The 5 Best & 5 Worst Action Movies Of The 90s

The 5 Best & 5 Worst Action Movies Of The ’90s

The ’90s was a time when action movies were either immortalized or remembered for all of the wrong reasons

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After the ‘80s brought one-liners and musclebound supermen to the action genre, the ‘90s doubled down on the “everyman” action hero archetype pioneered by Die Hard’s John McClane. The action cinema of the ‘90s brought a bunch of big-budget sequels, as franchises began their takeover of the film industry and hit factories ranging from Terminator to Batman ruled the box office.

The ‘90s pumped out a bunch of great action movies that rank as genre classics, as well as a handful of duds that weren’t worth the time it took to watch them. So, without further delay, here are the five best and five worst action movies from the ‘90s.

10 BEST: Léon: The Professional (1994)

The brisk pace of Luc Besson’s script and the minimalist focus of his ensuing direction made Léon an instant action classic. It’s endlessly rewatchable, and anchored masterfully by its three incredible stars: Jean Reno, Natalie Portman, and Gary Oldman.

Reno plays the titular ice-cool hitman, Portman (in her screen debut) plays Mathilda, the 12-year-old orphan he takes under his wing and teaches how to kill, and Oldman plays Norman Stansfield, the crooked DEA agent who murdered her family, one of the greatest movie villains of all time.

9 WORST: The Last Boy Scout (1991)

One of the few disappointments on Shane Black’s filmography, The Last Boy Scout squanders a great “buddy cop” premise (a private eye pairing up with an NFL quarterback) and two talented stars (Bruce Willis, early in his career when he actually tried, and Damon Wayans) with a movie that’s nowhere near as fun as it should’ve been.

Black mastered the “buddy cop” genre in Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and later on The Nice Guys, so it’s a shame he dropped the ball here. However, this may not have been entirely his own fault, as Black was reportedly forced to rewrite the script a number of times at the behest of the studio and Willis.

8 BEST: Point Break (1991)

Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break is as delightfully ludicrous as it premise called for. It’s the story of a football player-turned-FBI agent who’s sent undercover with a gang of surfers who moonlight as bank robbers and becomes so endeared to their charming leader that he doesn’t want to turn him in.

Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze are perfectly matched in the lead roles, while Bigelow’s use of handheld cameras to follow the unwieldy, unpredictable action sequences gives them an intense realism.

7 WORST: Judge Dredd (1995)

Although 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd comics would eventually get a better, more faithfully ultraviolent film adaptation, the character’s first foray onto the big screen wasn’t nearly as successful. It was hobbled by a PG-13 rating and starred Sylvester Stallone as the titular judge.

He took off his helmet a bunch of times and had Rob Schneider as a (supposedly) comedic sidekick. Stallone and Schneider butchered a dynamic that Karl Urban and Olivia Thirlby would go on to nail in 2012’s Dredd.

6 BEST: Face/Off (1997)

The premise of Face/Off is truly zany, but the movie makes it work. It’s about an FBI agent switching faces with the terrorist who killed his son. John Travolta and Nicolas Cage were the perfect actors to bring these characters to life, hamming it up and then emulating each other’s ham after the facial switcheroo.

In the hands of John Woo, who’s possibly the best action filmmaker of all time (and certainly one of the greats), Face/Off is a visceral, infinitely fun action masterpiece.

5 WORST: Timecop (1994)

Jean-Claude Van Damme has starred in some ridiculous movies over the years, but Timecop really takes the cake. The minimalism of actioners like Bloodsport and Hard Target played to Van Damme’s strengths as a charismatic martial artist.

Timecop is an insane, plot hole-ridden techno thriller about a cop assigned to the time-travel department who has to go back in time to fight a corrupt politician after the death of his wife. If that sounds like an asinine, misguided attempt to emulate the thought-provoking sci-fi of Philip K. Dick, that’s because it pretty much is.

4 BEST: The Matrix (1999)

Notably the second entry on this list to star Keanu Reeves (and his movie Speed was also a strong contender), The Matrix blends together a wide array of genres and styles – from cyberpunk novels to martial arts movies to anime – and nails every single one.

The Matrix has enough contemplations on lofty concepts like dystopia and the nature of reality to succeed as science fiction, but it also has enough gun-toting action and explosive set pieces to succeed as an action movie. In 1999, moviegoers got to have their sci-fi cake and eat it with an action fork.

3 WORST: Armageddon (1998)

In Michael Bay’s Armageddon, a team of oil drillers are sent into outer space to destroy an asteroid that’s on a collision course with Earth. It’s a B-movie with F-movie execution.

According to the film’s DVD commentary, Ben Affleck asked Bay if it wouldn’t be easier to train astronauts to use a drill than to train drillers how to make it in outer space, and Bay told him to “Shut the f*ck up.” That anecdote perfectly illustrates the amount of thought that went into this movie.

2 BEST: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

After making the first Terminator on a shoestring budget of $6.4 million, James Cameron was given a record-breaking $102 million budget for the sequel. Rather than rehashing the original, Cameron added a fresh twist to the original’s formula. T2 is certainly bigger than its predecessor, and it’s at least as great, if not even better.

Instead of using the sequel’s nine-figure budget as a crutch to avoid having to be creative like a lot of blockbuster directors, Cameron used the money to pioneer groundbreaking CGI technologies and bring breathtaking action sequences to life by ripping streets apart with practical stunt work.

1 WORST: Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995)

Of all the shameless rip-offs that followed Die Hard, Under Siege fundamentally misunderstood what made the gold-standard original work so well. John McClane is a cop but otherwise just a regular guy who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Under Siege’s Casey Ryback (played by an emotionless Steven Seagal) is a cook who happens to be a badass former Navy SEAL who can kill people with his bare hands at a moment’s notice.

But at the very least, that first Under Siege fell into the so-bad-it’s-good category. The sequel, set on a train that is overrun by a cartoonishly obnoxious terrorist, veers off the rails into the so-bad-it’s-bad category within the first few minutes.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/action-movies-ninties-best-worst-steven-segal-terminator/

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