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15 Great Underrated Action Movies On Netflix

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Hidden in the queue.

Nazarii Verbitskiy

TV Shows & Movies - June 11th 2026, 17:00 GMT+2

Hotel Mumbai — 15. Hotel Mumbai (2018)
Hotel Mumbai turns the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai into a claustrophobic survival thriller that refuses to look away from the violence or the humanity caught inside it. The film traps guests and staff in the Taj Hotel while gunmen hunt floor by floor, creating tension that feels suffocating rather than exciting. Dev Patel anchors the chaos as a waiter who becomes an unlikely hero, but the real power comes from how the movie treats every life as mattering equally. It is brutal without being exploitative, which makes the terror feel uncomfortably real. | © Bleecker Street

Day Shift — 14. Day Shift (2022)
Day Shift turns vampire hunting into a blue-collar job where Jamie Foxx cleans pools by day and stakes bloodsuckers by night to pay his daughter's private school tuition. The movie knows exactly how ridiculous that premise sounds and leans into every bit of the absurdity, mixing workplace comedy with genuinely inventive action sequences. Foxx brings his natural charm to a character who treats supernatural combat like overtime shifts, while the film delivers some of the most creative vampire kills in years. It's the rare Netflix action movie that feels like it was made by people who actually enjoy making movies. | © Netflix

Upgrade — 13. Upgrade (2018)
Upgrade turns a simple revenge story into something genuinely unsettling by making the hero's own body feel foreign to him. After a brutal attack leaves Grey paralyzed, an experimental computer chip called STEM gives him superhuman abilities but also starts making decisions for him in increasingly violent ways. The action scenes become deeply uncomfortable because you're never sure who's really in control. What starts as empowerment quickly becomes a horror story about losing yourself to technology. | © Blumhouse Productions

Ambulance — 12. Ambulance (2022)
Ambulance turns a simple bank robbery into two hours of Michael Bay spinning completely out of control, and somehow that works better than it should. The movie traps Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II inside a stolen ambulance with a wounded cop and a paramedic, then follows them through the most ridiculous car chase in recent memory. Bay shoots everything like the camera is having a panic attack, but the claustrophobic setting actually gives all that visual chaos a purpose. What could have been just another loud mess becomes something closer to a pressure cooker thriller that happens to explode every few minutes. | © Universal Pictures

The Night Comes For Us — 11. The Night Comes for Us (2018)
The Night Comes for Us delivers the kind of bone-crunching violence that makes John Wick look restrained. Indonesian action cinema has always pushed brutality to places Hollywood won't go, and this one commits to every broken bone, every arterial spray, every moment where you wonder if the stunt performers survived filming. The plot about a Triad enforcer protecting a young girl is simple enough to follow between the carnage. What matters is that director Timo Tjahjanto understands that great action choreography should feel like watching someone barely escape death in real time. | © Netflix

The Lost City 2022 — 10. The Lost City (2022)

The Lost City throws Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum into a jungle adventure that knows exactly how silly it wants to be. Bullock plays a romance novelist who gets kidnapped by a billionaire treasure hunter, then watches her cover model try to mount a rescue mission he's completely unqualified for. The movie works because it lets both leads lean into comedy while the action stays surprisingly solid around them. Nobody expected a rom-com spoof to deliver genuinely entertaining chase sequences and fight scenes. | © Paramount Pictures

Kill Boksoon — 9. Kill Boksoon (2023)
Kill Boksoon turns the tired assassin-with-a-heart premise into something unexpectedly personal by making the real conflict about motherhood, not murder. Jeon Do-yeon plays a legendary killer who can take out entire criminal organizations but struggles with her teenage daughter's college applications and curfew arguments. The action sequences hit hard with brutal knife work and creative kills, but the movie's best moments happen in quiet kitchen conversations where a world-class assassin tries to figure out normal parenting. Netflix found something rare here: a genre film that uses violence to explore family dynamics instead of just showcasing them. | © Netflix

The Northman — 8. The Northman (2022)
The Northman throws you into a Viking revenge story that feels more like surviving an ancient nightmare than watching a typical action movie. Robert Eggers shoots everything with the same obsessive historical detail he brought to The Witch, but scales it up to massive battles and ritualistic violence that hits different from standard Hollywood sword-fighting. Alexander Skarsgård disappears completely into a berserker prince whose quest for vengeance becomes increasingly unhinged and mythological. Most revenge movies want you rooting for the hero, but this one makes you wonder if anyone deserves to survive the brutality they're all inflicting on each other. | © Focus Features

Lucy — 7. Lucy (2014)
Lucy takes the ridiculous premise that humans only use 10% of their brains and runs with it at maximum speed, turning Scarlett Johansson into a superpowered being who can manipulate matter with her mind. Luc Besson doesn't care if the science is complete nonsense because he's too busy staging increasingly wild action sequences where telekinesis meets gunfights in the most absurd ways possible. The movie gets more unhinged as Lucy's abilities grow, eventually abandoning any pretense of logic for pure visual spectacle. It's the rare action movie that becomes more entertaining the less sense it makes. | © Universal Pictures

21 Bridges — 6. 21 Bridges (2019)
21 Bridges takes the familiar cop-on-the-run setup and actually commits to the paranoia instead of just using it as window dressing. Chadwick Boseman plays a detective who realizes the drug bust gone wrong he's investigating connects to something much bigger, and the movie keeps tightening the screws as every potential ally becomes suspect. The Manhattan lockdown premise gives the whole thing a claustrophobic urgency that most police thrillers skip right past. It's a straightforward genre exercise that works because it never pretends to be anything more complicated than it needs to be. | © STXfilms

Damsel — 5. Damsel (2024)
Damsel flips the fairy tale rescue fantasy by making the princess save herself from a dragon that her own family fed her to. Millie Bobby Brown trades Stranger Things for medieval armor and a very pissed-off attitude as she turns a tower prison into a survival horror scenario. The dragon gets actual personality and motivation instead of just being a plot device, which makes their face-offs feel more like a psychological duel than standard monster movie beats. What starts as a subversive premise becomes a surprisingly brutal watch about family betrayal and self-reliance. | © Netflix

Chris Pratt The Electric State cropped processed by imagy — 4. The Electric State (2024)
The Electric State drops you into a retro-futuristic wasteland where giant robots litter the highways and a teenage girl searches for her missing brother with help from a drifter and his combat mech. The Russo Brothers lean hard into the weird, building a world that feels like someone mixed Mad Max with toy commercials from an alternate 1994. Millie Bobby Brown carries the emotional weight while the action stays grounded in practical effects that make every robot feel like it weighs ten tons. Netflix spent serious money on something genuinely strange, and it shows in every rusted detail. | © Netflix

Extraction — 3. Extraction (2020)
Extraction turns a simple rescue mission into two hours of Chris Hemsworth getting absolutely destroyed while trying to save one kid from a Bangladeshi drug lord. The action sequences feel less like choreographed movie fights and more like watching someone survive a very bad day through pure stubbornness. Hemsworth's Tyler Rake bleeds through most of the runtime, and the camera follows every brutal hit with the kind of commitment that makes you wince. Netflix found their own John Wick, except this one looks like he might not make it to the end credits. | © Netflix

Godzilla Minus One — 2. Godzilla Minus One (2023)
Godzilla Minus One strips away decades of franchise bloat and remembers that the original monster was born from actual human trauma. The film grounds every rampage in post-war Japan's struggle to rebuild, making each attack feel like a real catastrophe instead of just spectacle. Director Takashi Yamazaki shot the whole thing on a fraction of Hollywood's budget but delivered effects that put most blockbusters to shame. What hits hardest is how the movie earns its emotional moments instead of just demanding them. | © Toho Company

Cropped the gray man 2022 — 1. The Gray Man (2022)
The Gray Man cost $200 million and somehow still feels like it was designed by a committee that never met in person. Ryan Gosling plays a CIA assassin with the emotional range of wet cardboard, which works perfectly because the script treats every human interaction like a mandatory checkpoint between elaborate chase sequences. The Russo Brothers throw money at every action beat until the explosions start looking expensive instead of exciting. What saves it is how committed everyone seems to be to making the most generic possible thriller, like they were actively trying to create the Platonic ideal of a forgettable Netflix blockbuster. | © Netflix

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Netflix has a habit of burying genuinely good action movies under an avalanche of new releases and algorithm picks. These 15 flew under the radar but deliver exactly what you want from the genre, and they're worth digging for the next time the homepage isn't cooperating.

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Netflix has a habit of burying genuinely good action movies under an avalanche of new releases and algorithm picks. These 15 flew under the radar but deliver exactly what you want from the genre, and they're worth digging for the next time the homepage isn't cooperating.