I have nothing against Ben Affleck, who has starred in and directed some great action movies over the years, but there’s no denying that he has some duds in his filmography. One such dud is The Accountant, but despite receiving a mixed reception from critics when it first debuted, the 2016 action thriller is currently the most popular movie on Netflix.
If you’re looking for a fun popcorn flick to throw on the TV, you could certainly do worse than The Accountant, but you could also do a lot better. Below, we’ve gathered up five great action movies on Netflix you can watch instead of The Accountant.
The Hunger Games
Plenty of young adult book series have been adapted into movies, but few are as successful as The Hunger Games. Jennifer Lawrence stars as Katniss Everdeen, a citizen of District 12 in the dystopian nation of Panem. After her sister is chosen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a televised event where children from every district fight to the death, Katniss volunteers to take her place. All four of the original movies are now streaming on Netflix.
Kill Bill: Volume 1
Whether or not it’s your favorite Quentin Tarantino movie, it is hard to deny that Kill Bill is one of his best. Both volumes are streaming on Netflix, but this first is about as close to a perfect action movie as you will ever see. Kill Bill follows the Bride (Uma Thurman) in her quest for revenge on Bill and his Deadly Vipers, who attempted to kill her and her unborn child.
Looper
Before Rian Johnson dipped his toes into the Star Wars universe or dreamed up the mystery at the heart of Knives Out, he made Joseph Gordon-Levitt a young Bruce Willis in Looper. The sci-fi thriller is about time-traveling contract killers who work for criminal syndicates. If the assassins live long enough, they are sent back in time to be killed by their younger selves, which “closes the loop.” But what happens when one killer’s older self survives?
One Piece Film: Red
One Piece is one of the longest-running and most successful anime series of all time, and it was recently adapted into a live-action series on Netflix. If you’re interested in the world of this series but aren’t quite ready to commit to binge-watching all 1,000+ episodes of the anime, One Piece Film: Red doesn’t require vast knowledge of the decades-worth of lore. It’s just a fun, action-packed, beautifully animated one-off that any fan of animation can enjoy.
The Raid: Redemption
With 2011’s The Raid (retitled The Raid: Redemption in the US), writer and director Gareth Evans brought the world’s attention to the Indonesian martial art of pencak silat. The movie follows an Indonesian National Police tactical squad as they fight countless criminals during a raid of a drug lord’s apartment block in the slums of Jakarta.