The best action movies on Amazon Prime right now

You won’t miss the Bay-hem in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. This movie is not without its flaws, but the action is far more comprehensible than in any of Michael Bay’s Transformers flicks. The film has a lot to juggle, as it continues the light reboot from Bumblebee while also introducing Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman) and his prehistoric-inspired Maximals from Transformers: Beast Wars.

Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) and Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) are the unwitting humans who find themselves caught up in the war between the Autobots and the evil Terrorcons who serve Unicron (Colman Domingo), a planet-eating Transformer who is bigger than most worlds. Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) may not be willing to fully trust his new human allies, but Mirage (Pete Davidson) is very eager to befriend Noah, and their bond carries the film.

How long has Tom Cruise been making Mission: Impossible movies? Since the original film came out in 1996. So it’s somewhat jarring to see Cruise’s Ethan Hunt as a much younger man working under Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), one of the few returning characters from the Mission: Impossible TV show.

After a mission gone wrong leaves Ethan the only survivor on his team, he recruits disavowed IMF agents Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Franz Krieger (Jean Reno) to help him clear his name. But when two of Ethan’s supposedly dead teammates turn up alive, he’s forced to wonder if one or both of them has betrayed the IMF.

Nearly four decades ago, Die Hard reinvented what a Christmas film could be. In Violent Night, Christmas goes full Die Hard with Santa Claus (David Harbour) himself stepping into the John McClane role. This version of Santa was once a Viking warrior, and he’s lost faith in both humanity and Christmas.  

But when a dangerous thief calling himself Scrooge (John Leguizamo) robs a wealthy family led by their ruthless matriarch, Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo), Santa stumbles upon Scrooge’s plan and hears the pleas of Gertrude’s granddaughter, Trudy (Leah Brady). Trudy is a true believer in both Santa and Christmas and the only one in her family who has a place on Santa’s nice list. Now, Scrooge and his minions are about to find out why they should have stayed on Santa’s good side.

Ignore the reviews for Highlander. Critics at the time dismissed it, but Highlander became a cult classic in the ‘80s that spawned multiple sequels and even a few TV series. Christopher Lambert stars as Connor MacLeod, one of the few immortal warriors who still walk the Earth in the present.

Through flashbacks, Connor’s rivalry with his eternal nemesis, The Kurgan (Clancy Brown), plays out over the centuries before they face each other again for the ultimate prize. Connor’s friend and mentor, Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez (Sean Connery), taught him everything that he knows, including his most important lesson about the war of the immortals: “In the end, there can be only one.”