20 Female Action Movie Heroes Who Could Go Toe-To-Toe With Anyone

Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) goes through a series of intense emotional and physical transformations as she deals with the titular tormentors in the Alien saga. We appreciate the character's growth and arc, and understand it through the prism of her experiences. She begins life as the very capable warrant officer of the very blue-collar commercial ship the Nostromo, and then witnesses her (expendable) crew mates get leveled by an alien life form her bosses hoped to harvest and weaponize. Naturally, she becomes more skeptical of her next set of cohorts, and more prepared to deal with her extraterrestrial adversaries. Across each successive encounter, she grows and changes, but is never less effective or tactical in her strategy, becoming more hardened and heartless and ready to do anything to defeat the critters... at least until she kind of becomes one (more on that in a minute).

By the end of Alien: Resurrection, her fourth bout against the title baddies, Ripley has seen it all: lethal Xenomorphs who incubate themselves in her shipmates, burst through their chests at birth, and spit acid; treacherous secret robots; noble-minded secret and not-so-secret robots; evil corporate suits; the death of everyone she has ever known across centuries of cryogenic freezing in between alien battles; her own death; eight resurrected mutant Ripley clones built by lab techs with varying mixtures of Ripley and Xenomorph DNA; and a weird human Ripley-Xenomorph grandchild. It's also worth noting that the Ellen Ripley who has seen all this in Resurrection is in fact the eighth clone of the actual Ellen Ripley, who technically died by jumping into a molten pit at the conclusion of Alien 3 after discovering she had been impregnated with a Queen Xenomorph. This Ripley has inherited some Xenomorph attributes, including acid-blood and super-strength.

Across every iteration and shade of Ripley, she is never less than absolutely lethal when it comes to decimating her opposition.

Sarah Connor's transformation from a mild-mannered waitress with a weird pet iguana to the ultimate survivalist bad*ss who's just mildly insane transpires over the course of her first two on-screen appearances, in James Cameron's original The Terminator and its sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Her core human vulnerability is what makes her such an indispensable character and one of the best action heroes in movie history. Sarah (Linda Hamilton) is barely scraping by as an LA waitress during the events of the original movie. She's a sweet, unassuming woman who quickly finds herself in danger, as a mysterious killer is systematically slaughtering every Sarah Connor in the phone book. Luckily for Sarah, she is the third such listing, and is on high alert when the handsome killer approaches her at a downtown club, Tech Noir, clutching a .45 longslide with a laser sighting and wearing a fashionable jacket. That's when her adventure really gets weird - the killer is blasted with a shotgun by a different handsome-yet-dangerous man in a fashionable jacket, who convinces her to tail him if she wants to live. This is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who explains that her would-be assailant is actually a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a lethal cyborg sent back from the future by a machine-led military force hellbent on eradicating humanity. Kyle, too, has been sent from the future, but his mission runs counter to the T-800's: He is a soldier, sent back in time to protect Sarah, to ensure she lives to give birth to her eventual son John, who will lead our species to survival against a robot apocalypse. What John may not have told Kyle, however, is that he is actually John's father, doomed to die protecting Sarah - but not before falling in love with her and conceiving John. Throughout the course of the first film, Sarah learns how to fight and fend for herself while fleeing the first Terminator with Kyle.

By the the events of the second movie, which takes place around 1995, Sarah has undergone a total transformation of mind, body, and soul. Hamilton wanted to ensure that the character looked like she had toughened up after her experiences in the first movie, and thus began an extensive training regimen to prep for the sequel. She began working out six days a week for three hours a day to get into peak athletic shape. Her T2 Sarah Connor arrives totally shredded, and looks and behaves like an army operative. She has befriended pockets of survivalist sects all around Southern California and Mexico, and had been training John in the ways of militaristic strategy during his formative years until she was institutionalized in a psychiatric ward. John (Edward Furlong), now a punky preteen, is in a foster home when he finds himself attacked by a new Terminator, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), before being rescued by another T-800 model (Schwarzenegger again), who informs him that future-John now reprogrammed the T-800 and sent it back in time to protect him from the T-1000. This time, Sarah is ready when John and the T-800 bust her out, and soon the trio are on the run together - a makeshift family of misfits on a mission to save the world from a terrifying apocalyptic fate. 

What makes Sarah Connor perhaps the metric against which many modern American action heroines are judged is the gravitas and depth of Hamilton's performance and physicality, coupled with Cameron's sparkling scripts. We appreciate and understand Sarah's process as she grows and changes across the first two movies, plus the sixth franchise entry, Terminator: Dark Fate, Hamilton's return to the franchise. She remained in impossibly impressive shape, and looked capable of taking down just about anybody, human or cyborg, even into her 60s.

The Underworld franchise is far from the only horror-action-sci-fi mashup of supernatural monster slaying at the hands of tough, slick action heroines, but it is one of the most durable. Since launching in 2003, the series has churned out five installments, four of which star Kate Beckinsale as "death dealer" Selene, a vampiric huntress initially tasked with taking out werewolves in an ever-escalating interspecies war. Over time, Selene comes to realize that romance should not be bound to any one species, and she embarks on a star-crossed affair with human-turned-werewolf/vampire hybrid Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman).

Selene is the best death dealer in the business, and she's smarter than her vampire colleagues. A great fighter with a tragic past, she is reticent to trust most of the figures in her life. Beckinsale, a talented and versatile actress, gives the character more nuance and care than the uninitiated might initially expect, even as she's mowing down Lycans. That's probably the reason the character has proved so durable - and so indispensible to the series. You can't really make an Underworld movie without its signature character. It's worth noting that Beckinsale does make an appearance in the only movie in the series in which she does not star, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, a prequel in which Beckinsale lookalike Rhona Mitra plays a very Selene-esque vampire.

The seemingly ageless Beckinsale (maybe she really is a vampire?) has apparently balked at continuing the series with any fresh installments.

Through six grisly Resident Evil adventures, Milla Jovovich's Alice has battled hordes of mutant zombies. After beginning her journey as an employee of the Umbrella Corporation responsible for creating a zombification virus who tried (and failed) to get the word out about her bosses' experiments, Alice became a rugged survivor, resourceful and clever - and constantly on the lookout for more guns.

The director of the Resident Evil series is Jovovich's real-life husband, Paul W.S. Anderson. Because Alice appears across six movies, and Sonya Blade from the original Mortal Kombat has also deservedly made the cut, Anderson is the most-represented director on this list, having helmed seven total films featuring two characters that qualify.

A revenge picture is only as good as its hero. 

Fortunately, when it comes to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies, we are rooting for Beatrix "The Bride" Kiddo (Uma Thurman) to enact her sweet vengeance and kill Bill (and everyone else who gets in her way) every step of the way.

Beatrix was betrayed by her former colleagues, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, and left for dead on her wedding day after she left the hitman life and tried to start a normal family - albeit while pregnant with the baby of DVAS ringleader Bill (David Carradine).

Beatrix was found and taken to the hospital, where she ends up lying comatose for four years. Bill initially sends assassin Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) to finish off Beatrix, but ultimately decides he would rather the crew take care of her after she awakens and is able to fight them.

Our heroine beats some insurmountable odds and eventually goes on the warpath, knocking off her old associates one by one. She engages in kung fu battles and swordfights aplenty (including, at one point, taking down an entire yakuza army), but she also survives being buried alive. Through a complicated narrative structure, we track Beatrix's entire training and ultimate career with Bill as well as her contemporary efforts. She is tough, fierce, and ultimately fair. She punishes those worthy of punishment, but spares the innocent. If ever Beatrix needed to kill anyone else, there's no doubt that audiences would flock to the scene of the crime.

We could never dodge the awesomeness of Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss). Trinity isn't just a great action heroine, capable of besting computer code within its own context or fighting machines as they attempt to breach Zion, the final bastion of humanity, beyond the fabricated confines of the Matrix. Trinity is also a fashion icon. Like Arnold's T-800, Trinity isn't just a lethal bad*ss. She also looks incredibly cool while she does it. Her iconic style only serves to add to her legend. She favors leather and shades, always in black, and makes everything look cool as she bends gravity to her will.

By end of the original The Matrix, Trinity is also unafraid of her own emotions, totally open and honest about her feelings toward Neo (Keanu Reeves). She is fiercely tough, able to knock out legions of Agents (evil digital hunters within the confines of the Matrix) with her kung fu acumen and loads of cool guns. But she is never not herself. She has a sense of style and personality that is honest and unique. Trinity's coolness doesn't just derive from her ability to save the world. It also stems from her inimitable ability to dress to kill.