My 90s action movie watchlist for August
Sony is about to wipe 551 StudioCanal movies and shows from PlayStation libraries in Europe and the UK on September 1, citing an expired licensing deal. No refunds, nothing.
Reading that got me thinking about the movies that shaped how I saw the silver screen growing up.
I was that kid glued to Stallone, Arnold and Van Damme. Who wasn't?
Honestly, the last few US releases on Netflix, HBO and Disney+ haven't done much for me either. That's probably why I barely watched anything the past few months and drifted toward cringy Chinese short dramas instead, which I mostly use as an excuse to keep learning Mandarin.
Now that August is all TWO Docs, all the time, I want something no-brainer to unwind with after a long day of work. A beer or a glass of wine, and some good old-fashioned popcorn action.
The list
Terminator 2. The Rock. Face/Off. Bad Boys, still love the first one of that franchise. Hard Target. Rush Hour. Taxi. Die Hard. Batman, the one with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. And a dozen more I'll probably remember once I start.
Why the 90s hit different for me
I still think the 90s and early 2000s are one of the best eras in movie history. Practical stunts. Actors who could throw a real punch and sell it. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Nicolas Cage, Keanu Reeves, Denzel Washington.
CGI existed but hadn't taken over yet, so most of what you saw on screen happened in front of a camera, for real. You can feel the weight of a car crash when it's a real car crashing.
It's also the last stretch of big American cinema before superheroes ran everything. No shared universes, no complicated fifteen-movie arcs to keep up with.
Just one story, one hero, in and out in two hours. For a lot of us who grew up in that window, before Avengers and the whole superhero machine took over, these movies carry more sentiment than almost anything that came after.
I'm not going to walk through the plots or explain why they're good. Everyone already knows.
What I want to do instead is dig into why a few of these mean something to me personally, since I'm about to rewatch most of them for the first time in almost three decades.
The Rock
I remember the week this one hit theaters. I was still living in my hometown in Belgium, and there was a tiny movie theater that barely had anyone show up for anything. Sometimes my friend and I would just run around the place between showings. It was that empty.
I was 12 or 13, technically too young to watch The Rock, but the people who owned the theater were friends of my parents, and nobody was checking IDs on a random Wednesday afternoon.
Bad Boys
Will Smith was iconic to me, but not because of Bad Boys first. I grew up on every single episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. That show hit me early and hit me hard. So watching Will at his peak in Bad Boys felt like a natural next step.
Older buddy cop movies like Beverly Hills Cop were great too, but the swagger and the one-liners in Bad Boys matched Will's energy from Fresh Prince perfectly. It felt like watching the same guy, just older and with a bigger gun.
Hard Target
Van Damme, our own Belgian national treasure, was exactly the kind of hardcore action star a kid like me needed. Maybe he never reached the size of Stallone or Arnold, but he carved out his own lane in martial arts cinema.
Hard Target was pure brainless fun. The plot, rich people hunting someone for sport, wasn't something you saw a lot of in 90s action movies. That alone made it stick with me.
Rush Hour
Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker together was golden. As a teenager, there weren't many duo action comedies that mixed martial arts with a mainstream, PG-13 package like this one.
I added Rush Hour to the list partly because I didn't get half the jokes back then, especially the cultural and interracial ones that were sharp but never mean. Watching it again a few years later, I understood how unique that mix really was, and I want to see how it lands with more context now.
Die Hard
Not a 90s movie; it came out in 1988, but it stays top tier regardless. What made it stand out for me wasn't the shootouts; it was that Bruce Willis's character got beaten up. Repeatedly. He barely makes it out alive.
Compare that to Arnold or Stallone movies from the same era, where explosions go off nonstop, and nobody ever seems to bleed. Die Hard hit different because it let its hero look human.
It was also the first movie I ever saw with Bruce Willis, and I've followed his career ever since. I felt a real gut punch when one of my earliest action heroes was diagnosed with aphasia in March 2022.
Batman
Almost forgot this one. Michael Keaton as Batman, Jack Nicholson as the Joker, this was my first real superhero movie. Before Marvel turned superheroes into a monthly subscription, this was just one dark, weird, atmospheric film that stood completely on its own.
Final word
There are way too many good ones to list here, and this whole era, the practical stunts, the occasionally over-the-top acting, the almost total absence of CGI, deserves way more appreciation than it gets.
Knowing how much physical effort went into every gunfight and stunt back then, compared to the green screen work today, still blows my mind.
Maybe that's the real reason I keep coming back to these movies. Not nostalgia exactly, more like proof that some stories don't need a franchise around them to matter. Just one good two-hour film, a beer, and a Wednesday afternoon with nowhere else to be.