These Women Don't Need Saving | A Countdown of Action Cinema's Deadliest Women!

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:13]till the end of time.

[00:00:17]What's up, vault dwellers? Dan here. And you know what? There's a specific feeling I want to talk about today. It's the feeling of watching a woman on screen and thinking nobody is coming to help her and she already knows that and she does not care even a little bit.

[00:00:38]Before Hollywood figured out this was even possible, the girls with guns genre was already out there doing its work in grindhouse theaters in Hong Kong back alleys.

[00:00:53]Today, I'm counting down 10 films where the women on screen are so capable and so committed and just so utterly in charge of their own story that by the end, you can't imagine it working out any other way. All right, we're going from 1974 all the way to 2020. Let's get into it.

[00:01:16]GOD.

[00:01:19]HUH?

[00:01:59]All right, we're starting with a pretty new one from 2020, the old guard. And here's the setup. You have Charlie Theren, who plays a woman named Andy, and she's been fighting in actual combat for roughly 3,000 years.

[00:02:18]She has seen everything. She has done and won everything.

[00:02:33]And she is tired in a way that no human being has ever been tired. And you know what? She picks up that gun anyways.

[00:02:45]That's what gets me about this film.

[00:02:47]It's not the immortality or the mythology or the franchise setup. It's the exhaustion. Andy doesn't fight because it's exciting. She fights because it's what she has to do. Because stopping means something she can't let herself even think about.

[00:03:08]Faren plays this with a weight behind her eyes that makes like every single action sequence hit so much harder.

[00:03:24]Most action films, they give you heroes who want to be there. Andy, I mean, she'd rather be anywhere else, but here she is anyways. and she's been there for 3,000 years and she's got to be standing when everyone else around her is gone.

[00:03:39]That's not a superhero. That's something way more tragic.

[00:03:58]>> Play dead.

[00:04:15]I found Dreaming the Reality, which is a movie from 1991, on a handwritten VHS tape at a yard sale.

[00:04:30]The label just said Moon Lee Girls Fight and like that was all the information I needed to give it a try.

[00:04:41]>> And here's what I learned about Moon Lee that I cannot fully explain to someone who hasn't seen her work. She looks like she should be in a completely different kind of movie. She's smallframed and she's got this bright like open face and then she just hits someone and the entire frame shakes from it.

[00:05:08]There is a total disconnect between what your brain expects from looking at her and what actually happens. And that disconnect is one of the great pleasures in ALL ACTION CINEMA.

[00:05:26]AND THEN THERE'S HER co-star who plays the villain, right? And she fights with this pharaoh like absolutely joyful ferocity that you just cannot fake and you can't manufacture.

[00:05:47]These two women tear through this film like they have a personal score to settle with the laws of physics. The plot, it doesn't even matter. What matters, it's them. They are the whole reason this tape existed and the whole reason I wore it out.

[00:06:26]What LA fem Nikita does that almost nothing else does is make you watch a woman become dangerous in real time.

[00:06:42]You get to see where she starts all strung out, violent in just the wrong ways, completely out of options.

[00:06:53]And then you watch the process, the stripping down, the building back up, and then every single stage of it. The restaurant scene is the moment the whole film is pointing at. She goes into that bathroom as one version of herself and she comes out as something else entirely.

[00:07:23]She didn't choose it and she didn't want it, but she does it anyways with a precision that is almost worse than anger.

[00:07:33]That's what makes Anne's performance just unforgettable. It's not about power. It's about competence that arrived at a terrible cost. Every film in the last 35 years that has a woman being trained into a weapon, they owe this one a debt that will probably never fully be repaid. None of them have the nerve to show you what the training actually takes away.

[00:08:04]FIRE.

[00:08:20]I was born in 1974. Foxy Brown also came out in 1974. So, we're kind of related now. Before this genre had a genre, Pam Greer was already doing it.

[00:08:32]>> Where? Baby, I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT.

[00:08:37]>> NOW, I only got so much control.

[00:08:39]>> The thing that separates her from everything else in action cinema up to 1974 is that she is never waiting for permission.

[00:08:52]She doesn't look around to check if someone else is going to handle it. She figures out what needs doing and she does it with a fury that is just completely her own and completely controlled.

[00:09:09]>> This film, I mean, yeah, it's got rough edges. It was made fast and cheap, and some of that does show, but really none of it matters because when Greer is on screen, those rough edges completely disappear.

[00:09:23]>> YOU going to get me?

[00:09:32]>> She has a kind of like physical authority that you either have or you don't. And she has it more than like almost anyone else I've ever seen in this genre. The revenge sequence at the end is one of the most satisfying moments in exploitation cinema, and it's entirely because of how she carries herself walking into it. Nobody was supposed to take this film seriously, but she made them anyways.

[00:10:26]All right, let's talk about in the line of duty from 1989. There is something very specific I need you to understand about Cynthia Khan in this film.

[00:10:36]He's trying to kill, >> which is that she's going up against one of the most physically terrifying male action stars who's probably like ever lived. And does she blink? Nah, not even once.

[00:10:57]The action film is just relentless in a way that is almost like exhausting to watch.

[00:11:11]And I mean that like as total praise, right? The sequences, they they just don't let up. They don't give you a chance to breathe.

[00:11:26]>> And at the center of all of it is a woman who takes hits that would just end most action heroes. And she gets back up with this expression of someone who is just mildly annoyed that this is taking a bit too long.

[00:11:45]>> That face, it's everything. It's not invulnerability. I mean, she's clearly getting hurt, right? It's the refusal to let that be the thing that decides the outcome. That gap between what the hits cost her, what she does next is where the whole film lives.

[00:12:07]I have watched this climax an embarrassing number of times and that earns every single one of them.

[00:12:35]The Long Kiss Good Night, which came out in 1996, is like one of the greatest unagnowledged action films of the whole '90s. And if you haven't seen this, you need to do that.

[00:12:52]What this movie does so damn well is it gives you two completely different women inside the same person and then they make you watch one of them slowly take the other one over.

[00:13:11]Gina Davis plays a suburban school teacher who starts having like these memories that don't belong to her. And as those memories come back, something like harder and colder and much more capable starts coming with them.

[00:13:32]>> The kitchen knife scene is the moment that the whole film just turns on. Her body knows something that her brain hasn't caught up to yet. She's doing things with that knife that her conscious self just can't explain.

[00:13:47]And the look on her face like this mixture of confusion and then dawning recognition is one of the best pieces of acting in any action film in that decade.

[00:14:04]The woman who is waking up underneath the housewife is terrifying and she is so so good at what she does. The film trust me completely and so should you.

[00:14:23]>> Die screw, [ __ ] >> So, speaking of trust, I trust that I probably didn't get every movie that you think should be on this list. Am I right? Well, here's what you do. Go to the comment section and you tell me what you want to see on a part two. Pretty simple, right? Let's get back to the show.

[00:14:59]IRON ANGELS FROM 1987 WAS A film that was made from almost no money and filmed in locations that were actively dangerous.

[00:15:14]And this was directed by a woman. And at this time that was like completely unheard of for this genre. And this thing hits so much harder than films with a 100 times the budget because the people making it, they were completely committed to delivering on one specific promise. These women are going to be incredible.

[00:15:39]Moon Lee, she's the star again in this film. And I just still can't get over seeing her move just so incredibly fast.

[00:15:47]And she hits with this kind of like total physical commitment that makes you wse on behalf of the people on the receiving end.

[00:16:01]I mean, she is never struggling despite her size. She just keeps on fighting.

[00:16:07]The film treats her ability as a given and asks you to keep up.

[00:16:20]The whole aesthetic of this film, the hair, the chaos, the practical explosions going off like 5 ft from people who are absolutely not standing far enough back. Teresa Woo, the director, she obviously wanted to prove something and she totally proved it.

[00:16:37]Every frame said so.

[00:17:09]Number three is Charlie's Theren in Ato atomic blonde from 2017.

[00:17:24]And I'm not going to describe to you the super famous stairwell sequence in any detail because if you haven't seen it, I want you to come to it the way I did, like with no preparation and no warning.

[00:17:45]What I will say though is that this is one of the most honest portrayals of what a fight actually costs the body that I've ever seen in an action film.

[00:17:55]She gets hurt. I mean, she gets hurt like badly.

[00:18:07]And she uses furniture, walls, her weight, like every resource she has and just keeps going.

[00:18:21]And that's the thing Atomic Blonde understands that a lot of action films don't. The badassness isn't in being immune to damage. It's in taking the damage and making the decision over and over again to just take one more step.

[00:18:37]Charlie Theren plays Lraine as someone who has made that decision so many times that's become like the only decision she knows how to make. By the end of this film, I felt like I had been in the fight with her. I mean, my shoulders hurt and I needed a drink. That's the best compliment I can give an action sequence. It made me feel the weight of it from across the couch. She earns every single frame of this film.

[00:19:35]Terminator 2: Judgement Day, back from good old 1991, has the greatest character transformation in action cinema history. And it's not a special effect.

[00:19:46]>> Shut up. Shut up. It's all your fault, [ __ ] It's all your fault.

[00:19:52]>> It is a woman doing pull-ups in a psychiatric hospital in the middle of the night with an expression on her face that tells you she's already left the building. Her body, it might still be in the cell, but she is somewhere else entirely, and she is at war.

[00:20:17]Sarah Connor in this film is not the same person from the first film. Like, not even close. That character is totally gone. What replaced her is someone who has spent like years being told she's crazy for knowing the truth.

[00:20:31]And she has used every single one of those years to prepare for what's coming.

[00:20:40]She is lean. She's focused and operating at a frequency that people around her, they can't hear. And when she finally moves the escape sequence, it isn't desperate. It's methodical.

[00:20:57]>> She's been playing in it for months, and you can feel every one of those months and how she moves through those hallways. She is the most dangerous person in every room she enters.

[00:21:12]And the film never lets you forget that.

[00:21:14]And neither does she.

[00:21:40]When Aliens came out in 1986, I was like 12 years old, and I hadn't actually seen the movie Alien yet. I went into this as a pre-teen and completely unprepared for what I was about to watch. And this movie just floored me. It And it wasn't the aliens that got me. It was Ripley.

[00:22:11]Specifically, it's the moments when she decides to go back in. I mean, she survived the aliens. She's out and she has like every reason in the world to stay out, but yet she looks at the situation, she does the math and she coast back in. She just loads up, walks down that corridor, and goes back in.

[00:22:40]I remember sitting on the floor and feeling like something click into place that I didn't have words for at like 12 years old. Luckily, I have words now. It was the understanding that the bravest thing you can do is choose to walk back into the thing that has already almost killed you.

[00:23:10]The loader suit at the end is one of the 10 greatest moments in the history of this medium. It's not about strength or size or special effects. It's about a woman who's decided completely and without reservation that this ends now.

[00:23:33]She is going to win or she's going to die getting there. And those are the only two options that she's going to entertain. And that's it. That's the whole genre right there in one scene.

[00:23:44]And that's why we're all here.

[00:24:01]You know, none of these women were waiting to be rescued. None of them were like asking for permission. Every single one of them looked at the situation and decided they were the one who's going to handle it. And that's the through line here. That's what makes the genre matter. That's the thing that hooked me at 12 and has never let go. All right, guys. I got one last thing to ask of you and that's keep it weird folks.