The 10 Best 1980s Movie Action Heroes

Action cinema got a shot in the arm in the 1980s with the rise of musclebound superstars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger and high-octane filmmakers like Tony Scott and John Woo. This decade saw the release of such genre classics as John McTiernan’s Die Hard, James Cameron’s Aliens, and George Miller’s The Road Warrior.

Suffice to say, it was a good time to be an action movie fan. From RoboCop to John McClane to Indiana Jones, the action movies of the 1980s introduced audiences to some of the all-time most iconic heroes.

10 Alex Murphy In RoboCop

In the role of the titular superhero in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, Peter Weller brings real humanity to a movie whose primary goals are exaggerating violence and satirizing corporate greed.

Weller’s heartfelt turns as both Alex Murphy and his cybernetic counterpart play into the story’s always-relevant themes of self-identity. Murphy is resurrected as more machine than man, but the glimmers of man start to shine through as he learns more and more about his past life.

9 Max Rockatansky In The Road Warrior

In George Miller’s original Mad Max movie, Mel Gibson’s Max was introduced as a renegade cop seeking revenge for his family’s murders in a dystopian near-future. The 1981 sequel The Road Warrior plunged Max into a bizarre post-apocalyptic wasteland and turned him into the icon he is today.

Miller recharacterized Max as a Man with No Name-style spaghetti western antihero: a softly spoken lone wolf who drifts across a lawless frontier, looking for injustice to fight. He ends up saving a community from a vicious biker gang with some of the most impressive car stunts ever put on film.

8 Roger Murtaugh In Lethal Weapon

The central duo of Riggs and Murtaugh in Richard Donner’s groundbreaking “buddy cop” classic Lethal Weapon are both great characters. The success of the franchise rests on their dynamic and the electric on-screen chemistry shared by Mel Gibson and Danny Glover.

But, out of the two of them, Murtaugh is slightly more iconic. He’s a family man perpetually on the brink of retirement with an unforgettable, universally applicable catchphrase: “I’m too old for this sh*t!”

7 Snake Plissken In Escape From New York

With the role of soldier-turned-criminal Snake Plissken in his iconic dystopian thriller Escape from New York, John Carpenter successfully reinvented Disney star Kurt Russell as a tough-as-nails badass.

As an eyepatch-wearing convict who’s called upon by the government as a last resort when the President is captured, Snake is a quintessential antihero. He doesn’t accept the job because he’s driven to do the right thing; he does it for a reduced sentence.

6 Sarah Connor In The Terminator

Like Ripley in the original Alien, Sarah Connor is initially introduced as an everywoman in James Cameron’s The Terminator. Then, through the unfortunate circumstances of the main conflict of the story – a relentless pursuit by an unstoppable killing machine – she’s forced to become a badass.

Linda Hamilton handles the transformation beautifully. She’s wholly convincing as both the relatable waitress audiences meet in the opening scenes and the cyborg killer in the finale who signs off with the quippy one-liner, “You’re terminated, f*cker!”

5 John Rambo In First Blood

While John Rambo was retooled as a remorseless killing machine in the war-glorifying sequels, he was introduced as a much more grounded, relatable figure in the original movie, First Blood. Rambo was introduced as a Vietnam War veteran suffering from PTSD. He goes from town to town, looking for his old war buddies, and finds that they’ve all died.

He’s pushed to his breaking point by corrupt small-town cops, who he leads into the woods on a manhunt. First Blood is a sharply made thriller, but it’s also a poignant indictment of the treatment of American soldiers who returned from Vietnam.

4 Axel Foley In Beverly Hills Cop

After quickly becoming one of Saturday Night Live’s most popular cast members, Eddie Murphy made the leap to the big screen with hits like 48 Hrs. and Trading Places. Arguably his greatest starring vehicle was Beverly Hills Cop.

The role of Axel Foley, an undercover cop who has to invent new personas on the fly to infiltrate key locations, was the perfect vehicle for Murphy’s mile-a-minute improv style.

3 Ellen Ripley In Aliens

While the first Alien movie is straightforward horror, pitting the crew of the Nostromo against one xenomorph, James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens is an all-out action extravaganza, pitting Ripley and the gun-toting Colonial Marines against a swarm of dozens of xenomorphs.

Cameron took the badass Ripley became in the finale of the first Alien movie and gave her a specific motivation beyond survival. The story taps into Ripley’s maternal instincts as she takes young, frightened orphan Newt under her wing.

2 John McClane In Die Hard

Bruce Willis’ Die Hard hero John McClane was the perfect antidote to the invincible, musclebound ‘80s action heroes played by Stallone and Schwarzenegger.

Unlike the supermen played by those bodybuilding stars, McClane is just a regular guy. He gets beaten up by bad guys, cuts his feet on broken glass, and doesn’t like himself very much. Audiences found him much more relatable than Doug Quaid or Marion Cobretti.

1 Indiana Jones In Raiders Of The Lost Ark

After George Lucas harked back to one pulp genre in Star Wars and cast Harrison Ford to play ice-cool gunslinger Han Solo, he harked back to a different pulp genre with Raiders of the Lost Ark and cast Ford to play archeologist-turned-adventurer Indiana Jones.

Once again, Ford knocked his pulpy role out of the park, creating an instant icon. Indy is one of the few movie characters who are immediately recognizable from their silhouette alone.

About The Author

Ben Sherlock
(3458 Articles Published)

Ben Sherlock is a writer, comedian, independent filmmaker, and Burt Reynolds enthusiast. He writes lists for Screen Rant and features and reviews for Game Rant. He’s currently in pre-production on his first feature (and has been for a while, because filmmaking is expensive). You can catch him performing standup at odd pubs around the UK that will give him stage time. Previously, he wrote for Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop.

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