9. Universal Soldiers
Like Robocop, nothing says ultra-cool quite like regeneration after death, and the Universal Soldiers programme was so bad-ass it openly challenged the grim reaper, laughing in his boney face at the prospect of death as a final solution and rising again to commit all sorts of naughty behaviour. The Universal Soldiers are as specialist as soldiers come, primed for duty, devoid of normal human emotion and conscience and as ripped as 1990s action movie stars ever got. The sequels may not have been great, but the one thing they got right was the bad-ass swagger of the original, which was that film's strongest selling point. Creating a situation in which high-kicking JCVD wasn't the immediately favourite in combat has got to have taken some balls, and it is the over-riding attitude of the film that makes it a cult classic, despite some firey critical hatred. It's suitably ludicrous, but that doesn't make it any less bad-ass. And the baddest of the bunch? Dolph "Suspiciously Good American Accent" Lundgren. The character who is the ultimate realisation of evil, the man who put the bad in bad-ass, and who keeps some awful trophies to celebrate his work. Ear jewelry anyone? http://youtu.be/OYQVr1PamlY