Greatest Female Action Stars

  Criteria varies but may include -

• Actual physical ability on-screen
• Great acting or conveyance of strong character
• Kicking ass and sexy
• It may be a film or television role
• It may be just from one memorable role

My Candidates

  

Angela Bassett - she may not be considered an action star per se, but her many roles exemplify how strong, sexy, and capable she is.  Check her out in Strange Days.

Angelina Jolie -  always smart, sexy, and lethal in many roles like Laura Croft Tomb Raider, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and Salt.

Anne Parillaud - she changed the whole contemporary game for women in Luc Besson's  La Femme Nikita as she morphed from wild criminal to trained and refined assassin.

Carrie-Anne Moss -  because her character of Trinity in The Matrix rocked.  She's definitely one you'd want on your team and it's no wonder Neo fell for her.

Cynthia Rothrock - when female action stars were few, if any in America, this champion martial artist went to China first to become one. Check her out in Yes, Madam. 

Franka Potente - ever since seeing her in Run Lola Run, I've been hooked and she didn't let down in The Bourne Identity.

Gena Davis - her fabulous transformations in both Thelma & Louise and The Long Kiss Goodnight are magical.

Gina Carano - an actual MMA fighter who's film debut in Haywire showed how women can tangle with the big boys in all levels of combat.

Halle Berry - she gave 007 a run for his money in Die Another Day and dazzled us in the X-Men movies.  I forgave her for Catwoman.

JeeJa Yanin - the female Tony Jaa.  This girl kicks serious ass in Chocolate.

Jennifer Garner - though she hit the big screen portraying Elektra, it was her portrayal of agent Sydney Bristow on the television show Alias that cemented her position here as one of the best female action stars.

Kate Beckinsale - has there ever been a sexier vampire hero?  See Underworld.

Keira Knightley -  how she can seamlessly go from classic period films to straight, no chaser action films like Domino, is no joke.

Kimberly Elise - she can go from innocent to steely intensity in a flash, if you remember Set It Off.

Linda Hamilton -  buffed, tough, and no-nonsense in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Maggie Cheung - this talented beauty can do it all in any genre.  She would have made the list even before her great performance in Hero as Flying Snow.

Maria Bello - her character of Detective Jane Timony of the Prime Suspect show is one of the best strong female characters I've seen on television.  NBC had to be on crack for canceling the show. 

Meiko Kaji -  if you think Lucy Liu was cool in the Kill Bill movies, then check out
this Japanese actress in the 1973 classic Lady Snowblood, part of the inspiration for her role.

 

Michelle Yeoh - the queen of Asian action, this former Miss Malaysia has 25 years worth of hard hitting films including the classic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

 

Milla Jovovich - beautiful and hardcore in the Resident Evil films.

Natalie Portman - her debut in The Professional was outstanding.

Noomi Rapace -  nothing against Rooney Mara's performance in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but there's nothing like the original Swedish actress.

Pam Grier - the superbad and superfine queen of 70's action.

Regina King - she's come along way since 227 and is one of the best things about the TV show Southland.

Salma Hayek - smoking hot and sultry in Desperado.

Sigourney Weaver - her character of Ripley in the Aliens films is the epitome of female action star and Sigourney is a veteran champ of that.

Thandie Newton -  she gets a bit overshadowed in Mission Impossible 2 with all the great action, but she fired it up pretty nice in that role.

Uma Thurman - she will forever be a classic action star, getting down and dirty in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 & 2.

Vivica A. Fox - a memorable performance in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 going toe to toe with Uma Thurman leads me to include her.

Ziyi Zhang - she came out the gate swinging with youthful energy in groundbreaking martial arts classics like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and House Of Flying Daggers.

Zoe Saldana - her lead debut in Colombiana, but let's not forget her as the new Uhura in Star Trek or that sexy blue alien in Avatar.

Cloud Atlas

This movie seems very interesting.  Maybe this one picks up in universal themes of humanity where Crash left off.

The Expendables 2

First off, we all know that it ain't about the storyline, character development, cinematography, great humor, the underlying meaning, good writing or any of those other stellar qualities that make real good movies.  We knew it before even the first Expendables came to the show.  We naturally wanted to see progress and maturation in those areas, but hey "What are you gonna do?"  Now everyone knows, including the filmmakers who seem to know it a bit better this time around and have seemed to capitalize on it.  So I don't have much to complain about in all fairness, because....  Well,  you know.  It's an action movie with mostly  rather shallow and aging action stars. But you've got eight of those heavyweights from back in the day, with 4-5 current minor stars.  We've all seen their movies back in the day, whether you loved them or hated them.  So what they've managed to do for the second time around rather simply and brilliantly better, is just take all our favorites and put them in a film together.  Who needs much marketing with all those names crammed together?  Americans like to supersize everything.  Bigger is better in our minds and so at the very least, The Expendables movies will get audiences to the show.  If not that, then go see how seriously ripped a 66 year old Stallone is next to the  flabby Gubernator who's only a year younger.  The real obvious treat is in watching all these guys together running around, shooting and blowing up shit, and then making those crazy one-liners in one movie.  However, this time around, there are more in-house jokes that poke fun at themselves in their other various roles on and off the screen.  The addition of Chuck Norris playing mercenary Booker and Jean Claude Van Damme playing villain Jean Vilain (yes, you read it correctly) gives it a bit of a healthy boost, as well.  So what I can't help but think to be the secret , at least to me, in being entertained by these movies is in not even treating them like action movies.  I swear I kind of look at them like scenes from Tropic Thunder, which was hilarious fun.  Stallone should have the Expendables meet Robert Downey and Jack Black! Lol.   Spoiler alerts are not needed for this calibre of genre, so one point I can say that I didn't like, though was probably smart on his point, was how Jet Li's character literally dropped out of the film early on.  It leaves us left with the next best on-screen fighter in Jason Statham, who has his trademarked Transporter-choreographed fight of the film, garbed in priest outfit wielding his knives and daggers.  This brings me to the final  minor point of criticism of the rather anti-climactic  showdown between Stallone and Van Damme, which while decent for the old-school heavyweights,  paled next to previous action buildup of the film.  Nonethlelesss and despite that, The Expendables 2 does deliver rather well of what we can reasonably expect.  What it may lack, it supersizes with a dozen action stars together who are having fun .  Not too many films can capitalize on that much star power.

Keeping The Radar On This

Just ran into the trailer for this new martial arts film.  Check it out.

Martial art movies where the wire work is very minimum, I really dig.  Add to that, authentic martial arts and thriving to impart e real philosophical meaning and you've got something.  Maybe everyone will not be impressed because it isn't flashy enough, as a lot of the mainstream big budget films we've been exposed to do raise the bar of expectation and entertainment.  But sometimes, it's worth going back to the "basics".  Tony Jaa and his films are excellent examples of where the two can meet.  Also check out these following trailers of my 2 favorite foreign authentic karate films seen in recent years.  Karate, in it's own right,  has become so overused and marginalized in film to mean every other art but or to be relegated to the art that's always defeated.

The Bourne Legacy

It's hard to believe that it's been a decade now since the Bourne movies started and five years now since the last great film in the trilogy.  So trying to resurrect the franchise with a fourth film, was certainly an exciting prospect that I was certainly very guilty of looking forward to.  Yet, I also had my equal doubts that reeled in the anticipation in equal measure.  How can you make a Bourne film without Damon as Bourne or Ludlum to pen the novel?  Where was director Paul Greengrass?  Nevertheless, I had to see for myself, as it still had a good cast in newcomers Jeremy Renner and Rachael Weisz and screenwriter Tony Gilroy.  Spoiler alert if you haven't seen any of the Bourne movies.

Renner plays Aaron Cross, who as it turns out, is a more enhanced Treadstone operative charged up on sophisticated mind and body enhancing drugs developed and  administered by scientist.  One of those scientist is Dr. Marta Shearing, played by Weisz.  When the ongoing controversy surrounding Treadstone-Blackbriar and Jason Bourne continue to fallout, the CIA decides to terminate their operatives and everyone associated with it, including the scientists.  Cross and Shearing narrowly avoid this fate, unite, and flee.  Along the way, a determined Edward Norton and the Treadstone team put clues together, track them, and  dispatch everything from  missiles, CIA hitman, and  an even more lethal drug-induced operative to hunt them down.    

Now it has the hallmarks of a Bourne movie, but feels like a knockoff.  The pace of the movie is so slow and devoid of any character development or chemistry between Weisz and Renner, that it's an initial elation when the action scenes take over.  That is, until one realizes that hey, "that's been done before and even better in other movies!"  What the action scenes lack is better choreography and originality.  Throughout, there is no real sense of urgency.  I wish I could really care more about the two protagonist, but I don't.  This is surprising because it's basically them against everyone else. Lacking are the intermediary characters like a CIA Deputy Director Pamela Landy or Nicky Parsons in the previous films who would try to understand and often aid their plight.  Landy in this film is only shown in an almost separate flashback like way, being put on the defensive in court by the government for aiding Jason Bourne.  So Cross is left with only Dr. Shearing  to fill that void, as she is the only one who understands the drugs he has been taking.  As it turns out, one of the drugs has left Cross with permanently enhanced physical abilities.  Well, this is great for him and us, as the audience.  However, the other drug that he has to continually be fed, controls his thinking and cerebral functions. Not so good.  Turns out that the CIA-Treadstone folks took advantage of Cross when he was just an average soldier who had been severely injured in Iraq.  So drug and gene scientist,  Dr. Shearing, is the only one who can conveniently help him survive. At some points, I found this sadly laughable instead of  feeling empathetic with visions of Van Damme/Lundgren in Universal Soldier on the quest for drugs to keep them smart. In this drug culture and era (amidst the backdrop of the Olympics), I also find it funny how it took a storyline dealing with druggie government operatives to try and raise up the Bourne franchise, as if it were limp.  Lol.  I digress. Nevertheless, finding the drugs for Cross is the major focus for the duo.   The Bourne Legacy contrives rather obviously to manufacture the action sequences and storyline plots of the previous films, even going so far as to have the fleeing duo rescued by a kind Filipino whisking them away in his fishing boat (remember the first Bourne movie?) after an endless but lackluster rooftop chase and (get this) motorcycle chase through the streets of Manila.  Really?  But it's missing much of the essence of the films, as Damon portrayed so well in the Bourne character.  Where the franchise is trying to go, is anyone's guess now.  I don't fault Renner or Weisz for the flaws, but perhaps writer Tony Gilroy shouldn't have stepped into the role of director or at least have taken a few steps further away from referencing Jason Bourne every chance he could.  Those are huge shoes to fill.  All the criticism withstanding, I'm still a huge fan of Bourne movies as I am of the Bond movies.  But maybe next time, we could get Matt Damon (perhaps along with Jeremy Renner) and have Paul Greengrass resume directing. It's a decent enough action picture, but a great legacy it ain't.

The Dark Knight Rises

What can I say about this film that basically sums it up?  EPIC!  More than any other comic book/superhero movie, this is the most epic I've ever seen.  There have certainly been issues with the Nolan-Bale franchise of Batman movies.  Yet this film manages to graciously close the chapter in such a fitting way that satisfies.  Along the way, there are more than unexpected and sweeping surprises.  Of course, there are the obligatory gadgets and larger than life action sequences that are on equal, if not better  footing with the previous films.  But it's so nicely and evenly tempered with storylines and characters both new and old, that riddle the film to these epic proportions.  Yes, this is a large and epic film because within those storylines and characters portrayed by a brilliant cast, are many themes that better than most films address what it means to be a hero, among many others relevant to the story and the viewers.  A summer blockbuster, it certainly is.  But more than that, this final act propels itself to almost Shakespearean heights at times.  A running time of almost 3 hours certainly does help with that, but I certainly didn't notice or feel the urge to glance at the time, as I was caught up in the anticipation of the storyline of these characters. That only brings me to my only initial criticism after just seeing it.  The dialogue of Bane, ironically like Batman, wasn't all that clear in this movie.  Irregardless, a second viewing in the theater is rather obligatory by me.