There’s a thrill in watching action movies where the bad guys are completely clueless about who they’re messing with. In fact, that storyline is one of the most appealing in the action genre. It creates a delicious sense of anticipation as audiences patiently wait for when the power dynamic shifts.
Few Hollywood movies nail that concept like these five movies. The heroes here look like nothing special at first, and that includes a retired CIA agent who seems determined to drink himself into the ground, and a dad everyone, including his own family, is a little embarrassed about. Give it 20 minutes, though, and every one of them turns into the last person a criminal organization should have crossed.
1. Man on Fire (2004)
The bad guys in this one are a bunch of kidnappers who grab a little girl named Pita (Dakota Fanning) off a Mexico City street. To them, it’s just another routine job, one they’ve done many times over without any serious consequences. What they never planned for was the bodyguard charged with keeping the girl and her family safe. At first, it’s easy to understand why they didn’t bother, given that the bodyguard is John Creasy (Denzel Washington), a burnt-out CIA agent who looked too hungover to be a threat.
Washington plays John like a man already halfway to his own grave. What they didn’t see, however, is the former CIA assassin underneath, the guy who used to do wet work for Uncle Sam. In the end, he doesn’t just rescue Pita; he systematically annihilates everyone who benefited from that kidnapping in one way or the other, from the kidnappers to the corrupt cops involved.
2. Taken (2008)
Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is one of those retired CIA operatives who never really talks about what they did for the government. But it’s not the first thing anyone notices about him. At the start of the movie, he’s just a dad trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace). That dark, buried part of him resurfaces when Kim and her friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy) are kidnapped by an Albanian human trafficker named Marko (Arben Bajraktaraj) within minutes of their arrival in Paris.
When he eventually gets Marko on the phone, what follows is one of the most quoted phone calls in movie history: a calm threat about “a particular set of skills” developed over a long career. Marko’s flat response, a derisory “good luck,” might just be the worst judgment call a bad guy has ever made in a movie. The rest of Taken sees Bryan making good on those threats with the efficiency of someone who’s done this before. The only real difference this time is how personal it is to him. Somehow, that detail makes it worse for Marko and his goons.
3. The Equalizer (2014)
It’s never really a good idea to mess with someone any character played by Denzel Washington considers a friend. The Russian gangsters in The Equalizer didn’t anticipate the fallout that came from beating a teenage friend of Robert McCall half to death. And why would they? If there’s an award for the most boring guy in Boston, McCall’s coworkers at the hardware store would nominate him without hesitation.
The guy alphabetizes his kitchen, dips his tea bag the same way every night at the same diner, and reads paperbacks on his lunch break like he’s got nowhere to be. The assault on his friend forces him to resurrect a part of him he thought he would never have to call on again. And let’s just say that every Russian gangster he encountered from that point on would have been safer at a shootout.
4. Nobody (2021)
Nobody was written by Derek Kolstad, the same guy who wrote John Wick, and his signature is immediately visible from the first scene. A couple of armed robbers break into Hutch Mansell’s (Bob Odenkirk) house and basically walk all over him with his son watching on, embarrassed by how cowardly he reacts to the whole thing. But that’s exactly how he wants things to be. He used to be a government “auditor,” which is code for the guy they sent in to clean up messes nobody wants traced back to them. The kind of work he did left scars, nightmares, and a bunch of dead people.
He walked away from all of it to live a normal life complete with getting married and raising a family. But that “normal’ eventually gives way to chaos when a bus full of Russian thugs messes with him on one of his worst days. He makes light work of the entire gang and lands them in the hospital. One of those thugs turns out to be the brother of a major crime boss who, as expected, seeks revenge. What he doesn’t know is who he’s hunting. It doesn’t take long for him to figure it out, and when he does, Hutch makes him wish he never tried to.
5. Sisu (2022)
It’s World War II and Finland is a mess. The Nazis are retreating and desperate, the kind that makes people do stupid things like the soldiers in Sisu did. During their retreat, they run into a prospector panning for gold. Like pretty much every underestimated hero on this list, he doesn’t look like much. He’s old, tired, and to top it all off, alone. Grabbing his gold seemed like the easiest thing those soldiers would do all week. It’s not. Nobody in the platoon bothers to do a background check on a guy bold enough to do something like that alone, and it turned out to be a costly mistake.
A recovered dog tag spells it out: Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) fought in the Winter War, and Stalin’s own Red Army gave him a nickname that roughly translates to “the immortal.” The film’s Finnish title, Sisu, doesn’t really have a clean English equivalent. It means something like guts plus stubbornness plus sheer spite. By the end, the Nazis chasing him understand exactly what it means without needing a translator.
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