever made instead.

Rather than pitting a hopelessly unprepared space crew against one terrifying, acid-spewing xenomorph, Cameron pitted Ripley, her stand-in daughter, and a band of heavily armed Colonial Marines against hundreds of xenomorphs and their queen.

3 Worst: A View To A Kill (1985)

Every James Bond actor besides Sean Connery has had their detractors, but the Roger Moore era got really ridiculous by the end. And on top of the cringeworthy absurdity, which 007 fans had come to expect by Moore’s seventh and final outing in the role, the actor’s advancing age became a real issue in this one.

The villain (who Christopher Walken was somehow roped into playing) has a ludicrous plan, even for a Bond movie, as he plans to destroy Silicon Valley with the aim of taking over the microchip industry.

2 Best: Die Hard (1988)

Easily the greatest action movie of the ‘80s and possibly the greatest action movie ever made, Die Hard represents the pinnacle of the action genre. With his everyman relatability, casual one-liners, and in-over-his-head desperation, John McClane is the ultimate action hero. He’s not a muscle-bound superman; he’s just a regular guy who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And on the flip side of that coin is Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber, the only Eastern European action movie villain who remained in audience’s minds after the credits rolled.

1 Worst: Tango & Cash (1989)

Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell were two of the biggest action stars of the ‘80s, and if nothing else, Tango & Cash proves that the two actors have more than enough on-screen chemistry to carry a buddy cop movie.

Unfortunately, the particular buddy cop movie they made suffers from a weak, flimsy script and a complete lack of any kind of realism. We’ll suspend our disbelief a little — it is a movie, after all — but what’s happening still has to make sense.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/best-worst-action-movies-eighties-mad-mex-die-hard/

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