If there are any, that is. I can’t think of any of the top of my head, but that proves only that I’m not a movie buff.
A trio of quick rules:
I wrote movies, not television shows. Big screen only, please, even if that does prevent us from posting skin shots of Clare Kramer.
I also wrote action movies on purpose. That includes some high fantasy and science fiction, but the important thing is that problems get resolved in the movie by punching people in the face, chopping off the heads of orcs, and/or blowing shit up.
No Disney. No goddamn Disney. Every time someone mentions Malificient I will murder a hobbit. Same thing goes for Cruella DeVille.
Anyway … Can anybody think of any action movies in which the moving force behind the villainy is a chick?
The big bad leader through most of the movie is Wilkes, a CIA official played by Rebecca Pidgeon. Although she’s working with Dunning (Richard Dreyfuss) who emerges in the end as the ultimate big bad.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but how about Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome? Isn’t the big bad played by Tina Turner?
There were a lot of noir films, back in the day, where the villain turned out to be a woman. Mickey Spillane’s I The Jury (I think that’s the one) was one of them. I’m not sure if noir meets your definition of an action picture, but Spillane is pretty action-y.
Dredd has Lena Headey as the big bad. It’s a pretty great action movie, I’m pretty sure it’s on Netflix Streaming right now, I recommend it.
Arguably 300: Rise of an Empire, with Eva Green as the main villain. Technically Rodrigo Santoro as King Xerxes is the big bad, but he’s a more minor character, compared to Green who is the main villain of the movie, with bigger scenes, including the end battle. Not a great movie but Green is great in it.
Sarah Connor is more of a Terminator than the one who came back in time in T2. They had to prevent her from assassinating Dyson, and then she orchestrated the destruction of Cyberdyne. It can also be argued that her getting pregnant in the first movie caused all of the events in the second movie: if John wasn’t in the picture, the robots never would have come back for her and she could have broken out of the boobyhatch all on her own, to live a life on the run, free of explosions & melting robots.
Also thought of these:
From Dusk till Dawn
Catwoman
Batman Returns
Friday the 13th
Batman Returns might be debatable, since Penguin and Catwoman are both main villians. And if I’m remembering correctly, Mrs. Voorhees is the killer in Friday the 13th, though I’m not totally sure. But speaking of that, there are probably plenty of slasher movies that count, depending on how you define action movies.
Hold on a second. I need to take a sip of coffee so I can properly do my ritual spit of contempt.
:: sips coffee, spits it out in ritual contempt ::
Now that I’ve completed the rite at the mention of that … thing … I have to say that Mrs. Coulter is too ambivalent a figure to the a true big bad. She’s a horrible human being and bad mother, but she’s not purely vicious, and as the movie series was never completed (Thank Athena!) it’s impossible to say whether she would have been the Big Bad of it. She’s clearly NOT the big bad of His Dark Materials. And even in the movie
:: ritually spits again ::
she has little to do with Asriel’s plan, and virtually nothing to do with Iorek Byrnison’s problems. So no, I’d not call her a big bad.
The Maltese Falcon. Everyone thought the Fat Man was the mastermind, but Brigid was the one playing everyone off against each other, as well as murdering Miles Archer in cold blood and indirectly causing the death of Captain Jacoby.
I think BATMAN AND ROBIN counts: Poison Ivy makes her entrance by killing a guy for her own reasons, and then orders Bane around easy as breaking Mister Freeze out of jail after killing the big guy’s wife and framing Batman for it, sure as she then attempts to murder Robin on her own initiative while a now-repurposed Freeze switches from pulling off jewel heists to plugging away at Ivy’s plan for mass murder.
