Action movies are pretty fun, right? They do what you’d expect them to do: provide action, you know, showing people chasing each other, punching/kicking each other, and maybe firing various weapons at each other, too. Even if an action movie is intense or sort of gritty, and perhaps not fun in the traditional sense, it can still end up not feeling too heavy if the heroes endure and secure some kind of victory (see the particularly tense and sometimes grisly Mad Max: Fury Road, for example).
‘Rolling Thunder’ (1977)
Like many thrillers from the 1970s, Rolling Thunder is unapologetically uneasy and tense, but unlike some of the thrillers from that time, it can also technically call itself an action movie. It’s about a veteran from the Vietnam War returning home to America, but struggling to settle in, with things falling apart and getting stomach-churning in a Taxi Driver-esque way… perhaps unsurprisingly, since Paul Schrader wrote both and this came out the year after Taxi Driver.
Also, Rolling Thunder has one of Tommy Lee Jones’ earliest big roles, and the underrated William Devane is pretty great, too, in the lead role. Rolling Thunder is just very nihilistic and not all that fun, but by design, and so even if there is a bit by way of violence and even action, it’s of the more stomach-churning and despairing variety than most films that could be classified as action movies.
‘Thriller: A Cruel Picture’ (1973)
It rather flatly calls itself Thriller: A Cruel Picture, but even then, the word “Cruel” only goes so far, because this one is absolutely ruthless, and is more than just a “Thriller” too, really. Thriller: A Cruel Picture has some really sadistic violence early on that makes it feel like a horror movie, and the premise after the particularly nasty stuff mostly revolves around a quest for vengeance against people who more than had it coming.
It’s a cycle of violence, and it’s all graphic enough that you can understand pretty well why Thriller: A Cruel Picture has been banned in a fair few territories (or at least was, upon its first release). You do need a strong stomach to get through this one, and the brutality of it all carries over and makes it further challenging to watch for the emotional exhaustion it inspires, too.
‘Mandy’ (2018)
Mandy doesn’t have a lot to its narrative, at least on the surface, but when you’re giving a summary of a movie’s plot, you can really only touch upon what’s on the surface. So… well, it’s hard not to ruin anything, because there’s not much to ruin. Maybe this much can be said about Mandy: it’s slow-going at first, and kind of ominous, and then at a point, it switches gears and becomes incredibly bloody, over-the-top, and nightmarish.
It’s certainly a horror film, albeit a weird one, and doesn’t really have much action until its second half, but there is quite a bit of it once that aforementioned gear-switch happens. What matters most is that Mandy is the rare film that lets you see both sides of Nicolas Cage; his underrated knack for quieter performances, and his more bombastic side that’s more explosive than just about any other actor of his generation. It’s also an oddly somber and sometimes despairing film, but alongside being all those other things, too. It’s a wild ride, but a ride worth taking nonetheless.
‘Killer Constable’ (1980)
There were plenty of great martial arts movies released in the 1970s and 1980s, but few have action that’s quite as non-stop as Killer Constable does. This is so relentless, even by modern-day standards, with the fairly simple narrative involving a constable who’s tasked with retrieving a large amount of stolen gold at any cost, and so he sets out ruthlessly cutting through any and all adversaries to carry out his objective.
There’s a little more to it than that, but for as exciting and spectacular as it is, Killer Constable is also pretty damn dark, considering how ruthless its protagonist is, and the fact that he’s far from a hero. It’s a story with a bad guy trying to take down some other purportedly bad guys, and everyone kind of just bleeds and/or dies a lot. And it’s great.