What are the greatest 2000s action movies of all time? It's a tricky question to answer, as, in the new millennium, action cinema was undergoing serious evolution. Across a long and tumultuous decade, a select few have stood the test of time. However, we can name about 35 of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best action movies that truly defined the 2000s.

At the daw🔯n of the 21st century, the era of muscle-bound beefcakes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone was long over. The 1990s saw seismic releases like The Matrix, Speed, and Mission: Impossible that introduced a new kind of action hero, one more refined in the art of killing. With more influences from Hong Kong and Japan and increasingly sophisticated VFX technologies, action movies have never looked better than they did in the new millennium.

Spies, soldiers🐭, and superheroes – such were the cinematic heroes of the time. So get ready and buckle up, these are the 35 greatest 2000s action movies of all time.

35. Charlie's Angels

Year: 2000
Director: McG

Good morning, Angels! Somewhe♏re between camp and corny is McG's cinematic sequel to the classic 1970s TV series Charlie's Angels, with a new generation of femme fatales kicking things into high gear. Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu team up as freelance spies who work for their unseen millionaire boss, Charlie (voiced by John Forsythe, who reprises his role from the TV show). Their latest assignment: tracking down a kidnapped software engineer. Charlie's Angels is intentionally silly and bombastic, but it gets the job done as popcorn fun that never fails to entertain.

34. Hot Fuzz

Year: 2007
Director: Edgar Wright

A few years after putting his comedic stamp on zombie apocalypses with his indie hit Shaun of the Dead, British movie maverick Edgar Wright riffed on the action genre with his comically cranked-up Hot Fuzz. Simon Pegg stars as a top-rate London police officer who is transferred to a small village, where he unearths a dark and murderous conspiracy. A high-volume love letter to Michael Bay and Jackie Chan, Wright's Hot Fuzz brings the heat with Hollywood-sized mayhem juxtapos🙈ed against idyllic rural England.

33. Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior

Year: 2003
Director: Prachya Pinkaew

Tony Jaa's breakout movie Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior launched the Thai film industry to mainstream attention, as well as the brutal martial art of Muay Thai kickboxing. The high-flying Tony Jaa stars as Ting, a fierce fighter from a smalജl, impoverished village who travels to bustling Bangkok and defeats a ruthless crime boss in order to retrieve his village's stolen Buddha statue. A pure exhibition of Tony Jaa's gravity-defying talents, Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior hits as hard and fast as its leading man.

32. Mission: Impossible 2

Year: 2000
Director: John Woo

Though it may be the most unpopular installment of the smash hit spy franchise, it's a heck of a standard when a John Woo-directed Mission: Impossible is the bottom rung. The Hong Kong auteur cranks up the style dial 🐲for the Mission: Impossible series as the 2000 sequel follows Ethan Hunt (again played by Tom Cruise), who teams up with a gorgeous thief (Thandiwe Newton) to secure a modified virus kept by an ex-lover and rogue IMF agent (Dougray Scott). What Mission: Impossible 2 sacrifices in realism, it makes up ꦍfor in pure cinematic ecstasy as motorcycle stunts and endless ammunition bring Hollywood within the league of Bollywood.

31. Man on Fire

Year: 2004
Director: Tony Scott

Tony Scott's 2004 actioner Man on Fire wasn't the first movie based on A.J. Quinneell's 1980 no🍌vel, but the other adaptation didn't have Denzel Washington. In Scott's version, Washington plays an ex-CIA agent turned bodyguard who wreaks havoc all over Mexico to rescue a nine-year-old girl (Dakota Fanning). While Man on Fire is dizzying enough to leave your ears ringing, its masculine aura and old-school ꦑheroics – and an utterly hypnotic Denzel Washington – make it feel like the last survivor of a dying breed.

30. Rush Hour 2

Year: 2001
Director: Brett Ratner

Do you understand the words coming ouꦉt of their mouths? A few short years after 1998's Rush Hour blew up the box office, Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker reunite for the explosive sequel that takes them across the Pacific Ocean. After a bombing at the U.S. embassy in Hong Kong, Chan and Tucker's mismatched cops put th✨emselves on the case when the suspect is a Triad ringleader with deeply personal ties. From hand-to-hand melee fights in massage parlors to casinos raining with cash, Rush Hour 2 is arguably one of the best Hollywood movies Jackie Chan has ever made.

29. Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Year: 2005
Director: Doug Liman

For couples in therapy, consider rekindling your rไomance with a movie night featuring the 2000s action movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Doug Liman's 2005 hit is a sexy satire on modern-day marriages with a deadly twist, with Brad Pitt 🍰and Angelina Jolie playing a husband and wife who unknowingly work for rival assassination agencies. The duo soon wind up in each other's crosshairs – literally – when they are tasked with eliminating the competition. A top-notch action flick with weapons-grade appeal, Mr. and Mrs. Smith puts all other romantic comedies in a zip-tie cuff.

28. Sin City

Year: 2005
Director: Robert Rodriguez

Turn the right corner in Sin City, and you'll find almost anything – including a stylish banger from Robeไrt Rodriguez. Based on Frank Miller's hit graphic novels, the star-studded Sin City follows several different stories of different people living in a rain-drenched urban nightmare where nothing is black and white. Rodriguez's hyper-stylish adaptation is a moving mosaic of love and violence that pays striking homage to the noir films of yesteryear while steeped in unspeakably harsh themes. Dying has never looked so good.

27. Shoot 'Em Up

Year: 2005
Director: Michael Davis

Shoot 'Em Up tore down the house at the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con, and all these years later, it still feels like a shotgun blast for every action movie fan. In Michael Davis' Shoot 'Em Up, Clive Owen plays a carrot-🅠eating drifter and former black ops soldier who takes it upon himself to protect a newborn baby from a bloodthirsty gang on the payroll of a superstar politician. 🐻A lunkheaded actioner that puts a premium on putting on a good show, Shoot 'Em Up raises the bar almost every five minutes, intentionally going for broke when most action movies lack the guts to throw everything they can at the audience.

26. Bad Boys 2

Year: 2003
Director: Michael Bay

Whatcha gonna do when Will Smith and Martin Lawrence come for you? Picking up where the original 1995 hit left off, Michael Bay's Bad Boys 2 reunites Smith and Lawrence to play hotshot Miami cops Mike (Smith) and Marcus (Lawrence)ꦜ. This time, the two are investigating a crime ring ♏who are flooding the streets with a dangerous new and very illegal product. Garish and shameless while still improbably gorgeous, Bad Boys 2 is a balls-to-the-wall spectacle where shootouts and car chases explode like Fourth of July fireworks. (The soundtrack album, too, is a monster jam that begs for permanent rotation.)

25. The Matrix Reloaded

Year: 2003
Directors: Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski

While the sequels to The Matrix spent years being compared unfavorably to their 1999 originator, The Matrix Reloaded surprises꧑ when one considers its existence as meta-commentary by its writers and directors, the Wachowskis. In The Matrix Reloaded, Neo (Keanu Reeves) returns to continue humanity's war against their machine oppressors, only to make a startling discovery about the war's very beginnings. All the while, the rogue Agent Smith (Hu♊go Weaving) reveals himself to be a much bigger problem. Beyond the spectacle of its wire-fu action – a synthesis of John Woo-esque bombast with the elegance of Chinese wuxia – The Matrix Reloaded is genius in its revelation that Neo's "Chosen One" narrative is not, as it turns out, original, nor is it a breakthrough of freedom but preprogrammed fate.

24. Minority Report

Year: 2002
Director: Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg brings life and motion to Philip K. Dick's 1956 novella, with who else but Tom Cruise on the run. Set in the year 2054, a special breed of police officers are dispatched to arrest criminals before they ♓commit a crime. But Tom Cruise's John Anderton, an ace officer of the "Precrime" police department, suddenly finds him🃏self on the other side of the law when he is accused of a crime yet to occur and races to prove his innocence. A complex blockbuster that blends together crime noir, mystery thrillers, and speculative science fiction, Minority Report is one of the rare crowd-pleasers that fully engages the brain instead of turning it off.

23. Wanted

Year: 2009
Director: Timur Bekmambetov

When James McAvoyꦜ bent his gun's bullet, he blew all of us away. In 2009, Mark Millar's comic book miniseries, Wanted, was adapted to the screen in a truly ostentatious and outrageous style courtesy of director Timur Bekmambetov. McAvoy stars as a dead-end desk jockey who resumes his late father's work as an assassin for a top-secret organization, learning the tricks of th🅺e trade from a veteran member (Angelina Jolie) and the Fraternity's enigmatic leader (Morgan Freeman). An R-rated Hollywood tentpole of the highest order, Wanted hits the bullseye.

22. Miami Vice

Year: 2006
Director: Michael Mann

Some twenty years after Michael Mann produced the neon-lit '80 cop hit Miami Vice for NBC, the filmmaker reimagined the show int💃o a far grittier crime thriller for the big screen. Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx co-star as Miami cops whose undercover mission ends up in jeopardy when one of them – Farrell's Crockett – gets romantically involved with a kingpin's lover (Gong Li). While the initial critical response to Miami Vice was mild in 2006, the action movie has grown into a cult classic, a film appreciated for its tragic atmosphere and darker retelling of what used to be a more colorful episodic. When your head is spinning for mojitos, get in a go-fast boat.

21. Versus

Year: 2000
Director: Ryuhei Kitamura

Guns, swords, and zombie hordes galore in the debut film from B-horror master Ryuhei Kitamura. In Versus, escaped convicts, yakuza gang members, and a kidnapped woman all find themselves surrounded by a flesh-hungry undead in a haunted forest that is secretly a gateway to hell itself. A fusion of grindhouse splatter horror with kung fu and gun fu, Versus is a midnight movie delight that launched Kitamura's filmmaking career and reputation as an underground artiste. Not only is it a great 2000s action movie, but it's also one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best horror movies of the time.

20. Speed Racer

Year: 2008
Directors: Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski

After the dust settled on The Matrix, the idea of the Wachowskis adapting an anime might have conjured up something close to Akira or Ghost in the Shell. What nobody expected was their psychedelic masterpiece Speed Racer. Based on the iconic anime known to aud♏iences on both sides of the Pacific, Speed Racer follows a rising star racer (Emile Hirsch) who swerves around challenges thrown his way after rejecting a lucrative corporate contract and remaining loyal to his family-run garage. A coming-of-age Technicolor triumph, Speed Racer zooms past the com𝓰petition.

19. Transformers

Year: 2007
Director: Michael Bay

Linkin Park memes aside, the magic of Michael Bay's 2007 tentpole Transformers is how much craftsmanship is on full blast in what could have been – and was widely believed to be – a numbing nostalgic cash grab. In this live-action reboot of the classic '80s cartoon (itself an elaborate commercial made to sell toys), a high school teenager (played by ex-Disney star Shia LaBeouf) learns his first car is a metamorphic robot who is part of an ancien꧋t war waged by alien machines. Though critics saw a cl🔴unker, Transformers has endured as a winner with aged-like-wine VFX, timeless appeal to adolescent males, and Bay's vision that blurs the line between gaudy commercialism and golden hour escapism.

18. Iron Man

Year: 2008
Director: Jon Favreau

"I am Iron Man." With just four words, Robert Downey Jr. resurrected his career and single-handedly birthed a whole cinematic universe. In Iron Man, RDJ inhabits the tailored suits of billionaire genius and weapons manufacturer Tony Stark, whose betrayal by a close confidant (Jeff Bridges) leaves him for dead in the Middle East. Engineering his way out of a cave, Stark uses his new titanium-alloy suit to seek revenge and reclaim his place in his late father's corporate empire. An exciting summer action flick and simultaneously a ghastly Ayn Raynd-esque power fantasy, Iron Man soars. It is also the film that kickstarted the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Marvel Cinematic timeline, so it's worthy of being considered one of the༺ greats.