10 Most Influential Action Movies Ever Made
3. The Matrix
At the turn of the 21st Century, The Matrix was the single most influential movie in Hollywood. Which was somewhat ironic, as the Wachowski's genre-defying classic took plenty of its own inspirations from sci-fi, anime, cyberpunk, Hong Kong action cinema, religion, philosophy and mythology to create what was at the time a truly unique spectacle.
X-Men, Charlie's Angels, Daredevil and countless others would incorporate 'wire-fu' into their action sequences, Equilibrium was about as brazen an imitation as you could make without getting sued, Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch and Wanted borrowed liberally from the Wachowski's visual playbook while Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch and Christopher Nolan's Inception bore more than a couple of superficial similarities.
In the space of just a few years, it became easy to forget just how important The Matrix was in the action genre as all of its once-groundbreaking elements became all-too-familiar after being run into the ground. Bullet-time may have quickly descended into one of the most parodied moments in cinema, but the aesthetics of the movie's action sequences dominated the genre for years.