21 Movies Like ‘John Wick’ to Watch After Chapter 4

• Directed by: Doug Liman
• Starring: Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper, Brian Cox, Clive Owen, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
• Written by: William Blake Herron, Tony Gilroy, David Self, Robert Ludlum
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 84%

The movie that started an entire action franchise, The Bourne Identity, is loosely based on the novel of the same name by Robert Ludlum. Matt Damon stars as an amnesiac CIA assassin who is rescued from the ocean off the coast of France following a botched job aboard a yacht. As he attempts to piece together the puzzle that is his life, Bourne meets a woman named Marie who helps him in his mission, albeit reluctantly at first. Forced to outrun assassins who are trying to kill him, Bourne uses his training and skills to fight back.

• Directed by: Paul Greengrass
• Starring: Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Joan Allen, Brian Cox, Karl Urban, Julia Stiles
• Written by: Tony Gilroy, Robert Ludlum
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 82%

The sequel to The Bourne Identity finds Bourne in hiding in India when he is framed for the murder of CIA agents in Berlin. As he reenters a world he thought he escaped, Bourne attempts to figure out the true culprit behind the murders as well as survive and outrun his past.

• Directed by: Paul Greengrass
• Starring: Matt Damon, Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, David Strahairn
• Written by: Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, George Nolfi
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 92%

Possessing some of, if not the best, action of the entire Bourne franchise, the conclusion to the trilogy sees Bourne return to where it all began for him: New York City. Picking up immediately at the end of Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum continues Bourne’s journey of self-discovery, taking him from Russia to Great Britain, Spain, Morocco, and finally back home to the United States.

As he works to find out who is at the center of this whole conspiracy, he aims to expose those behind it, ensuring it does not happen again.

• Directed by: Antoine Fuqua
• Starring: Denzel Washington, Chloë Grace Moretz, Martin Csokas, David Harbour, Bill Pullman
• Written by: Richard Wenk
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 60%

Speaking of ex-government assassins who just want to be left alone, The Equalizer stars Denzel Washington as Robert McCall, a former DIA operative living a quiet life in Boston. When he befriends a young girl who has been forced into prostitution by the Russian mob, he subsequently uses his skills to come out of retirement to save her.

• Directed by: Pierre Morel
• Starring: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen
• Written by: Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 59%

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you, but if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you."

It’s the speech that launched a thousand memes, Taken follows an ex-CIA assassin (I’m sensing a theme here) as he sets out to rescue his daughter from a group that intends to sell her into sexual slavery.

• Directed by: Christopher McQuarrie
• Starring: Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Henry Cavill, Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin, Angela Bassett
• Written by: Christopher McQuarrie
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 97%

One of the best action movies of the last decade, Mission Impossible: Fallout, sees super spy Ethan Hunt and his team race to prevent a nuclear explosion by terrorists. Going up against his toughest adversary yet, Hunt will stop at nothing to ensure that lives are saved, and the impossible is made, well, possible.

• Directed by: Gareth Evans
• Starring: Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Yayan Ruhian
• Written by: Gareth Evans
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 87%

All style and no filler, The Raid is pure action from start to finish and, along with its sequel, is hailed as one of the best action movies in recent years. Set in Indonesia, it follows an elite team of police officers who are set on taking down a ruthless drug lord and his crime syndicate. They are forced to infiltrate a high-rise building and battle floor by floor to root out the criminals and save the day.

• Directed by: David Leitch
• Starring: Brad Pitt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, Hiroyuki Sanada, Joey King, Andrew Koji
• Written by: Zak Olkewicz
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 54%

A single train that has a variety of passengers aboard who all have two things in common: They’re all after one briefcase, and they’re all assassins. Bullet Train features an ensemble cast that counts multiple Oscar winners/nominees among them and is packed full of action, humor, and a surprising amount of heart.

• Directed by: Tony Scott
• Starring: Denzel Washington, Dakota Fanning, Christopher Walken
• Written by: Brian Helgeland
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 38%

A lot of the movies on the list begin with “ex-government spy comes out of retirement to…”, but hey, it’s a formula that works.

In Man on Fire, Denzel Washington’s John Creasy works as a bodyguard for a 9-year-old girl named Lupita, and as they begin to warm up to one another, she is kidnapped. Forced to battle corrupt cops and criminals, Creasy will stop at nothing to make sure that Lupita is returned home safely.

• Directed by: Sam Hargrave
• Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Rudhraksh Jaiswal, Randeep Hooda
• Written by: Joe Russo
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 67%

If the John Wick movies have taught us anything, it’s that no one knows action movies quite like the guys who make them best: stuntmen. Extraction, starring Chris Hemsworth, is directed by Sam Hargrave, who has spent most of his career working as a stunt coordinator, and his first attempt at sitting in the director’s chair is a solid one.

Hemsworth plays an ex-Australian Special Forces soldier turned mercenary who accepts a job to rescue the son of an Indian crime lord. The action is an absolute blast, and you can certainly tell that Hargrave and Hemsworth put everything they had into this one.

• Directed by: David Leitch
• Starring: Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman, Eddie Marsan
• Written by: Kurt Johnstad
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 79%

Another great action movie from the mind of David Leitch, Atomic Blonde stars Charlize Theron as British intelligence’s best spy in the waning days of the Cold War. Theron’s character Lorraine Broughton is sent to Berlin on a mission to combat enemy spies but quickly becomes entangled in a web of betrayal, secrets, and lies.

While the plot is fairly standard action fair, the fight scenes, including an extraordinary one-shot sequence featuring a fight in a stairwell, can’t be beaten.

• Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
• Starring: Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox
• Written by: Quentin Tarantino
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 85%

Few things make for better watches than a Quentin Tarantino movie, and Kill Bill Vol. 1 is certainly at the top of any watchlist when it comes to the director. Starring Uma Thurman as The Bride, who wakes from a coma years after she was nearly killed on her wedding day by her ex-lover, the eponymous Bill. She soon embarks on a stylish quest for revenge, vowing to kill all those responsible for the attempt on her life and the death of her unborn child.

• Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
• Starring: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen
• Written by: Quentin Tarantino
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 84%

Where would Kill Bill be without Vol.2? Tarantino has said that he’s always envisioned the movies as one larger film rather than two distinct entries, so it only makes sense to watch both titles when embarking on your binge.

Picking up where the first movie left off, The Bride is in Mexico attempting to track down Bill, and using the skills she’s learned from her career as an assassin, she sets out to do exactly what she wants to do: Kill Bill. 

• Directed by: Luc Besson
• Starring: Jean Reno, Gary Oldman, Natalie Portman
• Written by: Luc Besson
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 74%

If you’re going to have a discussion about the best movies that feature disgruntled hitmen/assassins, then Léon: The Professional has to be at the top of your list. Starring Jean Reno as Léon, a mob hitman living in New York City who finds himself teaming up with Mathilda, the girl who lives down the hall and is the daughter of an abusive father. When her family is killed by a corrupt DEA agent, he becomes a reluctant guardian to her, as she begins to pick up the tools of the trade from him.

Mathilda is played by Natalie Portman in her first film role, Léon: The Professional has stellar action and real heart and is a 90s classic that should be seen by everyone.

• Directed by: Ilya Naishuller
• Starring: Bob Odenkirk, Connie Nielsen, Christopher Lloyd, RZA
• Written by: Derek Kolstad
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 84%

A movie that saw Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk truly step outside his comfort zone, Nobody sees Odenkirk’s character Hutch forced to return to an old life of violence following a robbery at his home. After his refusal to resort to violence leads to a further strain on his relationship with his son and wife, Hutch embarks on a crusade to set things right at any cost.

• Directed by: Gavin O’Connor
• Starring: Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal
• Written by: Bill Dubuque
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 52%

Another underrated movie about a seemingly normal guy with some dark secrets, The Accountant is a story about a math savant and small-town CPA, Christian Wolff, who moonlights as an accountant for criminal organizations. When a clerk for one of his clients discovers some issues with their books, Wolff finds himself at the center of a conspiracy that he never saw coming.

• Directed by: Sylvester Stallone
• Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Written by: Sylvester Stallone, David Callaham
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 42%

The Expendables franchise is essentially the Avengers of action movies, starring all of the best action stars of past and present who team up to do what they do best: kick ass.

In the first entry of the series, Sylvester Stallone and his team are betrayed when on a routine mission and must fight to ensure their survival. It’s not the best series of movies, but they’re worth a watch just so you can see Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and numerous other legends all share the screen together.

• Directed by: Christopher McQuarrie
• Starring: Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike, Robert Duvall, Richard Jenkins
• Written by: Christopher McQuarrie
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 63%

A franchise that was recently rebooted by Amazon, the first adaptation of the Jack Reacher book series was the 2012 version starring Tom Cruise. While not the most faithful adaptation of the character, the film itself is a solid action movie that is guaranteed to entertain. Reacher is an ex-Army investigator who gets pulled into a case in a small town where multiple people have been killed in a seemingly random incident.

• Directed by: Antoine Fuqua
• Starring: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Rick Yune
• Written by: Creighton Rothenberger, Katrin Benedikt
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 50%

It’s supposed to be one of the most secure places in the world, but what would happen if the White House was the center of a terrorist attack? In Olympus Has Fallen, Gerard Butler plays a Secret Service agent who is the last man standing in the White House after a group of terrorists takes control of the building and the President.

• Directed by: Roland Emmerich
• Starring: Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Maggie Gyllenhall, Jason Clarke, James Woods
• Written by: James Vanderbilt
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 51%

It’s supposed to be one of the most secure places in the world, but what would happen if the White House was the center of a terrorist attack?

Wait, that premise sounds familiar. Yes, White House Down was the second of two movies released in 2013 that dealt with the idea of the President’s house being taken over by terrorists. Instead of Gerard Butler, this time Channing Tatum is the one who it falls on to save not just the President but also his daughter, who has been trapped inside. 

A movie that needs little to no introduction, Die Hard is an action classic. Bruce Willis is John McClane, an NYPD detective who is trapped in a Los Angeles skyscraper when it’s the center of a heist. As the criminals take hostages and the police outside prove themselves to be incapable of stopping them, it’s up to McClane to prevent more bloodshed.

"Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.”