10 Underrated Action Movies That Didn't Deserve To Bomb At The Box Office

Last Action Hero gets WAY too much hate...

Last Action Hero Arnold Schwarzenegger
Columbia Pictures

The action genre is always in a constant battle with itself to raise the stakes and deliver bigger and better set-pieces than fans have ever seen before, which is one of the major reasons why it will always remain one of cinema's most popular genres.

Everywhere you look from your local bargain bin to the annual parade of $200m blockbusters are going to feature fist-fights, car chases, shootouts and no shortage of explosions, and the sheer volume of new entries in the genre each year means that more than a few of them are inevitably going to fail.

It isn't just bad movies that bomb at the box office, and plenty of all-time classics all the way from It's a Wonderful Life to The Shawshank Redemption failed to find much of an audience during their time in theaters, only to secure cinematic immortality in the years since.

Action in particular is a genre full of cult classics, hidden gems and little-seen favorites, and in some cases it's taken a long time for them to finally get the respect and adulation they deserved the first time around.

10. Ninja Assassin

Last Action Hero Arnold Schwarzenegger
Warner Brothers

Whether you'd enjoy Ninja Assassin or not can most likely be determined by how you feel about the title, which pretty much hits the nail on the head in terms of the entire plot of the movie.

Sure, the cinematography is so dark that sometimes you can barely see what the hell is going on, and the characters are so thin that you could cut through them with a butter knife never mind a samurai sword, but nobody watches a movie called Ninja Assassin expecting much in the way of substance or depth.

Wachowski protege and V for Vendetta director James McTeigue fully embraces the absurd levels of graphic violence and bloodletting that you'd expect from an R-rated, neo-noir martial arts flick, and while the acting performances and dialogue are admittedly and very frequently terrible, the wall-to-wall mayhem has seen it become a firm favorite among genre fans in the decade since it barely scraped past the $60m mark at the box office.

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