La Femme Nikita (1990)
La Femme Nikita launched not only Luc Besson’s career as the international man of action entertainment, but it also became an unlikely franchise of its own, spawning two US television series and an American feature film remake (Point of No Return). The watered down stateside formula is simple: woman in cocktail dress + a handgun. But all the US adaptations have missed what made the original so special: Nikita is a Beauty and the Beast tale and Nikita (Anne Parillaud) is both the Beauty and the Beast. And her beginning is beastly. Many users of best Australian online casino have seen this movie.
The Last Boy Scout (1991)
This is Shane Black at his Shane Black-iest, and it makes you wish that he and director Tony Scott had collaborated more. Scott gets the tone that Black’s screenplay is going for, and while on the surface the story of a washed-up detective and washed-up football player seems too contrived to work, it does.
Point Break (1991)
Let’s get this out of the way: Point Break is my favorite action film of the 1990s by a country mile. That may primarily be because its underlying focus seems to be on dismantling the legitimacy of the masculine impulses that guide most action films. Director Kathryn Bigelow sets up two opposing visions of masculinity at the center of the film: Patrick Swayze’s extreme-sports-loving outlaw Bodie and Keanu Reeves’ buttoned-up FBI agent Johnny Utah. As many have opined, the movie could be seen as an unrealized romance between the two men, as Utah goes undercover to infiltrate Bodie’s gang of presidentially-masked bank-robbers. One could run with that idea and Point Break would still work perfectly as a bracing, breathless action epic, and that’s what separates the film from much of its ilk.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
We should probably stop giving James Cameron flak for taking so damned long on these Avatar follow-ups because if there’s a man who knows how to make an action sequel, it’s him. Hell, he practically defined the format in 1986 with Aliens, and in 1991 he put that bigger, badder formula to grand use in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Picking up with Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor 15 years after the events of the first film, we find a woman completely changed by what she experienced – now a tough son-of-a-bitch and ferocious mamma bear devoted to protecting her son, the future leader of the human resistance. In this movie, you’ll see land-based casino games that are available at jeux de casino.
Hard Boiled (1992)
John Woo is a legend of the action genre, which is why you’ll see so damned many of his movies on this list. Hard Boiled, his last official Hong Kong film before heading off to Hollywood, is one of his most entertaining and stylistically definitive, and a giant of the genre. Hard Boiled stars Chow Yun-Fat as Tequila, a tough Hong Kong cop obsessed with taking out the nefarious crime ring that murdered his partner, who teams up with an undercover cop on the brink. Along the way, there are plenty of Woo’s stunningly choreographed fight scenes and shoot-outs, culminating in an insanely violent shoot-em-up final act that’s a breathless series of set-pieces. How insane? Try, “defending infants in a maternity ward from well-armed villains” insane. You just can’t beat the moment Tequila apologizes and coos at a tiny baby as he wipes a splatter of his own blood off the wee one’s face.
Demolition Man (1993)
Set aside Rob Schneider and the three seashells, and Demolition Man is perhaps one of the smartest, most subversive sci-fi films of the 1990s. It doesn’t get credit for its subversion because it’s putting Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes front-and-center, but if you look at the surrounding film, it’s surprisingly crafty with its cultural critique of a future that will be overwhelmed with product placement and forced fuzzy feelings.
