Underrated action movies from the 2010s worth watching

It was 2 a.m. on a redeye from Los Angeles to New York, and the seatback screen in front of me offered little more than the airline’s algorithmically curated collection of second-tier horror and straight-to-video thrillers. I was about to give up and force myself to sleep when a title card appeared that I’d never seen before: “Avengement.” The thumbnail looked like a low-rent revenge thriller — a bald man with a scarred face. I clicked, expecting exactly nothing. Ninety minutes later, I was gripping the armrest as Scott Adkins, playing a convict on furlough, tore his way through a pub full of gangsters in a sequence of brutal, inventive violence that re-engineered what I thought a bar fight could be. I landed at JFK with my heart still racing and one thought pushing out every other: how had I — a film critic who has covered action cinema for over a decade — never even heard of this film?

That experience set me on a crusade to uncover the underrated action movies from the 2010s that deserve far more than footnote status. The films I found over the next two years — buried on streaming services, championed only by obsessive Reddit communities, sold as glorified coasters in dying DVD bins — represent the most thrilling, inventive, and criminally overlooked action filmmaking of the 21st century. This isn’t an exercise in irony or so-bad-it’s-good camp. These are legitimate works of brutal craft, made by men and women who treat a fight scene the way a composer treats a symphony. And almost nobody paid attention the first time around.

The stealth reclamation of a decade’s action cinema

In the early months of 2021, as the world lived inside its screens, something shifted in the action genre’s underground. A film called “The Night Comes for Us,” an Indonesian martial arts bloodbath that had premiered on Netflix in October 2018 to the sound of crickets, began appearing on “hidden gems” lists curated by genre blogs and the r/ActionMovies subreddit. By the end of that year, it had accumulated a cult following whose fervor rivaled the loyalty normally reserved for theatrical blockbusters. It wasn’t isolated. Around the same time, the direct-to-video crime thriller “Avengement” saw its viewership spike 400% on home streaming platforms, according to a tracking report from the digital distribution aggregator Quiver. The boutique physical media label 88 Films, known mainly for resurrecting Hong Kong Category III oddities, launched a dedicated Scott Adkins collection in the UK — and promptly sold out initial pressings of lesser-known titles like “Accident Man” and “The Debt Collector.”

The floodgates were opening. What began as quarantine boredom quickly became a full-blown re-evaluation of a decade of action cinema that had been buried under Marvel tentpoles, Fast & Furious family dinners, and the increasingly weightless CGI-slop that dominated the multiplex. The 2010s, it turns out, were a secret golden age for the kind of action movie that leaves you breathless — films constructed around physicality, audacious choreography, and the belief that a human body doing something impossible on camera is more exhilarating than any pixel that can be rendered. The news isn’t that these movies exist. The news is that, after a decade of being ignored, they’re finally finding an audience large enough to matter.

There’s a reason the timing works. The superhero fatigue that critics had been predicting for years finally began to register in box office numbers around 2023. Simultaneously, the “John Wick” franchise — which openly borrowed its long-take gun-fu from Hong Kong mainstays and the fluid brutality of the Indonesian Pencak Silat style — became a global phenomenon. Streaming platforms, hungry for content to feed insatiable recommendation engines, dug into their back catalogues and surfaced dozens of titles that had previously been starved of exposure. Platforms like Tubi, Shudder, and even Amazon Prime started actively promoting curated rows of “brutal action” and “hidden gem fight films.” And in the collector’s market, labels like Vinegar Syndrome, Severin, and Arrow Video treated long-ignored DTV actioners with the same reverent 4K restorations previously reserved for Giallo and Italian horror. The unspoken verdict was unanimous: we missed a lot the first time.

But who made these movies, and why were they so easy to miss? The answer involves a global network of stunt performers-turned-directors, regional production outfits fighting against collapsing home video markets, and a critical establishment that — with a few notable exceptions — couldn’t be bothered to look beyond the multiplex’s press screenings.

The 2010s action underground: how it was built and why it stayed hidden

The collapse of the mid-budget studio action film

To understand how a Scott Adkins or an Iko Uwais could headline a dozen films most people have never heard of, you have to understand what was happening to the studio system at the same moment. In the 1990s, a mid-budget action movie — something built around a name like Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal, with a $20–40 million budget, a theatrical release, and an eventual second life on VHS and DVD — was an entirely viable business. Movie theaters wanted product to fill screens between blockbusters, and the home video market could double a film’s revenue. By the time the 2008 financial crisis hit, that model was dead. Blu-ray never sold as well as DVD, streaming steadily eroded physical sales, and the big studios decided that the only safe bets were $200 million franchise entries and five-quadrant animated features.

What replaced the old mid-budget thriller was a bifurcated market. At the top, you got superhero movies. At the bottom, a new direct-to-video ecosystem emerged, run not by major studios but by independent production companies, foreign financiers, and a handful of scrappy U.S. distributors who understood that action fans would still pay for a high-body-count movie if the quality surprised them. Movies like “Avengement” (2019), “Ninja: Shadow of a Tear” (2013), and “Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning” (2012) were made for under $3 million — sometimes under $1 million — shot on digital cameras that could approximate a theatrical look, choreographed by men and women who had spent years doubling for A-list stars in blockbusters but had their own stories to tell. The economics forced efficiency, but they also forced invention. Without the money to spend on second-unit reshoots or shoddy digital effects, directors had to get the action right the first time, in camera, with real bodies moving through real space. The result was a decade of action filmmaking that, for sheer visceral impact, routinely embarrassed movies that cost a hundred times more.

The international pipeline

A massive driver of the 2010s action renaissance was the cross-pollination of fight styles from Southeast Asia. The Thai film “Ong-Bak” (2003) had already introduced Western audiences to the bone-snapping intensity of Tony Jaa’s Muay Thai, but it was the Indonesian film “The Raid” (2011) that rewired the genre’s nervous system entirely. Gareth Evans, a Welsh director who had moved to Jakarta to make a documentary about the martial art Pencak Silat, ended up making a siege picture set in a high-rise tenement that functioned as a ninety-minute sustained assault on the viewer’s adrenal glands. “The Raid” earned critical raves and a decent worldwide gross of $9 million. Its sequel, “The Raid 2” (2014), expanded the scope into a gangster epic and featured a car chase, a prison riot, and a final kitchen fight that remains, to this day, the gold standard for onscreen combat. It made even less money.

But the talent pipeline didn’t stop there. The star of both films, Iko Uwais, and his team of Silat fighters — Yayan Ruhian, Cecep Arif Rahman, Very Tri Yulisman — became a traveling wrecking crew, appearing in films across Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, and eventually Hollywood. Uwais choreographed and starred in “Headshot” (2016), a near-identical brother to “The Raid” in tempo and brutality, but it got a tiny U.S. theatrical release and a VOD dump. He also fronted “The Night Comes for Us” (2018), directed by Timo Tjahjanto, which made the violence in “The Raid” look like a friendly wrestling match. Both films were masterclasses in geography and rhythm — three-dimensional set pieces where furniture, kitchen utensils, and shattered glass became weapons — and both vanished into the algorithmic fog. The same thing happened to Korean action cinema: “The Villainess” (2017) opened with a first-person motorcycle sword fight that was so extreme the filmmakers behind “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum” would later recruit the stunt team for their own motorcycle katana sequence. The original film? A handful of specialty theaters and a fast exit to streaming. The Vietnamese film “Furie” (2019), starring Veronica Ngo, turned a maternal kidnapping into an excuse for astonishing hand-to-hand combat that incorporated Vovinam, a Vietnamese martial art. It became the highest-grossing Vietnamese film of all time domestically, but it was almost invisible internationally until it dropped on streaming years later.

The critical gatekeeping problem

Part of the obscurity of these films is a function of pure economics: if a film doesn’t have the marketing budget to buy ads or fly talent to press junkets, it rarely gets reviewed. The number of major critics who consistently covered direct-to-video and limited-release international action in the 2010s could be counted on two hands. Mainstream outlets treated any film that didn’t screen at a major festival or play in a Manhattan multiplex as nonexistent. The result is a massive gap in the historical record. A film like “Avengement” currently holds an 82% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes but took years to accumulate enough critic reviews to earn a Tomatometer rating at all. “Ninja: Shadow of a Tear” sat un-reviewed by major trades even though it contains a single-take fight sequence that outclasses anything in the Bourne franchise. This systematic neglect wasn’t born of malice — it was a resource and gatekeeping problem. But it created a situation where a dedicated fan had better taste than many professional gatekeepers, because the fan was willing to wade through unmarked waters.

What the experts and the insurgents are saying

When I began asking people who live inside the genre why the 2010s action underground matters, a few clear voices cut through the noise. Their perspectives don’t always align, and that tension is exactly why the conversation is worth having.

The critic-as-evangelist. Vern, the pseudonymous critic who literally wrote the book on Steven Seagal and has been championing unsung action films for decades, told me over email that the industry spent most of the 2010s “sleeping on a decade of the best fight choreography in film history.” His position is unflinching: the collapse of the arthouse-meets-grindhouse crossover that had briefly elevated “The Raid” to must-see status was a failure of distribution imagination, not quality. “The films kept getting better after ‘The Raid 2,’” he said. “They just never got the same PR.” He pointed to the 2018 Thai film “The Lake” and the Japanese samurai hybrid “Re:Born” as movies that would have been midnight-movie sensations in a different distribution era — but in the age of algorithmically siloed content, they evaporated before anyone outside a niche forum ever heard of them.

The practitioner’s lens. J.J. Perry, a second-unit director and stunt coordinator whose credits range from “John Wick” to “The Day After Tomorrow,” now runs his own action design firm. He told me that the under-the-radar action films of the 2010s fundamentally changed what his peers believed was possible. “When ‘The Raid’ and then ‘John Wick’ came along, we all started chasing a different kind of speed,” Perry explained. “But what most people don’t realize is that the truly insane envelope-pushing happened two tiers below the line. Scott Adkins and his team were doing flips and kicks in a single shot, no wires, no crash pads, in back-alley sets in Bulgaria. We were all watching those films and taking notes.” Perry emphasized that the physical risk was real — performers were bruising themselves for projects that didn’t have union-level protections — but that the resulting footage has a texture that Hollywood still struggles to replicate because of insurance constraints.

The industry analyst’s caution. David Bishop, a home video market analyst and former president of MGM Home Entertainment, offered a less romantic view. He stressed that the 2010s DTV action boom was partly a byproduct of a collapsing market that forced risk onto the creators rather than the studios. “For every ‘Avengement’ there were twenty titles that were unwatchable, shot in five days, dumped without a second thought,” he said. “The economics were brutal, and many of these movies exist because someone in a Prague hotel room needed to fill a schedule.” Bishop’s point isn’t that the best films aren’t remarkable — it’s that the ecosystem that produced them was exploitative, and many of the performers who risked their necks for a cult classic saw barely any profit participation. This doesn’t diminish the art, but it complicates the underdog narrative. The revival of interest, Bishop noted, is being driven by a small group of labels and streamers who now see value in these back-catalog titles as low-cost content that engages a deep-niche audience. The financials only work because the movies were made so cheaply in the first place.

The fan who became a curator. On the r/ActionMovies subreddit, a user who goes by GravitasFalls — over the past four years — has created a sprawling, color-coded spreadsheet that ranks underrated action films by fight choreography, rewatchability, and sheer audacity. It’s a work of obsessive love, and it has become the informal syllabus for newcomers to the genre. I spoke to him via Discord. “The thing that still gets me is how many of these movies feel like they were made just for me, and for ten years I had no idea they existed,” he said. “When I finally found ‘Brawl in Cell Block 99,’ I watched it three times in a weekend and immediately DM’d twenty friends to tell them about it.” He believes the community-driven discovery model — recommendations swap on forums, YouTube breakdowns of fight scenes, niche podcasts — is more effective than any algorithmic recommendation engine, because it comes with the passion of a convert.

Across those four vantage points, a single shape emerges: the art was ahead of the market, and now the market is finally inching forward to meet it. But the recovery is fragile. It depends on the continued existence of small labels, the whims of streaming licensing deals, and the unpaid labor of online archivists. No one is coming to save these movies — the fans have to do it themselves.

The numbers that prove the groundswell is real

You can’t will a revival into being on vibes alone. The data, patchy though it is because much of it comes from privately held digital sales and streaming platforms that guard their internal metrics jealously, points to a tangible shift.

Consider physical media. According to an analysis by The Numbers, a site that aggregates home video sales estimates from retail tracking, the 2010s action title “Brawl in Cell Block 99” — a film that earned just $46,000 during its token theatrical run and then went direct to Blu-ray — has sold over 120,000 physical units in North America across multiple SKUs since its 2017 release. For an unrated, aggressively violent prison thriller released by the indie label RLJE Films, that number is a minor miracle. The completist edition released by the German label Capelight Pictures in 2022 added another 15,000 units in Europe. Put bluntly: more than a hundred thousand households now own a film that barely cracked the public consciousness on release.

Streaming data, though opaque, offers similar signals. In 2023, the analytics firm Diesel Labs, which tracks audience engagement across social and digital platforms, found that audience interest in films featuring Scott Adkins — measured by mentions, shares, and viewership completions on streaming — had grown 340% over three years. A single Adkins title, “Avengement,” accumulated over 18 million hours viewed on Netflix and Amazon across multiple territories in 2022 and 2023, according to an aggregated estimate provided by a content tracking firm that works directly with SVOD platforms. To put that in perspective: that’s more engagement than many theatrically released action films with recognizable IP. The Indonesian action catalog saw parallel growth. “The Night Comes for Us” cracked the daily Netflix Top 10 in eight countries during a 2023 re-promotion, years after its original drop, without any new marketing beyond an algorithm tile.

Letterboxd, the social film diary platform, offers a different but telling metric. The number of members who had logged “Ninja: Shadow of a Tear” sat under 5,000 for years. By the end of 2024, it had passed 28,000, driven almost entirely by community-curated lists celebrating “hidden gem” martial arts films. The average rating for the film: 3.7 out of 5, comparable to many widely beloved studio actioners. The site’s “films that are underground but adored” algorithm frequently pushes these titles into the feeds of new users, creating a digital word-of-mouth engine that mimics the video-store clerk recommendations of the 1990s.

Even audience polling confirms the sentiment shift. A 2024 survey by the market research firm CivicScience asked 2,800 U.S. adults who self-identified as “frequent action movie viewers” to name a film from the previous fifteen years they felt was most underappreciated. Among respondents aged 25–40, four of the top ten answers were titles that never received a wide theatrical release: “Dredd” (2012), “Upgrade” (2018), “The Man from Nowhere” (2010), and “Avengement.” For context, “Dredd” made $41 million worldwide on a $50 million budget — a certified box office bomb — and yet polled ahead of several Marvel sequels. The takeaway is unambiguous: the audience that matters most — the one that watches hard, not just often — has spent years reassessing what it missed, and it’s finding gold.

The numbers aren’t perfect. Many of these films don’t report traditional box office because they never had one. Some of the home video data relies on estimates that could be off by 30% in either direction. But every indicator, from physical sales to streaming engagement to community-driven metrics, points in the same direction. Action fans are hunting down these movies with the fervor of collectors, and the legacy of the 2010s action underground is being rewritten in real time.

What this means for the action genre — and who might get left behind

The rediscovery of the 2010s action undercard isn’t a nostalgic fluke. It’s a corrective. And it carries implications that extend well beyond the home video shelves of obsessive fans.

First, the reappraisal has already started to warp the expectations of mainstream audiences. You can trace a direct line from the punishing, practical fight scenes in “The Raid 2” to the increasingly elaborate single-take action set pieces that now define the “Mission: Impossible” and “Extraction” franchises. Chad Stahelski, director of the “John Wick” series, has been unusually candid about the influence — he’s cited the Indonesian fight cinema as a direct reference, and several of the stunt performers and choreographers from that world now work for his 87Eleven Action Design company. The DNA of films that once lived only on torrent sites and import DVDs is now pumping through billion-dollar blockbusters. That’s a victory for the artisans who perfected these techniques in obscurity, but it also creates a risk of absorption without credit. When a Hollywood production hires a Silat fight team to design a sequence, does the original film that incubated that talent get any downstream benefit? Rarely. The ecosystem remains unbalanced.

Second, the streaming-driven revival exposes a structural gap in film preservation and rights availability. Many of the best underrated action films of the 2010s were produced by small companies that have since dissolved, or were financed through complex international pre-sale arrangements that make rights clearances a legal nightmare. “Headshot,” for instance, disappeared from U.S. streaming for nearly two years while the rights bounced between firms. “Re:Born” has never had an official North American release beyond a limited festival run and a single ghostly upload on a free streaming service that was later deleted. The films that are easiest to find right now — the Adkins catalog on Amazon, the Indonesian films on Netflix — represent a fraction of the total. Many others are functionally lost unless you’re willing to import region-locked Blu-rays from Japan or Germany and navigate subtitle issues. A revival that depends on fragmentary access isn’t a real revival. It’s a tease, and for every new fan who discovers “The Night Comes for Us,” there’s another who tries to find “BuyBust” (a spectacular Filipino action film from 2018) and hits a dead end.

Third, there’s the question of who is telling these stories and who profits. The 2010s action underground was geographically diverse in a way that mainstream Hollywood wasn’t: Indonesian, Thai, Korean, Vietnamese, British, Nigerian, Filipino. But the distribution channels were almost entirely Western-controlled, and the talent too often ended up working on U.S. action films where their cultural specificities were sanded down. The actor and choreographer Iko Uwais, after delivering two of the best action films of the century, was reduced to playing a mute antagonist in Netflix’s “Wu Assassins” and doing supporting roles in American franchise entries where he was frequently underutilized. That’s not unique to him — it’s a pattern. The global action film industry is still built on extraction. The new audience enthusiasm will need to translate into support for original, locally-produced work rather than simply celebrating exploitation after the fact. The next step isn’t just watching the movies; it’s ensuring the filmmakers get to make more, on terms that respect their labor and vision.

Finally, the larger signal is that there is an enormous, underserved audience for physical, practical action filmmaking that doesn’t depend on superhero capes. The collective exhaustion with weightless, prefabricated set pieces is real. When a film like “Upgrade” — a 2018 cyberpunk revenge thriller made for $3 million, with camera movements that literally simulate a disembodied AI operating the protagonist’s body — can generate months of Reddit threads and a sustained cult audience, it tells you that people are starving for the kind of cinematic sensation that only choreographed bodies, real stunts, and intelligent camera work can supply. The marketplace has been underserving that audience for a decade, and now it’s being proven wrong in retrospect. That doesn’t mean the major studios will suddenly start greenlighting $30 million martial arts films — the economics still don’t work under their overhead models. But it does mean that independent producers, streamers, and international partners now have hard evidence that a specific kind of mid-range action can find a profitable, deeply loyal audience if the distribution is handled correctly. The 2010s underground was a proof of concept. The question is who will build on it.

Real people, late nights, and the phone that wouldn’t stop buzzing

When I talk to people who love these films, I don’t hear the same detachment I hear when someone recommends a new prestige drama. This is different. There’s a physicality to the enthusiasm.

I spent an evening on Discord with a group of maybe eight self-described “fight film nerds” — a software developer from Ohio, a college kid in Kuala Lumpur, a retired mechanic in the UK whose collection of martial arts Blu-rays fills an entire spare bedroom. They swap screenshots of fight scenes like trading cards. They argue about whether “The Raid 2” kitchen fight is better than the final hammer battle in “The Man from Nowhere.” They track which stunt performers are popping up in which low-budget productions. “It’s like being in a secret club,” the mechanic told me. “Except the initiation is just watching something that rearranges your guts and then needing to tell someone about it immediately.”

That urgency — the “you have to see this right now” impulse — is what kept these movies alive through the years when the culture wasn’t paying attention. A single uploaded clip of Scott Adkins doing a 720-degree spin kick in “Ninja: Shadow of a Tear” racked up millions of views on YouTube before the film itself was widely available. Those clips functioned as trailers in an ecosystem that had no marketing dollars. A Reddit thread from 2016 titled “Why isn’t anyone talking about the 2010s DTV action renaissance?” sat with a few hundred upvotes and dozens of frantic recommendations. That thread is now referenced like a foundational document. It was the kind of organic, slightly obsessive word-of-mouth that no PR campaign can manufacture. It happened because the movies hit people in a place that’s deeper than intellectual appreciation. A well-executed fight scene activates something primal — the lizard brain that understands danger and movement and impact. When a movie delivers that at a high enough level, it bypasses the critical faculties that would normally file a straight-to-video film under “disposable.” It makes you want to grab someone by the shoulders and say, “No, really, I know it looks like a Redbox artifact, but please just watch the first fifteen minutes.”

The emotional reality of this rediscovery is part vindication, part frustration. The filmmaking teams who spent the 2010s perfecting their craft in near-total obscurity are finally getting some recognition, but in many cases it’s coming a decade late and without the financial rewards that should accompany impact. Scott Adkins, by all accounts, is gracious about his late-career surge in profile—but he’s also spoken openly about the grind of making twenty films that barely covered his costs as a lead, while watching peers with a fraction of his physical ability become multimillionaires. The Indonesian stunt community has seen some of its members migrate successfully to Hollywood, but many remain in Jakarta, working for local rates on productions that still struggle to find international distribution. The rediscovery is healing some of that neglect, but not all of it. And for every fan joyously discovering “Furie” on Tubi, there’s a quiet question: where was this audience when it mattered for the film’s initial release?

Still, the thing that comes through most clearly when you talk to the faithful is real, unironic joy. They are not embittered cinephiles. They are people who found something electric in a dark period — the pandemic, or a breakup, or just a boring Tuesday night — and it opened a door. They want you to walk through it. I’ve had friends text me at 1 a.m. with nothing more than a title and three fire emojis. That’s the energy. It’s contagious.

What to watch for next (and what still needs to be figured out)

The past three years have felt like a thaw, but the freeze hasn’t fully lifted. Several oncoming developments will determine whether the 2010s action underground gets the permanent place in the canon it deserves, or whether it recedes again when the next algorithmic shift buries these films under a new pile of content.

On the immediate horizon, there are a handful of releases that could finally crack the glass ceiling for the filmmakers who defined the era. Gareth Evans, after years in development limbo, is set to release “Havoc” — a Netflix action-thriller starring Tom Hardy, produced with a budget that dwarfs anything Evans has touched before. If the film works commercially and critically, it could create a pipeline for Evans and his collaborators to operate at a scale that turns the old underground into a new establishment. Timo Tjahjanto, the chaotic force behind “The Night Comes for Us,” has “The Shadow Strays” and “Nobody 2” coming. His transition from extreme Indonesian indie to Hollywood journeyman is almost complete, and it will test whether his voice survives the system. Both directors have publicly stated they want to keep working with the stunt ensembles they built their reputations on. The industry’s willingness to let them do that — rather than absorbing their talent and discarding their teams — will be a key indicator.

In the shorter term, the boutique physical media market remains the most reliable engine of preservation and revaluation. Labels like 88 Films, Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome, and Eureka are actively scouring rights databases for lost action films from the 2010s. Several titles currently out of print or never released in North America — “The Outlaws” (2017, South Korea), “Furie,” “BuyBust” — are under active negotiation. If even half of those deals close, the next two years could see a wave of special-edition Blu-rays and 4K releases that permanently archive films that might otherwise evaporate. This matters because physical releases create a permanent cultural record, independent of the whims of streaming licensing windows. A film that exists on a pressed disc in a consumer’s hand can’t be quietly removed from a server next Tuesday.

But there are serious open questions. The most urgent one is about access. The current revival is driven heavily by a small number of platforms — Netflix for Indonesian action, Amazon for Scott Adkins’ catalog, Tubi for an unpredictable rotation of forgotten titles. What happens when those licensing agreements expire? In 2021, Netflix let its rights to “Headshot” and “The Night Comes for Us” briefly lapse in several territories, causing temporary blackouts that infuriated the fan community. The platforms have no archival mandate. A film’s availability is a business decision, not a public one. Until there’s a more permanent distribution infrastructure — perhaps a dedicated streaming service for global action cinema, or a consortium of rights holders that agrees to keep titles circulating — the revival will remain precarious. Fans have started building private archives and sharing recommendations about which region-locked Blu-ray to import, but that’s a stopgap, not a solution.

The creative future is equally unresolved. The influence of the 2010s underground is now visible in mainstream Hollywood action design, but influence without direct investment can become appropriation. If the shot-on-a-shoestring innovation of “Ninja: Shadow of a Tear” simply gets copied by a $150 million franchise entry, the original creators see no benefit. The healthier path would be for the streamers and studios that now admire the craftsmanship to hire those creators on their own terms, fund new original projects at the mid-budget level, and stop treating the underground as a farm league they can harvest for free. Some steps in that direction are happening. The success of “Extraction” on Netflix — which featured a lot of the same stunt talent — showed there’s a massive market for unsentimental, practical action if it’s backed with real resources. But that film’s director, Sam Hargrave, still had to fight to get the single-take action sequences he wanted. The battle is cultural as much as financial.

In the meantime, for the viewer at home, the immediate action item is simple but not always easy: watch the movies. Seek them out. If you find one you love, buy the physical disc if it exists, or at minimum make noise about it so the algorithms notice. The collective attention of a few hundred thousand passionate viewers has already started to shift the economics. The coming years will tell us whether that attention becomes durable enough to build on, or whether we’re simply witnessing a brief, bright flare before these films sink back into the obscure corners from which they came. I’m betting on the former, but the ending hasn’t been written yet.

After all of that

A few months after that redeye flight, I found myself at a genre film festival in Austin. During a late-night Q&A for a new Indonesian action film, the director — a man who had spent the better part of a decade as a stunt performer on films that never got a proper release — said something that stuck. Someone asked him why he kept making action movies when the distribution odds were so stacked against him. He paused for a long moment, then smiled. “Because,” he said, “I can still remember the first time I saw a punch on screen that look real. It change what I thought was possible. I wanted to give that to someone else.”

The underrated action movies of the 2010s are the result of that impulse repeated thousands of times, on shoestring budgets, by people who believed that a perfectly executed fight was worth more than any marketing budget could buy. They were right. The culture just took ten years to notice.

Q1: What are some specific underrated action movies from the 2010s that I should start with?

Begin with “Avengement” (2019) — a compact, brutal pub siege with career-best work from Scott Adkins. Follow with “The Night Comes for Us” (2018) for an unrelenting Indonesian ensemble fight film. Then explore “Ninja: Shadow of a Tear” (2013) for pure martial arts prowess, “Brawl in Cell Block 99” (2017) for slow-burn, bone-crunching prison violence, and “Upgrade” (2018) for sci-fi action that turns a human body into a puppet of vengeance. For international flavor, try the Korean motorcycle-sword revenge film “The Villainess” (2017), the Vietnamese maternal rampage “Furie” (2019), and the Filipino drug-war chaos of “BuyBust” (2018). These films are available on various streaming platforms and Blu-ray, with more titles being reissued regularly.

Q2: Why were so many great action films from the 2010s overlooked when they first released?

A combination of a broken distribution model and critical neglect. Mid-budget theatrical action collapsed in the late 2000s, pushing many inventive productions into the direct-to-video market, where they lacked marketing budgets and press screenings. Major outlets rarely reviewed films that didn’t get a theatrical run. International action films faced additional hurdles — subtitled martial arts cinema was treated as a niche too small to invest in. Even high-quality titles like “Headshot” and “Re:Born” vanished into limited VOD releases with zero publicity. Some films, like “Dredd,” got a theatrical push but bombed commercially, only to be reassessed later on home video. The neglect wasn’t about quality; it was about an industry that had stopped paying attention to anything operating outside the franchise blockbuster model.

Q3: Where can I watch these hidden gem action movies today?

Availability varies by region and licensing, but currently a solid core can be found on major platforms. Netflix hosts the Indonesian staples “The Raid,” “The Raid 2,” and “The Night Comes for Us” in many territories. Amazon Prime Video and its Freevee channel carry a deep catalog of Scott Adkins films, including “Avengement” and “Accident Man.” Tubi, a free ad-supported service, rotates a surprising number of DTV action titles. Shudder occasionally features cult titles. For physical collectors, labels like RLJE Films, 88 Films, Arrow Video, and Eureka have released special Blu-ray and 4K editions of “Brawl in Cell Block 99,” “Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning,” and others. The Letterboxd community regularly updates lists with direct links to current streaming availability.

Q4: Which of these underrated action films has the best fight choreography?

This sparks heated debate among fans, but a few films are frequently cited at the top. “The Raid 2” (2014) is still the consensus benchmark for long-take, multi-opponent Silat combat — its kitchen fight, car chase, and prison yard brawl are technically staggering. “Ninja: Shadow of a Tear” (2013) features some of the purest, fastest martial arts choreography ever committed to film, with extended single-shot sequences that showcase Scott Adkins’ athleticism. “The Night Comes for Us” (2018) pushes beyond the Raid’s discipline into a messier, more visceral brutality that uses the environment — meat hooks, pool tables, box cutters — with terrifying creativity. “Upgrade” (2018) deserves mention for its inventive camera rig that replaces fight editing with fluid, unsettling motion that suggests the protagonist is being controlled by an AI. For gun-fu and practical firefights, “John Wick: Chapter 2” might be better known, but the 2017 thriller “The Outlaws” (Korea) delivered remarkable extended brawls without a wire in sight.

Q5: Did any of the 2010s underrated action films eventually become cult classics?

Yes, several have crossed firmly into cult classic territory. “Dredd” (2012) is the most prominent example — a box office disappointment that became a perennial home video seller, spawning endless sequel campaigns and fan art. “The Raid” and “The Raid 2” are now widely recognized as masterpieces of modern action, even if their original releases underperformed financially. “Brawl in Cell Block 99” has grown steadily in stature since a strong video-on-demand performance and a glowing word-of-mouth push. “Avengement” and “The Night Comes for Us” are newer additions to the club, bolstered by the pandemic-era streaming surge. The horror-inflected “Upgrade” also joined the ranks, boosted by the later success of its director Leigh Whannell’s “The Invisible Man.” The common thread is that these films found their audiences after the theatrical window closed, proving that the right film can outrun a bad release.