10 Movies That Prove The 90's Were The Golden Age Of Action

2. The Matrix

Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator 2
Warner Bros.

To put it mildly, The Matrix was an absolute game-changer. A shot in the arm for a genre that was in real danger of stagnating towards the end of the 20th Century, the Wachowski's melting pot of influences and styles spawned a thousand inferior imitations.

In fact, The Matrix was so influential that for years you couldn't go within a hundred feet of a cinema without bumping into a movie that featured leather-clad heroes, dystopian futures and slow-motion wire-fighting. It wasn't even limited to the action genre either, with the movie's techniques pillaged for use in everything from Scary Movie to Shrek.

Boundary-pushing, ambitious and endlessly imaginative, the movie was one of the most influential of the decade regardless of genre, and almost twenty years later remains an endlessly-rewatchable high-octane classic, despite two inferior sequels and the abundance of thinly-veiled knock-offs that followed in its wake.

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