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The Most Underrated Action Movies of the 1990s

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7m ago

Apr 11, 2024 / 7253 Views

Evan Walker

Surviving the Game (1994)

A year after John Woo made his U.S. debut with the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target, another movie about the homeless being hunted for sport by wealthy Businessmen arrived at multiplexes. Both films were loosely inspired by Richard Connell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” but while JCVD’s effort, mullet and all, might be better remembered by most, Surviving the Game is arguably the slightly more thoughtful of the two, with director Ernest Dickerson, best known for his work as a cinematographer alongside Spike Lee, able to explore themes of race and class in a way that Hard Target previously failed to.

Ice T is the man in the firing line this time as Jack Mason, a vagrant suffering with PTSD and who ends up being recruited by Charles S. Dutton’s soup kitchen volunteer for paid work as a hunting guide to Rutger Hauer. Once out in the wilderness, however, Mason quickly discovers that the only thing Hauer’s Thomas Burns and his friends are keen on hunting is him. What they didn’t count on, however, is Mason displaying some pretty impressive survival instincts. A well shot and solidly paced actioner, Surviving the Game is elevated further by a great supporting cast of would-be hunters that includes John C. McGinley, F. Murray Abraham, and, most notably, Gary Busey, whose main contribution is to deliver an astonishing monologue he reportedly came up with himself one memorable chat around the fireplace. That scene alone makes it worth seeking out.

Sudden Death (1995)

Peter Hyams had already proven himself a director capable of getting a good performance out of Jean-Claude Van Damme in their previous movie together Timecop. But while that effort is often held up as an example of JCVD at the peak of his powers, this sports-themed Die Hard clone is just as watchable. Van Damme plays Darren McCord, a former fireman attending the seventh game of the Stanley Cup Finals with his young son and daughter.

McCord’s enjoyment of the Game, unfortunately, is cut short when he discovers the vice president, who is also in attendance, is being held hostage by a group of terrorists led by Powers Boothe’s disgruntled Secret Service agent Joshua Foss. Foss and his cronies have wired the entire arena with explosives which will detonate at the end of the Game unless they receive millions of dollars in ransom money. A moderate success in theaters, Sudden Death nevertheless failed to make the kind of coin Timecop did, with critics slamming the contrived nature of the movie’s plot. Yet, under the watchful eye of Hyams, Van Damme delivers another solid performance, boosted by thrilling action set pieces and impressive stunts. Definitely one of the better of the Die Hard clones to come out over the years.

Daylight (1996)

Despite a great start to the decade with movies like Cliffhanger and Demolition Man, the 1990s was a largely fallow period for Sylvester Stallone, with his big screen adaptation of Judge Dredd failing to impress before Assassins endured a similarly lukewarm response. The latter was not helped either by the decision to jettison the movie’s brilliant original script, written by the Wachowskis.

Daylight should have brought an end to that rotten streak for Stallone but despite more than making back its production budget thanks, in part, to overseas sales, it lacked staying power. Still, Daylight remains a solid disaster action flick that finds Stallone displaying a glimpse of the vulnerability that earned him praise a year later for his performance in James Mangold’s Cop Land. Here he plays Chief Kit Latura, a disgraced former New York City EMT who is tasked with leading a group of survivors out of an underground Manhattan tunnel that is very quickly collapsing around them. Had director Rob Cohen got the green light for his original choice to play Latura, Nicolas Cage, then things might well have turned out different for Daylight, with Cage an up-and-coming star at the time.

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