The 21 best action movies of all time

This list was previously published in 2021.

Every year brings a new battle-ready combatant eager to fight for the right to claim the title of Best Action Film of All Time. But for every punch thrown, there’s a kick missed. So how to tell the champions from the wannabes? Here is our rock-’em-sock-’em list of the Best Action Films of All Time.*

(*Disclaimer: This list is highly subjective! You’ll likely question my judgement! Let’s rumble.)

21. Baahubali: The Beginning and Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (2015 & 2017)

Country: India

Directed by S.S. Rajamouli

Starring: Prabhas, Rana Daggubati and Anushka Shetty

A while back, a TikTok video made the rounds comparing Hollywood action with India’s efforts. Short version: If you’ve been limiting your explosions-and-car-crash viewing to North American work, you’re missing out on the most sublime, ridiculously delightful action cinema ever made. There re so many places for newbies to start – the Dhoom films, the Baaghi franchise, Siddharth Anand’s War – but my first stop would be S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahulbali twin blockbusters that arrived years before RRR made the man a household name.

Following a poor boy who grows into a strapping warrior (Bollywood super-star Prabhas), the Baahulbali films feature jaw-dropping, super-silly action delivered with the straightest of faces. If you can watch the clip below, in which a battalion of soldiers find a supremely inventive way to invade a fortress, without letting loose a big, glorious grin, then I just cannot help you.

Plausibility scale: 100 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “In battle, you are your best weapon.” — Baahubali (Prabhas)
Body count: Impossible to tally
Watch it now: Streaming on Netflix; available to rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes, YouTube, Google Play
If you liked this, watch: Magadheera, Rajamouli’s third-best action extravaganza

20. Bullitt (1968)

Directed by Peter Yates

Starring Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn and Jacqueline Bisset

Released: USA

It is hard to understate just how large an impact Bullitt has had on Hollywood moviemaking. Have you ever been impressed with a car chase? With a leading man’s effortless magnetism? With a score that moves you as much as the on-screen action?

It all starts with Bullitt, director Peter Yates’s lean, mean thriller about a San Francisco cop’s quest for justice that was made with the express purpose of underlining just how cool Steve McQueen was.

Plausibility scale: 10 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “Look, you work your side of the street, and I’ll work mine.” –Lieutenant Frank Bullitt (McQueen)
Body count: 6
Watch it now: Available for rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes, Cineplex Store, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Video
If you liked this, watch: The Driver

19. Casino Royale (2006)

Directed by Martin Campbell;

Starring Daniel Craig, Mads Mikkelsen and Eva Green

Country of origin U.K.

Remember when Ian Fleming devotees were incensed that the new 007 would be … blond? All hair-colour concerns were forgotten once fans caught Daniel Craig’s first outing, which shouldn’t work as well as it does. For starters, director Martin Campbell wasn’t some fresh face aiming to shake a stirred franchise: he’d already made 1995′s fine-enough Goldeneye. I guess Campbell was holding back, as Casino Royale is a juggernaut.

The punches land hard, Mads Mikkelsen’s villain is wonderful, and the kills are brutal. From the parkour chase through a Madagascar construction site (I’ll never stop laughing when Bond crushes his way through some drywall instead of merely running around it) to a property-insurance nightmare showdown in Venice, Casino Royale imagines a world where Bond is more a lethal machine, less a catch-phrase-spouting caricature.

Plausibility scale: 35 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “I’m sorry, that last hand nearly killed me.” –James Bond (Craig)
Body count: 25
Watch it now: Streaming on Crave; available for rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes, Google Play
If you liked this, watch: Skyfall, the second-best of Craig’s run, forgiving its third-act Home Alone vibes

18. The Wild Bunch (1969)

Directed by Sam Peckinpah

Starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine and Edmond O’Brien

Country of origin USA

A western that despises everything that the “western” label represents, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch had the guts to interrogate its audience. You want to see rough men engaging in rough deeds? You really want your fill of on-screen carnage? Here, watch this film about a group of outlaws trying to pull off one last score and prepare for a grim, bloody, fatalistic thriller that will make you feel both alive and sick.

With a cruel sensibility and a body count high even by today’s standards, Peckinpah’s film set a new standard for action at the same time that it argues there’s something deeply wrong with us for liking the genre in the first place.

Plausibility scale: 79 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “If they move, kill ‘em.” – Pike Bishop (Holden)
Body count: 145
Watch it now: Streaming on Hoopla; available for rent/purchase on Google Play, Cineplex Store, YouTube
If you liked this, watch: The Dirty Dozen

17. Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie

Starring Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill and Rebecca Ferguson

Country of origin USA

Tom Cruise is not mortal. During the production of M:I - Fallout, the sixth and best of Cruise’s Ethan Hunt adventures, the star should’ve died a dozen times. He leaps from tall buildings, rides a motorcycle against traffic and performs a high-altitude, low-opening 200-miles-per-hour free-fall jump from a plane 25,000 feet in the air. For real. (That last feat took 106 takes.)

If Fallout was just a succession of Cruise giving Death the middle finger, it’d be enough. But the star’s reunion with his M:I - Rogue Nation director Christopher McQuarrie is also a spy thriller par excellence, comfortable with street-level fights (that washroom brawl!) and high-concept set-pieces (that prisoner extraction!). Cruise emerged from Fallout, by the way, with only a broken ankle. I imagine by the time that he’s done filming M:I 7, he’ll have wrestled COVID-19 itself to the ground.

Plausibility scale: 94.5 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “‘I don’t understand what I’m involved in?’ ‘I don’t understand what I’m involved in??’ What … am I involved in?” – Ethan Hunt (Cruise), trying to decipher the film’s quadruple-cross plot
Body count: 29
Watch it now: Available for rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Video
If you liked this, watch: Mission: Impossible III, the second-best in the series thanks to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s blasé-cruel villain

16. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)

Directed by Lau Kar-leung

Starring Gordon Liu

Country of origin Hong Kong

Revenge is a dish best served cold. But in The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, it’s served with white-hot fury. Lau Kar-leung’s legendary kung-fu epic, one of the hundreds produced by the Shaw Brothers, establishes the template for any film in which a young hero suffers an injustice, trains to rise above his station, and then enacts brutal vengeance. (So: all of them.)

Gordon Liu is magnetic as a Shaolin disciple making his way through 36 tests of strength, while the film’s final battle is one for the ages.

Plausibility scale: 15 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “I should have learned kung-fu instead of ethics.” – San Te (Liu)
Body count: Dozen, or so
Watch it now: Streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video; available for rent/purchase on YouTube, Google Play
If you liked this, watch: The Five Deadly Venoms

15. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Starring Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu and Gordon Liu

Country of origin USA

The movie-est movie to ever be movie-d, Kill Bill Vol. 1 is a direct portal inside Quentin Tarantino’s grindhouse-addled brain. To list all of the director’s many homages to crass rape-revenge flicks, gnarly spaghetti westerns, somber samurai epics, contemporary yakuza gross-outs and adult-only anime chaos would be an exercise in footnote mania.

Let’s just say that Tarantino nails exactly the right tone between referencing and ripping-off, creating a funky, endlessly fun genre Voltron of a movie. As Uma Thurman’s The Bride (or is it Beatrix?) rampages through a cartoon world in which swords are allowed on commercial airliners and blood doesn’t obey the laws of gravity, you will laugh, you will cry, you will vomit.

Plausibility scale: 100 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “Leave the limbs you’ve lost. They belong to me now!” – The Bride (Thurman) after turning the Crazy 88s into bloody stumps
Body count: 62
Watch it now: Streaming on Netflix and Crave with Starz; available to rent/own on Apple TV/iTunes, Cineplex Store, Google Play, YouTube
If you liked this, watch: Battle Royale, which features Kill Bill’s Chiaki Kuriyama

14. The Dark Knight (2008)

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Gary Oldman

Country of origin USA

In the summer of 2008, two superhero movies premiered, each altering the future of blockbuster filmmaking. Jon Favreau’s Iron Man sparked the biggest franchise in history, 23 hits and counting. But Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight changed the way that we thought superhero movies could work, move and infect the zeitgeist.

There is a reason why I can happily watch The Dark Knight’s Michael Mann-y bank heist over and over. Just as there is a reason why I still hold my breath during the SWAT scene in which the Joker fires a bazooka from the back of a moving truck like it’s no big deal. And why Warner Bros. has tried twice (three times, if you count Zack Snyder’s Justice League) to replicate the electricity of Heath Ledger’s Clown Prince of Crime and not even come close. Meanwhile, does anyone remember the name of Iron Man’s villain?

Plausibility scale: 45 per cent ridiculous; we’re only a few steps away from real-life Jokers torching fire trucks
Quotable quip: “Why so serious?” – The Joker (Ledger), coining a catchphrase that will haunt dorm-room posters and novelty T-shirts for decades
Body count: 23
Watch it now: Streaming on Netflix; available for rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Video, YouTube
If you liked this, watch: Inception

13. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Directed by James Cameron

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Edward Furlong and Linda Hamilton

Country of origin USA

After four sequels, a TV series and enough timeline-continuity hiccups to drive a theoretical physicist stark raving mad, it is easy to forget just how much Terminator 2 absolutely owns.

While James Cameron’s first Terminator film remains a propulsive kill-fest, his sequel pole-vaulted over expectations, delivering a sci-fi spectacle that was as terrifying as it was ingenious. Schwarzenegger, now flipped into the hero role, has never been better and the state-of-the-art computer effects still impress today. Immensely rewatchable, it’s little wonder that Terminator’s rights-holders have been trying to recapture the magic ever since.

Plausibility scale: 92 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “Come with me if you want to live.” – T-800 (Schwarzenegger)
Body count: 47
Watch it now: Available for rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes, Cineplex Store, Amazon Video
If you liked this, watch: Aliens, Cameron’s other all-time action masterpiece which I was this close to listing here

12. RoboCop (1987)

Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Starring Peter Weller, Nancy Allen and Ronny Cox

Country of origin USA

At the toxic height of Reaganomics, audiences headed to RoboCop expecting a straight-ahead shoot-’em-up like Commando or Rambo: First Blood Part II. Instead, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven delivered a deliberately disgusting epic that subverted American action-cinema tropes at the same time that it refined them. You want scenery-chewing bad guys? Verhoeven gives you scum who reduce cops to pieces of meat and C-suite slime who think nothing of throwing subordinates to the robotic dogs. You want a man of steel? Here’s a perversion of science who shoots rapists in the crotch.

Even if you’ve seen RoboCop before, it deserves a contemporary rewatch to realize just how far Verhoeven pushed genre limits. RoboCop is not only one of the best films of the 1980s, it is the best film about the ’80s.

Plausibility scale: 20 per cent ridiculous, considering RoboCop’s Detroit looks an awful lot like today’s Detroit
Quotable quip: “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.” – RoboCop (Weller)
Body count: 28
Watch it now: Available for rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes, Cineplex Store, Google Play
If you liked this, watch: Total Recall, Verhoeven’s other ’80s masterpiece

11. John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

Directed by Chad Stahelski

Starring Keanu Reeves, Ruby Rose and Lance Reddick

Country of origin USA

When the first John Wick film debuted in 2014, it felt like a perfectly serviceable B-movie blast and one that saved Keanu Reeves’s career from a VOD point of no return. But Chapter 2 is stocked with a different arsenal altogether.

Not only does it double the already ludicrous body count of the original, it also matures into a bold, visually mesmerizing treatise on high-low action aesthetics. Reeves’s suave assassin shoots, stabs and strangles his way to victory, but always through the most artfully arranged kill-shots in recent memory. Director and veteran stunt-man Chad Stahelski throws a wild mix of jiu-jitsu, judo and gun-fu at his audience to create an indelible series of eye-popping images.

Plausibility scale: 99 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “You wanted me back … I’m back!” – John Wick (Reeves)
Body count: 141
Watch it now: Streaming on Netflix and Crave; available to rent/buy on Apple TV/iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Video
If you liked this, watch: Atomic Blonde, directed by David Leitch, co-director of the first John Wick

10. Fast Five (2011)

Directed by Justin Lin

Starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and Dwayne Johnson

Country of origin USA

Few big-screen franchises survive into their fifth instalment – and fewer still take that opportunity to reinvent themselves. But Fast Five is one unusual beast of a remodel. After director Justin Lin took over the Fast brand with the third film, Tokyo Drift, a once-disposable street-racing series swerved into blockbuster territory. Lin has helmed five separate F&F entries (including F9, coming this summer maybe), but Fast Five is his gift to the world: a bonkers masterpiece of destruction.

Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto and his “faahhhmily” are on the run in Rio and this time Dwayne Johnson’s baby oil-coated lawman is on their tail. Johnson’s throw-down with Diesel in the middle of the film is a beautiful ballet of homoerotic fisticuffs, while the climax – in which our heroes drag a gigantic safe through downtown Rio – is pure popcorn lunacy.

Plausibility scale: 95.5 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “You know I like my dessert first.” – Luke Hobbs (Johnson), after being asked whether he wanted the good news or bad news
Body count: 59
Watch it now: Streaming on Crave; available for rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes, Google Play, YouTube
If you liked this, watch: Furious 7, the second-best in the series thanks to its parachuting cars

9. The Matrix (1999)

Directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski

Starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie Anne-Moss and Laurence Fishburne

Country of origin USA

If we are, as Elon Musk has posited, living in a computer simulation, then kudos to the A.I. that introduced The Matrix into our simulacrum of reality. With its wire-fu fights, anything-is-possible set-pieces and that magical “bullet time” effect, the Wachowskis’ sci-fi thriller rewired the cinematic expectations of an entire generation. Its narrative and philosophical underpinnings may not be revolutionary – Dark City mined similar territory at the multiplex just a year before – but its CGI tricks were mind-blowingly innovative. There is a reason the film has been co-opted by any number of social movements: it resonates like a smack to the face. It wakes you the hell up.

Plausibility scale: incalculably ridiculous
Quotable quip: “There is no spoon.” – Neo (Reeves), giving Uri Geller a run for his money
Body count: 27
Watch it now: Streaming on Netflix and Crave; available for rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Video
If you liked this, watch: Speed Racer, the Wachowskis’ much-derided but actually pretty-fun anime adaptation

8. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen and John Rhys-Davies

Country of origin USA

Here are three scandalous statements: Raiders of the Ark is the best film that Steven Spielberg has ever made. It is also the best film that Harrison Ford has ever made. And it is the best film that John Rhys-Davies has ever made. (Maybe that last contention isn’t so controversial, until you realize Rhys-Davies also appeared in all three Lord of the Rings movies.) But I’m going to bat for all the above, given that everything in Raiders works just right: Spielberg’s gigantic, silly set-pieces, the rakish appeal of Ford, the fist-pumping defeat of supernatural-worshipping Nazis. It all clicks to create a delightful matinee romp of unparalleled quality.

Plausibility scale: 78 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?” – Indiana Jones (Ford) helping an entire generation generate ophidiophobia
Body count: 60
Watch it now: Streaming on Netflix; available for rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes, Google Play, Cineplex Store, Amazon Video
If you liked this, watch: The Fugitive, Ford’s second-best action movie (yes, I know there are three more Indiana Jones and five Star Wars films to choose from)

7. The Raid 2: Berandal (2014)

Directed by Gareth Evans

Sstarring Iko Uwais, Arifin Putra and Tio Pakusadewo

Country of origin Indonesia

If you haven’t been paying attention to Indonesia’s action-cinema boom over the past decade, then you’re in for a head-crushing treat. By combining the techniques of the martial art pencak silat and with a propensity for shocking gore, films such as Headshot and The Night Comes for Us deliver brutal blasts of stomach-churning action. Gareth Evans’s tremendous The Raid 2: Berandal stands out from even this intimidating pack.

A sequel to Evans’s own 2011 thriller The Raid – which featured actor/silat master Iko Uwais fighting his way up a high-rise full of criminals – Berandal is a gigantic leap forward in narrative and stylistic ambition. Telling an epic Godfather-like tale of warring gangsters in a blood-soaked Jakarta, Evans and Uwais deliver an orgiastic explosion of excellently choreographed violence that feels painfully real.

Plausibility scale: 25 per cent ridiculous; you really believe these guys are killing each other
Quotable quip: “Bring back the ball.” – Baseball Bat Man (Very Tri Yulisman), before using that ball for some very sinister, non-sport purposes
Body count: 180, conservatively
Watch it now: Available for rent/purchase on Google Play, YouTube, Cineplex Store
If you liked this, watch: The Night Comes for Us

6. The Rock (1996)

Directed by Michael Bay

Starring Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris

Country of origin

Is Michael Bay the Devil? In 1998, this seemed like a fair question for Entertainment Weekly to pose, given that the director was in some critics’ eyes destroying the foundations of coherent filmmaking. While Bay is guilty of many cinematic sins (hello, Transformers), he’s also the kind of Satan who makes being bad look so very good.

Take The Rock, which smooshes Bay’s best and worst instincts into an extraordinary piece of punch-drunk action pop. You’ve got Sean Connery playing an elderly James Bond (basically), Nicolas Cage going jittery before it was self-satirizing, Ed Harris as a villain with genuinely understandable motives, a murderer’s row of character actors playing murderers (David Morse! John C. McGinley! Tony Todd!), and the streets of San Francisco being torn to shreds. Even the Criterion Collection folks think that The Rock is unbreakable. Amen to this Beelzebub.

Plausibility scale: 89 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “Your ‘best’? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and [unprintable in a family newspaper, sorry] the prom queen.” – Mason (Connery) telling Cage’s FBI agent to man up
Body count: 23
Watch it now: Streaming on Disney+ add-on Star; available for rent/purchase on Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Video
If you liked this, watch: Bad Boys II, thanks to Bay’s breathtakingly obscene 15-minute chase scene

5. Die Hard (1988)

Directed by John McTiernan

Starring Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman and Bonnie Bedelia

Country of origin USA

If Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone didn’t turn down offers to star in Die Hard, we wouldn’t be talking about John McTiernan’s movie right now. But because those muscle-man commandos walked away and because the comparatively average-Joe-y Bruce Willis signed on instead, Die Hard stands as one of the most compelling, charming action movies ever made. Thanks to Willis’s everyman appeal, the film’s stakes seem real(ish) and relatable(ish). We could imagine that, yeah, if we had to face off against a collection of German mercenaries in a Los Angeles skyscraper, we might lose our shoes, too.

And, yes: Die Hard is a Christmas movie.

Plausibility scale: 55 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “Welcome to the party, pal!” – John McClane (Willis)
Body count: 23
Watch it now: Streaming on Disney+ add-on Star, and Crave with Starz; available to rent/own on Apple TV/iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Video
If you liked this, watch: Die Hard with a Vengeance, the second-best in the series

4. Seven Samurai (1954)

Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura and Keiko Tsushima

Country of origin Japan

There are influential movies and then there is Seven Samurai. Likely the most remade/reworked/referenced film in cinema history, Akira Kurosawa’s “assemble the team” epic has so engrained itself into the fabric of the popular imagination that you know the film’s narrative beats and style even if you have never seen a single second of footage.

Following a group of master-less samurai hired by a village to defend themselves from bandits, Kurosawa’s masterpiece is genuinely timeless: its story, characters and most crucially its action feel as fresh today as they did 67 years ago. It only takes one viewing to realize just where Sergio Leone, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, the Wachowskis and so many other action auteurs got their best ideas.

Plausibility scale: 4 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “Danger always strikes when everything seems fine.” – Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura)
Body count: 65
Watch it now: Streaming on The Criterion Channel; available for rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes, Google Play, YouTube
If you liked this, watch: Yobjimbo, Kurosawa’s other all-timer starring Toshiro Mifune

3. Police Story (1985)

Directed by Jackie Chan and Chi-Hwa Chen

Starring Jackie Chan, Brigitte Lin and Maggie Cheung

Country of origin Hong Kong

Most North American audiences were introduced to Jackie Chan through 1995′s Rumble in the Bronx, which is a solid primer on the goofy charm and physical prowess of the one-man stunt machine. But to truly grasp what Chan was capable of and how his daredevil attitude changed the course of action cinema in Hong Kong and the world, you have to go back a decade earlier to Police Story.

The first and best entry in the mega-series (now at eight barely connected films), Police Story stars Chan as a cop who takes down a drug empire with nothing but his limbs. A witty, lightning-fast thrill-ride that showcases both Chan’s unparalleled acrobatic skills and his fondness for slapstick, Police Story is intensely focused on making you smile, gasp and cackle with laughter.

Plausibility scale: 63 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “Yaaaahhhhhhh!” – Ka-Kui (Chan) as he scales down a multi-storey pole decorated by hundreds of decorative lights
Body count: 1 or 2? Lots and lots and lots of injured bad guys, though
Watch it now: Streaming on The Criterion Channel; available for rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes
If you liked this, watch: Project A, Chan’s rough-and-tumble adventure made two years before Police Story

2. Hard Boiled (1992)

Directed by John Woo

Starring Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung and Anthony Wong

Country of origin Hong Kong

There are a half-dozen John Woo movies that could occupy this spot. The Killer. A Better Tomorrow. Bullet in the Head. Hard Target. Face/Off. Even 2017′s Manhunt, an exuberant return to form that remains criminally underseen (it’s on Netflix, people!). But Hard Boiled is peak Woo: action as opera, bombast as poetry.

The Hong Kong thriller announces its audacity from the start: Chow Yun-Fat’s cop named Tequila (yes!) is giving chase to two hoods. Bullets tear up a teahouse, bystanders go down. And then Chow nonchalantly dangles a toothpick between his teeth, slides down a bannister, targets his prey, and ensures they’re dead before he glides off. It is a moment of sub-zero cool that perfectly encapsulates Hard Boiled’s action-is-everything M.O.

Plausibility scale: 93 per cent ridiculous
Quotable quip: “You saved the day there, you little piss-pot. Thanks a lot.” – Tequila (Yun-Fat) after a baby pees on his leg whilst in the midst of a shoot-out
Body count: 320 (that’s not a typo)
Watch it now: Available for rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes, YouTube, Google Play
If you liked this, watch: Face/Off, Woo’s best American film

1. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Directed by George Miller

Starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult

Country of origin Australia

Director Steven Soderbergh and Mad Max superfan puts it best: “I don’t understand how they’re still not shooting that film and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.” Me neither. Because while George Miller’s fourth entry in his apocalyptic franchise didn’t kill anyone (so far as I know) it is definitely the vision of a psychopathic madman.

Two hours of fiery wall-to-wall vehicular carnage, Fury Road is as pure a shot of adrenaline as the cinematic medium allows. And nearly everything on-screen – from the monstrous War Rig to the fire-spewing guitar player known as The Doof – is real-deal CGI-free mayhem. While Miller is preparing a follow-up – which may take as long as the 30-year gap between this film and 1985′s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome – I can’t imagine that he will ever top the awe-inspiring action of Fury Road. Without killing someone, that is.

Quotable quip: “Uh-uh. That’s bait.” – Max (Tom Hardy), in a famously dialogue-light performance
Plausibility scale: 110 per cent ridiculous
Body count: 112
Watch it now: Available for rent/purchase on Apple TV/iTunes, Google Play, YouTube
If you liked this, watch: The Road Warrior, the second-best in the series