10 Awesome Action Movies That Didn't Need A Sequel, Remake Or Reboot
Some movies are much better off if we only have to see them once.
Action movies are usually among the easiest for Hollywood to turn in to franchises, because bare-bones concepts and popular central characters are often relatively simple to adapt for new stories. However, the law of diminishing returns also hits the genre harder than most, with countless classic originals being tainted by their association with a string of inferior follow-ups.
Die Hard, Terminator, Predator, Rambo and The Matrix are just some of the franchises that fell victim to acute sequelitits, but on the other side of the coin the John Wick, Mission: Impossible and Fast and Furious brands seem to keep going from strength to strength.
Sometimes, there are even those rare all-time great action movies that are allowed to stand on their own, and have thus far remained untouched by Hollywood's desire to re-purpose almost everything with any degree of popularity or name recognition.
That doesn't mean they haven't tried already, and with the news that we're getting a female-driven reboot of Cliffhanger, a True Lies spinoff for Disney Plus and an updated version of Face/Off from the writer of The Cloverfield Paradox, these movies may yet find themselves becoming regurgitated in some form on a screen near you.
10. The Night Comes For Us
The Raid and its sequel opened many people's eyes to the greatness of Indonesian action cinema, so it comes as no surprise that The Night Comes For Us turned out as good as it did given that it involved much of the talent that had been a part of Gareth Evans' two modern classics.
Studio XYZ Films and stars Joe Taslim, Iko Uwais, Julie Estelle and Zack Lee were all reunited under director and nemesis of auto-correct Timo Tjahjanto, who had already demonstrated his chops for expertly-choreographed violence in Uwais' Headshot two years previously.
A relentless and bone-crunching action thriller, The Night Comes For Us ended on a deliberately ambiguous note with Taslim's Ito driving headfirst into the oncoming gunfire of the Triads. While a sequel could have picked up immediately from there, similar to how The Raid 2 played out, there are no plans to turn the movie into a franchise despite Tjahjanto admitting that he's got plenty of ideas for a follow-up.