The 10 Best Crowd-Pleasing Action Movies, Ranked

Another movie in a legendary trilogy (at least it was a trilogy for a while), Raiders of the Lost Ark was the first (not to mention best and most entertaining) Indiana Jones movie, and also a high point of Steven Spielberg’s entire filmography to date. It’s a treasure hunt movie, basically, or one of those “let’s get the MacGuffin before someone who doesn’t have good intentions gets it,” so real simple stuff, but ideally executed.

There aren’t any wasted moments in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and you could probably count on one hand the number of wasted seconds (if there even are any to begin with; you can go on your own treasure hunt for them to find ‘em, if you'd like). It’s maybe the quintessential crowd-pleasing action movie, expertly balanced between feeling old-fashioned and ahead-of-its-time, somehow, as far as the pacing goes. Everything’s great here, really, but you probably knew all that already, right?

There’s a similar issue with the original Star Wars trilogy as the one that presented itself when it came to singling out a movie from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Return of the Jedi is very much a crowd-pleaser, although it has a few rough patches and is certainly more inconsistent than the movie that preceded it, The Empire Strikes Back, which is maybe the best of the three but also the closest to “challenging,” and thereby perhaps not crowd-pleasing in the traditional sense?

So, the first movie is going here. You could also argue it’s more a science fiction or space opera movie than it is an action one, a bit like you could argue The Lord of the Rings wasn’t fully action-focused, yet the action in Star Wars is still a vital part of what makes it work so well and prove so memorable. The whole finale, in particular, feels perfectly engineered to be as satisfying and cheer-worthy as a sequence in a movie could possibly be.

Up there as one of the best superhero movies of all time, The Incredibles is also worth a shoutout right here and right now because it’s a family film and thereby broadly appealing. You can be a kid and get a lot out of it, an adult and get even more out of it, or somewhere in between and still probably find it great. It doesn’t really matter how old or young you are.

That’s not something that can be said about every animated/family movie, and even some of the better ones are aimed more at younger audiences than older ones. The Incredibles manages to just work, though, as a family movie about a family (with, sure, superpowers), as a charmingly retro action/sci-fi film, and as a showcase of some remarkable animation that still largely holds up 20+ years later.

You could say it’s more of an adventure/fantasy film instead of an action one if you wanted, but still, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King does have a lot of action, and not including it here felt weird. Well, not including a movie from The Lord of the Rings trilogy felt weird, and even if you don’t think The Return of the King is the very best of the three, you might be okay with it being called the most crowd-pleasing.

It wants to satisfy and it gets to go big, wrapping everything up, and pushing all the emotional stuff that was already moving to new heights, you know, emotionally. It’s stirring and maybe one of the most exciting epic movies ever made, perfectly rounding out a trilogy made up of two other movies that were also pretty much perfect.

More Cruise here, with the best of the Mission: Impossible movies: Fallout. It’s also the most crowd-pleasing, at least in the eyes of this writer, and you could say that all the movies in the series aim to do that whole pleasing the crowd thingo, and so maybe any of them could go here, but come on. Mission: Impossible – Fallout. That’s all. That’s it. That’s got the most by way of goods delivered.

It gets the balance just right stakes-wise and when it comes to going big, but not too big, doing for Mission: Impossible what Fast Five did for its series. The plot here, with Fallout, is the same kind of “save the world” one you usually get in the series, yet it succeeds the most in feeling particularly urgent and suspenseful, all the while having a bunch of series-best (or near-best) action scenes generously spread throughout.

RRR is super thrilling stuff, and impressively stays thrilling for a very long time. It’s about three hours long, all up, but you don’t feel that runtime in a bad way. Things escalate well, and the opening act does a great job at introducing people you can care about and people who you'd really like to see taken down, and then it all builds towards the point (or maybe various points) you'd expect to see, narratively.

It’s just what RRR does on the way there that proves surprising. Outside of some rewriting of history, there’s not much that’s wild or too surprising about the story here, but it is well-told, and it saves the truly jaw-dropping and surprising moments for all the big, over-the-top, glorious action sequences, which are all worth the price of admission. That the drama here is solid and the narrative proves quite compelling (even if sometimes familiar) is just icing on the massive and endlessly filling cake that is RRR.

The first Guardians of the Galaxy did quite a lot, in hindsight, bringing a fairly obscure superhero team to the big screen and making just about everyone like them straight away. Comic book readers might've been ahead of the curve, but the titular squad here did look weird and like a bit of a gamble on Marvel’s part to base a movie around, but it paid off immensely.

There was a sequel that went a little darker, and was also interesting, and then the third movie, the appropriately titled Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was an all-out crowd-pleaser. It aimed to leave no crowd displeased. It was even a bit sappy and blunt, even by the standards of James Gunn’s (usually quite good) superhero works, but it also worked as a good send-off. Admittedly, more of a send-off to the series under Gunn’s guardianship (ha), but unlikely to be a send-off to all the characters here; they’ll probably live on or continue to make appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in some capacity, going forward.

One fairly reliable way to get viewers invested in a story is to make it about revenge, and that goes for movies that tell massive stories across lengthy runtimes, too. Enter Gladiator, which certainly wasn’t the first epic movie with a historical setting and this kind of narrative at its center (see Braveheart, Ben-Hur, and Spartacus), but maybe it’s the best of these?

Sorry, if that’s a hot take, then how about this: it’s the most action-packed of those, and while all are compelling dramatically and as stories about revenge/righting wrongs, Gladiator proves particularly good at making the whole thing stirring and emotional. It’s also one of the fastest-paced epic movies, maybe of all time, getting through things at a good clip while always ensuring that things don’t get rushed the way they did in the theatrical cut of a later Ridley Scott epic, Kingdom of Heaven (the director’s cut of that one fares so much better).

Tom Cruise likes to play savior kind of roles, and sometimes he’s quite good at it (as the better Mission: Impossible movies show), but with Top Gun: Maverick, the narrative around that movie’s release was that he was saving cinema. And it kind of checked out? Like, so many other people were instrumental in that film’s success, of course, but Cruise was the face of it all, and he was pretty great in it.

The whole movie was engineered to be as likable and maybe even as safe as possible, like how it hit all the narrative beats you'd expect and didn’t seem keen to imply the eventual antagonistic force was any particular country/nation/group… but oh well. It played things safe well, with confidence, and with technical proficiency, since the whole thing was slick, sometimes spectacular, and generally well-paced. Might be a hard movie to love, if you want to approach it with even a slightly critical frame of mind, but it’s an incredibly easy movie to like, and a fairly hard one to totally resist.

Fast Five is probably the fastest-paced of all the Fast and Furious movies, and it’s also the one that feels least likely to have anyone coming away from it feeling even remotely furious; like their time was wasted or something. You could not really like the racing-heavy early movies, and similarly feel something negative toward the really wild later movies, and yet still feel satisfied with Fast Five.

It’s simply a great action/thriller/heist movie, and there’s still quite a lot by way of car-heavy action, albeit with other types of action (all of it high-quality) throughout, so that one type of set piece never runs the risk of getting boring. Fast Five sees everything clicking into place pretty much perfectly for this sort of mindless yet satisfying blockbuster, and it’s just a blast, you know? That’s all it needs to be, but it really, really is that.