It is an age old question, What is the greatest Action Movie of all time? Many people will have many different reasons for choosing many different films, but here at MovieMuse we want to settle the debate once and for all. So over on our World Cup of Movies Facebook group we are running a head to head knockout competition that pits the 128 best action films against one another in a fight to the metaphorical death.

To identify our shortlist without cries of bias and a stewards enquiry, we initially used the top 100 action films as listed over on IMDB according to user ratings. To ensure we don’t include films that are too obscure and therefore won’t have been seen by the voters, these films are the top rated 100 films that have at least 100,000 ratings supplied. We have also decided that each film series should have no more than two films included (this is for a distinct series and not a whole franchise, so it would be only two James Bond films starring Daniel Craig that could be included, not just two Bond films overall).  Where more than two films in a series are in the IMDB top 100, a vote would determine confirm which are entered.

 

 

We feel this is a really great starting point. But we also wanted to get get some input rom you, the voters, to let us know what other films should have made the list. So we saved 28 spaces for those gems that didn’t make the IMDB list. Over on Facebook we received more than 60 nominations and these were put to the public vote. Though it was only after the vote closed that we noticed a number of absentees that you may have expected to see, such as Top Gun, Daylight, Twister, Platoon, Black Hawk Down and Assault on Precinct 13.

 

 

The voting was pretty brutal in places, with films like Death Wish II getting completely annihilated with only 2% of the vote against Total Recall and the recent Chris Hemsworth film Extraction suffering a similar fate against Robocop. But the biggest losers were the 4th and 8th Fast and Furious films which didn’t get a single vote in their face off against the other films in the series.

 

The biggest winners were probably expected, but their margin of victory may not have been. It will be interesting to see how they fare in the first round proper. But their were a number of big  name casualties. eXistenZ, Rush and Snowpiercer where the losers with the highest percentage of votes, but we also lost Arnie’s  Commando, Steve McQueen’s classic Bullitt, Mad Max 2, Broken Arrow and Sly’s mountaineering thriller Cliffhanger.

We also lost a few foreign language classics like Ong Bak and The Villainess and even blockbusters like Avengers Assemble and Return of the Jedi (due to the two film maximum for any film series).

 

Now the full 128 film list is complete, the first round draw will take place on Saturday 25th July at 8.30pm and you can watch it live on Facebook. The draw will contain 64 match-ups with no seeding, so if Aliens comes us against The Matrix in round one then one of them is going to fail at the first hurdle! Three battles will then be posted per day and the individual match-ups will be by way of a Facebook poll and the one with the highest votes after 24 hours moving on to the second round.

 

 

So head over to the World Cup of Movies facebook group and may the best film win!