10 Worst Action Thrillers, Ranked (original) (raw)
Christopher Lambert in Highlander II: The Quickening
Image by Jefferson Chacon
Published Feb 11, 2025, 5:38 PM EST
Luc Haasbroek is a writer and videographer from Durban, South Africa. He has been writing professionally about pop culture for eight years. Luc's areas of interest are broad: he's just as passionate about psychology and history as he is about movies and TV. He's especially drawn to the places where these topics overlap.
Luc is also an avid producer of video essays and looks forward to expanding his writing career. When not writing, he can be found hiking, playing Dungeons & Dragons, hanging out with his cats, and doing deep dives on whatever topic happens to have captured his interest that week.
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Action thrillers are popular. Who doesn't love shootouts, explosions, and valiant heroes saving the day? The genre overflows with entries, from the great to the mediocre to the outright abysmal. The worst of them suffer from lifeless action, nonsensical plots, wooden performances, or an overreliance on cheap special effects. They're more likely to leave the viewer bored and frustrated than entertained.
With this in mind, this list looks at some of the very worst action thrillers out there. Some of them fail because they try too hard to emulate successful franchises without understanding what made them work. Others collapse under poor storytelling, bad editing, or laughable dialogue. Whether it's a low-budget misfire or an uninspired sequel, these movies represent some of the lowest points of action cinema.
10 'Samurai Cop' (1991)
Directed by Amir Shervan
Matt Hannon holding a sword in front of trees in Samurai Cop (1991)
Image via Hollywood Royal Pictures
"I'm a cop!"This direct-to-video disasterpiece revolves around Joe Marshall (Mathew Karedas), a supposed samurai-trained police officer who teams up with his partner Frank (Mark Frazer) to take down the ruthless Katana gang. Despite its title, Samurai Cop has little to do with martial arts, and its protagonist's skills are questionable at best. Though meant to be a serious crime saga, the finished product features stilted dialogue, awkward performances (including a memorable villain performance by B-movie legend Robert Z'Dar), and action sequences that lack any semblance of choreography.
Nevertheless, the movie's sheer incompetence is precisely what its fans love about it. It has become a minor cult film for this reason. Still, judged as a proper action thriller, Samurai Cop is pretty woeful, with choppy editing, bizarrely long pauses in conversations, and reaction shots that linger for too long. Interesting bit of trivia: prior to this, star Karedas had worked as a bodyguard for Sylvester Stallone.
Release Date
November 30, 1991
Runtime
96 minutes
Writers
Amir Shervan
Producers
Orlando Corradi
Cast
Mathew Karedas
Joe Marshall
Mark Frazer
Frank Washington
Directed by John Herzfeld
"You want to get out? You come through me!" Speaking of Stallone, he turns in some of his worst work ever in Escape Plan: The Extractors, the third and most unnecessary entry in the franchise. Sly is security expert Ray Breslin, who is forced to infiltrate a heavily guarded prison in Latvia to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend. Unlike its predecessors, which at least attempted some level of creativity with their high-tech prison settings, The Extractors feels cheap and unimaginative, relying on basic shootouts and hand-to-hand combat sequences that lack any real tension.
It's kind of jarring to see stars like Stallone and Dave Bautista in such a shabbily put-together project. The editing is sloppy, with blatantly obvious chroma-keyed explosions and gunshot effects. There are some decent death scenes in the finale, but the rest of the action sequences are pretty flimsy. It makes the movie forgettable. While performing weakly at the box office, The Extractors did make a small profit on home video, proving that at least some fans were (somehow) still on board for this.
8 'Simon Says' (2006)
Directed by William Dear
"I have a game to play!" Simon Says is an odd slasher that tries to blend horror and action but winds up delivering neither. It had potential, given that the usually enjoyable Crispin Glover's presence in a dual role as psychotic twin brothers who hunt a group of teenagers through the woods. Still, while Simon Says aspires to be an intense survival thriller, it's undone by an incoherent script, absurd character decisions, and a performance from Glover that occasionally veers into the ridiculous.
For example, his over-the-top accent makes him difficult to understand at times. More generally, the "teens go camping and get butchered" trope has been done to death, and Simon Says fails to innovate with it. The protagonists are not even likable, and they don't have any real friend dynamic between them. Some of the kills in the film are quite creative, involving tripwires and various pointy objects, but this can't compensate for all the other flaws.
Simon Says
Release Date
September 25, 2007
Runtime
87 minutes
Director
William Dear
7 'Highlander II: The Quickening' (1991)
Directed by Russell Mulcahy
"Most people have a full measure of life, and most people just watch it slowly drip away." One of the most infamous sequels in history, Highlander II: The Quickening is notorious for how badly it botched the lore of the original Highlander. The film practically took a flamethrower to its own mythology, revealing that the immortals are actually exiled aliens from the planet Zeist. This baffling retcon immediately alienated fans and destroyed any of the mystique that made the first film compelling.
This is only one of many problems in the movie, however. It's marred by terrible special effects, disjointed editing, a generally incomprehensible plot (did L. Ron Hubbard write this?), and a lack of any engaging action. Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery return, but their performances feel half-hearted as if they’re aware of how ridiculous the material is. They oscillate between looking bored and chewing the scenery. All told, The Quickening is inconsistent, gory, absurd, and unimaginative.
6 'Somebody Help Me' (2007)
Directed by Chris Stokes
"It's happening again!" This is a TV movie, so it gets a little more of a pass, but it's still so bad it warrants a spot on this list. Somebody Help Me follows a group of friends who rent a cabin for a weekend getaway, only to be stalked by a masked killer. But what could have been a fun, suspenseful slasher instead turns into a tedious, poorly written mess filled with predictable jump scares and wooden performances.
Plus, Somebody Help Me seems hellbent on ticking every single horror cliché in the book, including horny teens, a secluded location, a killer with no real motive, and a suspicious character who is an obvious red herring. The movie quickly grows wearisome with its lazy storytelling, nonsensical character decisions, and an exhausting amount of material recycled from other films. Somebody Help Me was meant to be a star vehicle for R&B artists Marques Houston and Omarion, but it's a dysfunctional one.
Somebody Help Me
Release Date
November 10, 2007
Runtime
100 minutes
Writers
Chris Stokes
5 'Speed 2: Cruise Control' (1997)
Directed by Jan de Bont
Image via 20th Century Studios
"I just bought a condo here, so I hope they can fix it!" Another famously shabby sequel, Speed 2: Cruise Control abandons the breakneck intensity of the first movie, instead placing its protagonist, Annie (Sandra Bullock), on a slow-moving cruise ship. A cruise ship slowly heading for disaster just doesn’t provide the same adrenaline rush, so the flick was doomed from the start. With Keanu Reeves refusing to return, Jason Patric steps in as the co-lead, but his performance lacks the required charisma.
There is simply no tension here, no momentum. The only even vaguely enjoyable part of Speed 2 is Willem Dafoe's villain performance, and even that's pretty cartoony. The film finally serves up some spectacle during the climax, but it's too little, too late. Critics ripped the movie to pieces, and it's since been widely mocked in pop culture, becoming a cautionary tale of how not to make an action thriller.
4 'Toxic' (2008)
Directed by Alan Pao
"That’s the thing about secrets… they never stay buried." Toxic is an attempt at a stylish neo-noir that collapses under its own ambition. It follows a tangled web of characters—including hitmen, strippers, and gangsters—whose lives intersect one night. Despite trying to emulate the pulpy, fast-paced storytelling of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, Toxic is lightweight and incoherent, with poor pacing and uninspired action sequences. One might say it places style over substance, but even its style is underwhelming.
Indeed, this flick is the opposite of adrenaline-fueled, with the main character frequently doing absolutely nothing. Toxic proves that throwing together multiple genres without a strong foundation is a recipe for failure. There are camera tricks aplenty along with a host of other gimmicks, like cameos from Bai Ling and Danny Trejo, but not much actual story. The characters aren't fleshed out, so the audience can't invest in them. The dialogue is riddled with cringe-worthy attempts at wit, and the performances are largely forgettable.
Toxic
Release Date
March 1, 2008
3 'Doom: Annihilation' (2019)
Directed by Tony Giglio
"Die! Die! Die!" The Doom games are epic, but none of the film adaptations have done them justice. The original Doom movie from 2005 was no masterpiece, but compared to Doom: Annihilation, it looks like The Last of Us. This direct-to-video embarrassment is another attempt at bringing the legendary first-person shooter to life. The plot is as generic as it gets—a group of space marines lands on a Martian moon and accidentally unleashes hellspawn—and the film does nothing creative with the premise.
Annihilation sticks closely to Doom lore but lacks personality. The 2005 film had its problems, but there was at least some fun in watching the Rock double-tapping demons, and the POV shooting sequence was fan service done right. By contrast, there's nothing memorable about Annihilation. The special effects are also shockingly bad for a 2019 release, with monsters looking almost like PlayStation 2-era CGI creations.
2 'Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever' (2002)
Directed by Wych Kaosayananda
Lucy Liu as Sever in Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
"You can’t fight what you can’t see." Few action thrillers have achieved the level of critical panning that Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever did upon its release. This train wreck, starring Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu as dueling secret agents, is infamous for being one of the most hollow and nonsensical spy thrillers ever made. The plot revolves around a nano-technology weapon, but the convoluted script and lifeless performances make it nearly impossible to care.
Where to begin? The story is riddled with crater-sized holes, the violence is mindless, and the talents of the stars are completely wasted. Worse still, the movie tries to take itself seriously, draining it of any so-bad-it's-good charm. With no compelling characters, no engaging story, and no memorable action, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is a masterclass in how to make an action movie boring. Not for nothing, it's currently the worst-reviewed movie in Rotten Tomatoes' history.
1 'Against the Dark' (2009)
Directed by Richard Crudo
"This is my war." Claiming the top spot on this list is Against the Dark, which represents perhaps the very bottom of the toxic cinematic barrel that is the filmography of Steven Seagal. Here, he plays Tao, the leader of a group of hunters tasked with eliminating bloodthirsty mutants in a desolate, post-apocalyptic world. However, Seagal isn't even the main character; the promotion materials are highly deceptive. He barely speaks throughout the film and, when he does, it's usually in a slow mumble.
This movie is the poster child for heavy-handed exposition, info-dumping on the audience at every turn. The narrative is sluggish and poorly shot, the monster design is confusing, stuck halfway between vampires and zombies, and the pop soundtrack is obnoxious. The film's dreary, washed-out visuals only add to its unbearable dullness. In the end, Against the Dark is not just a terrible action-thriller—it’s an absolute chore to sit through. Even by Seagal's dubious standards, it's a major dud.
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