Action Girl / Live-Action Films

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"There's no use arguing with her, the ladies are their own enforcers."

— Dwight McCarthy on the Old Town Girls, Sin City

Action Girls on the silver screen.

• James Bond

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Individual Films

• 1941 (1979): Donna punches Birkhead out for making an unwelcome pass at her early on and can fly a plane well enough to avoid being shot down in an Unfriendly Fire situation despite having zero training or experience.
• 2-Headed Shark Attack: Kate starts out just willing to place herself in the vicinity of the shark to help people, but during the final showdown, she swims between the two shark heads so that neither can get her and then stabs the shark several times with a piece of wood.
• Alice gets a Xenafication treatment in Tim Burton's 2010 Alice in Wonderland.
• Alita: Battle Angel: The natural instincts of the eponymous Cyborg protagonist draw her to battle and she spends much of the movie kicking ass.
• All About E: E unhesitatingly fights off some men who harass two drag queen friends of her, later rescuing Trish and then herself from Johnny as well, showing some martial arts skill while also handling a gun well.
• American Ultra:
  • Lasseter, who kickstarts the plot by revealing Mike's training to him before he can be assassinated by the TOUGHGUY operatives, and later rescues him from the crashed car before Laugher blows it up. She ends up subduing Yates during the final action sequence.
  • Phoebe also shows that she's a crack shot with a gun and shows some unarmed combat skills. This foreshadows that she's also CIA.
• Anna: The eponymous character herself. She's a highly trained assassin for the KGB, and puts down numerous far larger men with just martial arts, never mind guns.
• Anna and the Apocalypse: Anna and Steph; Anna's first reaction upon seeing the person she tried to help is a zombie is to whack it with her bag, then decapitate it with a seesaw, before going on to kill more zombies on screen than anyone else, while Steph is able to handle zombies well on her own and decapitates the first zombie we see her fight with a toilet seat.
• The Archer: Lauren is a very skilled archer who uses her prowess to fight, and also knows martial arts. Rebecca also fights to a lesser extent but isn't as skilled.
• Ahn Ok Yun (Jun Ji-Hyeon), the sole female assassin in the 2015 South Korean film Assassination.
• Assassination Nation: All of the main four girls show (unexplained) prowess with guns and take down many armed men to rescue Bex or in Lily's case herself before going to a final confrontation which isn't resolved. Nance also guns down two attackers before being killed defending her children.
• Leigh (Laurie Zimmer) in John Carpenter's original Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). She starts out as just a secretary in a police station but becomes an action girl when the nearly-abandoned station is under siege by a street gang during the night and fights them off along with the lone policeman and two convicts. She keeps her cool especially in comparison to the other secretary who panics.
• MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) in Atomic Blonde, who stands out as a very physical and realistic example more similar to Jason Bourne or John Wick than some of the more She-Fu-y examples out there. She fights well with fists, guns, and really anything that's not nailed down.
• Bandidas: Maria and Sara, the titular "bandidas" (literally "female bandits" in Spanish) who both wield guns or knives while robbing several banks.
• Barely Lethal revolves around Megan, a teenage girl assassin who fakes her own death so she can go to high school.
• Kate Beckinsale
  • Selene in Underworld. However, it is debatable on whether she's an Action Girl or a Dark Action Girl.
  • Anna Valerious in Van Helsing. She is eager and ready to get into a fight. However, she is a Faux Action Girl via The Worf Effect throughout the film, though the finale acts as a redeemer. She successfully vanquishes her nemesis Aleera, and she doesn't hesitate to throw herself at Van Helsing's werewolf form to cure him. She succeeds at the expense of her life. Were it not for the fact that Anna was fighting supernatural monsters, she'd be a carbon copy of Selene.
• Carmen Rawlins in Bet Your Life: Badass Biker, Bounty Hunter and Kick Chick. Played by Corinne van Ryck de Groot, the female winner of Next Action Star, with this role being part of her prize.
• Black Friday (2021): Marnie is just as aggressive while fighting the parasites as her male colleagues, if not more in certain cases.
• BloodRayne: Rayne, Katarin and other women (whether vampires or humans) are very capable fighters, usually as they wield swords.
• Boy Eats Girl:
  • Jessica shows shades of this later into the film, defending herself ably with a golf club, kicking and using a pair of scissors on zombies. Then she commandeers a tractor and kills many using that.
  • Cheryl as well head butts one zombie and then stabs another with her high heel.
• The Car: Road to Revenge: Daria grew up in the worst neighbourhood in the city and, although more refined now, has lost none of the skills she learnt there. She is an expert shot and can hold her own in a hand-to-hand fight against the worst street scum the city has to offer, even if they are cybernetically enhanced.
• Francesca Bruni in 2005's Casanova. Your brother is a poor swordsman who's got himself into a duel? No problem, just take his place and kick ass!
• Castaways: Cara and Emily both prove themselves pretty adept at survival skills. First off Cara seems more action-oriented, making shelters using just a knife from what she can find on the island. Emily though knows how to spear fish, make a fire and clean fish for eating, impressing Cara. Emily unhesitatingly stabs Finn fatally with her carved spear near the end as well after learning how he's a human trafficker planning to sell the pair into slavery.
• Zen, autistic teenage martial arts savant of the Thai film Chocolate.
• Kyra has developed into one by The Chronicles of Riddick, beating up various men larger than she is, evading an alien helldog, and even holding out against the Necromongers for a while.
• Pam Grier made a career out of playing this kind of character in a number of Blaxploitiation movies in the 1970s, at a time when female action characters were unusual, and black ones even more unusual. Her characters are not only proficient fighters, but are usually the ones to initiate the action and take the fight to her enemies.
  • In Black Mama, White Mama her character, Lee Daniels, is an escaped convict who has to fight for her survival against both gangsters and law enforcement.
  • The title character in Coffy from 1973 was one of the first full-fledged examples of a female Blaxploitation hero. She is nurse who turns vigilante when her sister falls victim to the drug trade, using both her sex appeal to infiltrate the drug gangs and then her fighting skills to extract a bloody revenge.
  • In Foxy Brown, which is a Spiritual Successor to Coffy, she plays a very similar role: an ordinary citizen turned vigilante and using sex and violence to take revenge on the bad guys.
  • Her character in Sheba, Baby is a Private Investigator who takes the law into her own hands. Here, the sex is very downplayed, but she is an accomplished fighter, both hand-to-hand and with guns.
• Colombiana:
  • Cataleya herself. Even as a girl she's capable of surprising a hardened gangster and escaping. Then she's trained to be an expert assassin later by her gangster uncle.
  • Her mother Alicia knows how to handle a BFG as well.
• Valeria (Sandahl Bergman) from Conan the Barbarian (1982). Took lessons from master Kiyoshi Yamazaki who worked with Schwarzenegger and Lopez. Swung a sword, looked good doing it.
• Conan the Barbarian (2011): Tamara, after gradual promotion from Damsel in Distress, turns out to be a good fighter, taking on several enemies well.
• Conan the Destroyer: Zula is a fierce and very skilled warrior who's introduced as she holds off a half dozen men at least when chained to a stake, as punishment for having raided the village she's in. Zula is quite adept with a staff or spear, as shown here and throughout the rest of the film.
• The Condemned (2007): The two female contestants, Rosa and Yasantwa, are this by necessity to survive on the island. Rosa doesn't last long, while Yasantwa manages longer, killing an attempted rapist in self-defense.
• Corky Romano: Kate Russo is a female FBI agent, so naturally she's qualified with a gun. She's also shown to be proficient in martial arts, in particular a Groin Attack she uses later.
• Disturbing the Peace: For unexplained reasons, Catie—who is the preacher's daughter and owns the local diner—has hand-to-hand combat skills that allow her to take on an outlaw biker and win.
• Lynn Redgrave's character Mary O'Donnell in Don't Turn the Other Cheek! single-handedly comes to Russian conman Dmitri and Mexican bandido Max's rescue by beating down about ten or twenty of Huerta's soldiers with her bare hands.
• Rookie Judge Cassandra Anderson in Dredd proves herself to be highly capable over the course of the movie. Not only does she mentally kick Kay's butt multiple times, but she rescues herself when she gets captured, saves Dredd from the corrupt Judge and even stands up to Dredd with regards to the fate of the Clan Techie. It's no wonder that Dredd gives her a pass at the end of the film.
• Drive-Away Dolls: Sukie is a police officer who's quite fierce and aggressive. She beats up larger thug Flint when he comes into her apartment, then turns out to have a gun in her dog's carrier, shooting (non-lethally) Senator Channel to defend Jamie and Marian.
• Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness: Akorida, the party's leader, can sling spells or fight with a sword very well.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves:
  • Holga, a barbarian woman, likes beating people up and wields a variety of weapons throughout the film.
  • Doric, a female druid, actually turns into an owlbear (a huge monster), tossing her enemies around in that form.
  • There's at least one Neverwinter guard who's also a woman, although she only appears briefly.
• Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two:
  • Although she never presents herself as a physical threat, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) has all the same training as any other Bene Gesserit, which allows her to be able to kill two of the baron's men and best Stilgar in hand-to-hand combat. As of Part Two however, she's fully committed to becoming a Reverend Mother for the Fremen so she doesn't see action anymore (and she's pregnant).
  • Men and women alike can become warriors among the Fremen, and Fremen warriors tend to be very skilled and very deadly. Chani (Zendaya) is, of course, the most prominent example.
• Eastern Condors: Joyce Godenzi plays the leader of the Cambodian guerrillas who escorts the squad to their target, and racks a up a body count equal to any of the men. There are several other women in the guerillas and they are not far behind her.
• Maya from Eight Below. Only female dog and the leader of the pack.
• The tragic Su Lin, sister of Lee in Enter the Dragon. It was the star-making role of Angela Mao Ying, who would go on to star in many other Hong Kong martial arts films and received the nickname "Lady Whirlwind".
• The Exception: Mieke it turns out is a Dutch resistance fighter, with a pistol she hid in her room she's very willing to use. She doesn't end up doing so, but is nonetheless a courageous spy who gathers information on the Germans at the risk of her own life.
• The Expendables:
  • Despite The Expendables being largely male, CIA agent Maggie Chan is every bit as badass as the male expendables in the first sequel.
  • In The Expendables 3 Maggie is replaced with Luna, a hand-to-hand combat expert first introduced working as a bouncer in a night club where she easily dispatches three rowdy patrons while in a dress and heels. Did we mention she was played by world renowned MMA Fighter Ronda Rousey.
• Fair Game: Conservationist Jessica starts out as the victim, but after she is raped she takes bloody revenge on the three poachers.
• Veronica from Final Girl has trained most of her life in armed and unarmed combat. She is extremely good in either case.
• In Firestorm (1998), ornithologist Jennifer manages to hold her own for most of the movie, and proves to have a host of skills that are useful when fleeing from a gang of killers in the midst of a forest fire.
• Fire with Fire: Talia is a US Marshal, teaching her boyfriend Jeremy to shoot. He has to rescue her once when the bad guys go after them, but in the last case she rescues herself and then him, taking out the Big Bad plus his very skilled hitman while doing so.
• Foolproof: Sam practices martial arts and uses them on a thug who threatens her during her first meeting with Leo. She climbs through an elevator shaft and narrowly avoids the elevator while scouting for the heist. She holds Leo at gunpoint, hinting he should let them quit his service. When he mockingly asks if Sam thinks he'd give her a loaded gun, she reveals that she pickpocketed the ammo clip from him.
• Future World (2018): Ash is a female android with inhuman strength and takes on several enemies in the film, killing them largely using just her bare hands.
• Ghosted: Sadie is a highly competent CIA covert agent who shows her skills using martial arts and guns, very much outmatching Cole (at first especially). She's also somewhat reminiscent of Paloma from No Time to Die, since Ana de Armas played both of them.
• Girlfight: The story revolves around Diana's goal to become a boxer. She's trained and has several bouts, but even prior to that she got into a lot of fights.
• Scarlet from G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is on of the Joes' best and brightest, who wields a high tech crossbow that allows her to easily take out Neo-Vipers. She also held her own in a one on one fight with The Baroness and participated in the Paris chase on the back of a motorcycle.
• Skylar Lewis of Girl vs. Monster is a monster hunter..
• Gone (2012): Jill has trained in martial arts and using a gun since her abduction. Her skills stand up well as she goes on a quest to find her sister.
• A Good Woman Is Hard To Find: Sarah evolves into this over the course of the film, first Killing in Self-Defense to defend herself from attempted rape and murder, then managing to kill a crime boss along with his armed thugs despite having no apparent prior experience in using guns.
• Halloween:
  • Laurie Strode became one of these in Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later. Not only did she spend most of the movie protecting the other characters from Michael Myers, she also ends up turning the tables on Myers and hunting him down with an axe.
  • Laurie may be an even bigger one in the new timeline set up in Halloween (2018), where trauma of the first film's fateful Halloween night, lead to spending the next forty years training herself and her daughter to be Crazy-Prepared Survivalists in anticipation for Micheal's return.
• The titular character of the film Hanna is a Child Soldier and Sole Survivor of a CIA experiment to create the perfect killers.
• Harriet: Harriet. She frees herself despite all the dangers, then hundreds of others, with great skill. During her missions, she's armed with a pistol, though never kills anyone. In her greatest mission, Harriet leads a detachment of Black union soldiers to free around seven hundred people at once.
• Proving not all movie Action Girl examples are of modern origin, silent film-serial regular Helen Holmes from "The Hazards Of Helen" shorts regularly drove motorcycles off bridges, traversed the roofs of moving trains, foiled robberies, and pursued fleeing roadsters on horseback. She didn't fight hand-to-hand, but that's still a lot of action for a heroine from 1914.
• Mallory Kane in Haywire, played by Gina Carano no less. Notably, due to Carano's extensive background in mixed-martial arts this makes Mallory a much more physical Action Girl than most examples, with her fight scenes being comparable to something you'd see in a Bourne film.
• Hercules (2014): Atalanta the Amazon. Cotys is initially doubtful about her skills, believing the coming battle is no place for women, but soon backs down when she shows off her archery prowess.
• Park Nam-joo in The Host (2006) is an Olympic bronze medal archer. At one point she goes to look for her niece on her own. She survives being hurled into a wall by the creature and sets it on fire by successfully shooting an arrow into its eye
• The French assassin Nice, played by Sofia Boutella in the dystopian thriller Hotel Artemis, is a proficient killer and has one of the highest body counts in the film, all while wearing an elegant red dress.
• Marion Ravenwood gradually Took a Level in Badass in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and helps out in Indy's battles whenever she get a chance. She goes from screaming and panicking at the snakes and the skeletons in the tomb to gunning down Nazis in an airplane cockpit. She's definitely one in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
• "The Mountain Girl" from D.W. Griffith's Intolerance is one of the earliest, if not the first, film example. She is a Babylonian who isn't particularly interested in romance but likes eating onions and killing Persians. When the Persians attack and she takes to the walls with the rest of the army to fire arrows, she enjoys herself.
• It Conquered the World has an example that's downplayed, yet still a noticeable standout from most 1950s sci-fi movies (due to director Roger Corman not liking the Neutral Female concept). Beverly Garland's character Claire Anderson is the wife of the scientist who sells out to and enables the alien invasion, and after spending most of the movie pleading with him to stop doing so, finally snaps at the climax, grabs a rifle, and runs off to give the alien a "The Reason You Suck" Speech (which she manages to make believable despite talking to a giant carrot) and then goes down fighting against it.
  Claire: So that's what you look like! You're ugly! Go on! Try your intellect on me! You think you’re going to make a slave of the world? I'll see you in Hell first! (fires rifle)
• It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): Winnie and later Bernie are both girls in their late teenage years. They show great skill in evading being killed, using improvised weapons and turning the tables on the Angel Killer.
• Johnny Mnemonic has Jane, a female cyborg bodyguard. She's not as badass as Molly Millions in the original story, but this was probably due to the limits of cinema at the time.
• Judge Hershey in Judge Dredd. She gets into a Cat Fight with Dr. Ilsa Hayden.
• Juliana: The titular character is as tough as the streets she grew up in. When a boy her age steals the flowers she's going to sell, she's hot on his heels until she tackles him, causing him to fall hard on the ground. Juliana then insults and shoves him, warning him not to pull the same stunt with her. During the time she's pretending to be a boy, she's no slocuh when it comes to shoving the boys if they even think of getting physical with her. Later, when Cobra snitches on Don Pedro that she's actually a girl and the man menacingly gets closer to her, she's quick to grab a wooden stick and threaten him. She edges him on while waving the stick.
• Claire from Jurassic World is this trope played in a rather interesting way. As she's the park operations manager, she's hardly an athlete or a trained fighter, but she is a very intelligent and determined survivor, so when she gets a Moment of Awesome, it comes from her wits rather than any physical prowess or training. Despite this, she still saves Owen's life from a Dimorphodon which was attacking him by clubbing it with Owen's tranquilizer rifle and then shooting the pterosaur with it, and she manages to outrun a Tyrannosaurus Rex while in high heels. On top of her, of those sent to try recapture the Indominus Rex, one of the very few survivors of that resulting massacre was also a woman.
  • It comes up again in the second film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, but her previous experiences have toughened her up a bit. And changed her fashion to something a bit more practical.
• Hit-Girl in the 2010 movie Kick-Ass, is probably one of the best examples of the Little Miss Badass trope. Despite being only eleven years old and her small stature putting her at a physical disadvantage, she proves to be one of the most deadly characters in the movie, thanks to spending pretty much her whole life training to be a killer.
• The unnamed Girl in Kill Ben Lyk is a parody of this trope. She accidentally kills two other members of the cast.
• Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill. Trained by one of the greatest warriors to ever live, she was a professional assassin and is considered the deadliest woman in the world. She single-handedly cuts her way through almost 88 sword-wielding bodyguards before going on to dispatch an entire team of highly-trained assassins in her Roaring Rampage of Revenge. The other major females fall into Dark Action Girl territory.
• Kimi: Angela shows great skill while she's evading pursuit by the thugs after her at first. Then she even manages to kill all of them using just a nail gun.
• In Last Action Hero, Slater's daughter is one of these, and at first it's played for laughs by subverting the Damsel in Distress — she's screaming mock-hysterically as she kills the mook sent to take care of her. But it's also deconstructed a bit when Slater mentions that she spent her prom night alone in her room, field-stripping an AK-47.
• Clementine, the protagonist of Left for Dead, is a pistol-packin' momma who lets nothing stand her way as she journeys to find her man and extract some righteous vengeance along the way.
• The Lord of the Rings
  • Éowyn. "I AM NO MAN!"
  • In the first film, Arwen Evenstar carries a wounded Frodo from Weathertop to Rivendell, outrunning the Black Riders.
• Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road. Even in a series where being an Action Girl is practically a survival requirement, she's still at the top of the pile. She's a Badass Driver who leads several of Immortan Joe's Wives to keep them out of a constant life of sex slavery. She's also an incredibly good shot and physical fighter, even handing Max his ass several times. A number of critics and fans have begun to call her this generation's Ellen Ripley. Her equally kickass story prior to Fury Road is detailed in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
• The Magnificent Seven (2016) has Emma, the one that takes to initiative to hire the titular seven to rescue her town, after the Big Bad murders her husband (among other townsfolk). While she's not exactly on par with the Seven, she's the best shot with a rifle out of the townsfolk and while she does have to be saved once by Red Harvest, she makes up for it by finishing off the Big Bad, when he almost kills Chisolm with a concealed gun.
• Trinity from The Matrix is probably one of the most iconic examples of this. An unflinching badass takes out dozens of mooks with both kung fu and automatic weapons, and at one point, even manages to get the drop on one of the seemingly invincible "agents".
• Mercenaries: Four women with military and other combat experience are recruited by the CIA to serve on a secret mission against female warlord Ulrika, who is herself an example.
• Mission: Impossible Film Series: While the female IMF agents in the first movie don't get a chance to show off their skills the following films show that they're just as skilled as their male counterparts.
  • Mission: Impossible III:
    • Once Farris is freed she proves capable of working in perfect tandem with Ethan in a firefight despite days of torture. Her death is beyond her control as she was on her own and betrayed by her superiors, and even then she manages to get out a covert message warning of the corruption in the IMF's leadership.
    • Zhen Lei is tough, an exelent shot and great at thinking on her feet and adapting to a mission as things change.
  • Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol: Jane Carter is an excellent fighter. She does have trouble toning that down for more subtle parts of the mission however, as her reactions can be a bit violent even when it's not warranted. She ends up killing an assassin wanted for questioning, but she did try to walk away first after having her captured and only ran back in when Benji was in danger.
  • Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation: MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) is a skilled fighter and planner who is capable of giving Ethan a hard time or keeping pace him despite working on her own rather than with a team like he does.
  • Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Grace (Hayley Atwell) proves herself very capable even if she's only a thief by trade. Paris, meanwhile, is of the Dark Action Girl variety, being an unhinged driver and wielding a sword in the Venice sequence.
• Mirror, Mirror: Snow White a tough, skilled swordfighter after she's trained by the dwarfs, holding her own against Alcott and even the Beast.
• Mohawk: After Joshua and Calvin are killed, Oak goes on a one-woman Roaring Rampage of Revenge to wipe out Colonel Holt and all of his men.
• Alex from Momentum, a hi-tech thief with espionage training. In addition to being an expert combatant, she's also skilled in deception and spycraft. Essentially the female version of Bryan Mills.
• MonsterVerse: Mothra once again is a particularly powerful case. Among the humans, there's Mason Weaver in Kong: Skull Island, and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and to a lesser extent Godzilla vs. Kong have dropped hints of Madison being a teenage one.
• Morgan: Morgan and Lee both show great skills at unarmed combat or with guns. It's because both are artificial human super soldiers.
• Anna Fang from Mortal Engines, really shines in this regard, slaughtering the slaver guards of Rustwater with ease, going toe-to-toe with Shrike (albeit unsuccessfully) and engaging in an epic duel with Valentine near the film's end, to distract him while Hester shuts down MEDUSA. She's also an Ace Pilot, flying the Jenny Haniver in the final battle against London's defenses.
• Miss Piggy turns into an Action Pig in numerous Muppet movies. You mess with the frog, you will get hurt.
• Saga in Mitt liv som hund (My Life as a Dog). She beats all the boys at boxing and is the best on her all-boys' football (soccer) team.
• Mythica: Marek is a handicapped badass initially, but learns how to fight with a staff and her magic nonetheless. Teela, meanwhile, is a healer who’s also trained in combat. Many other minor female characters also show skill at combat with regular weapons or magic.
• Deconstructed Trope in the French action film Nikita. Nikita is a junkie turned cop killer turned government agent who doesn't particularly want to be where she is. She's no badass and it shows by how she barely scrapes through many of her assignments.
• In Once Upon a Spy, Paige Tannehill is a fully-trained K-12 agent (equivalent of a '00' agent in the James Bond franchise) and it is her job to keep Non-Action Guy Jack Chenault alive. She does all of the fighting in the film.
• Sharpshooter Annie Oakley is the single most dangerous person in The Outlaws IS Coming!.
• Painkiller Jane: Jane is a US Special Forces soldier, first seen on a covert mission into Chechnya. She continues to show her skills throughout the film, aided by then having a Healing Factor too.
• Pan: Tiger Lily is a young woman who has martial arts, knife throwing and swordfighting skills which she shows off fighting pirates very ably.
• Perfect Addiction: Sienna is a skilled MMA fighter but she trains other people at first rather than having bouts herself. She still fights while training other fighters however, beating Kayden while doing so. Once she discusses this with Kayden, noting that there is a stigma against women fighting because beauty's seen as their only asset so getting busted up would diminish that. She also spars with another female fighter, Athena, while helping train her. Sienna beats Athena, who it turns out previously had beaten all of her opponents that year, proving Sienna's skills.
• Pirates of the Caribbean
  • Elizabeth Swann starts off in the first film as a brave and resourceful, but in-experienced and somewhat naive girl, who winds up serving as Damsel in Distress for much of the first movie. But after being rescued, she still proves at least willing help out in battle as much as she can. By the sequel, she's taken enough of a level in badass thanks to her fiance, Will giving her some lessons on sword-play, that she's now more than capable of holding her own in fight, and by the third film, she's gone full on Pirate Girl and ends up leading a fleet a pirates into the Final Battle.
  • The first film also had Anamaria, the token Pirate Girl in the otherwise all male ragtag crew put together to go after Barbossa.
  • Angelica from the fourth film can also be considered an Action Girl as she's a swords-woman on par with Jack Sparrow himself, though she's closer to a Dark Action Girl.
• Pistolera blasts her way through a drug cartel on a murderous Roaring Rampage of Revenge. As a Villain Protagonist, she may be closer to being a Dark Action Girl.
• The Princess: The princess and Linh, her teacher, are skilled female warriors. In the story they take on dozens of male soldiers (many much larger than them) and beat them handily.
• Robin Hood's daughter Gwyn in Princess of Thieves, played by Keira Knightley. This was the role where she learned the archery skills that she later used in King Arthur (2004).
• Prospect: Cee is good at using a gun, and also escapes ably from pursuit. In a non-combat example, she also pretty matter of factly amputates Ezra's arm, and he seems mildly perturbed by her attitude while doing it.
• The Quick and the Dead (1995) with the unnamed "The Lady", a female Gun Slinger, played by Sharon Stone, who enters a life-or-death Quick Draw contest to get close to and take her revenge on the man running said contest.
• Rebel Moon has Kora (Sofia Boutella) who's proficient with a blaster gun and hand-to-hand, and Nemesis (Bae Doona), who has Cyborg arms and wields Hot Blades.
• Helen Mirren's character in Red (2010) is this at retirement age, specializing in More Dakka, most notably when she holds off Secret Service Agents by using a heavy machine gun to keep them pinned.
• Red Dawn (1984). Teenaged girls Toni and Erica, who subvert the usual trope by being too rugged up in the Colorado winter to be much fanservice. After the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits kill their first Dirty Communists, they state flat out that the guys can do their own washing up. We later see them blasting away in ambushes and using their feminine wiles to get bombs into places where the Russians really don't want them going off.
• Interesting little semi-subversion in Red Eye. Rachel McAdams' character is manipulated, abused, and (metaphorically) raped by Cillian Murphy's Magnificent Bastard, and eventually she decides to man up (for want of a better term) and brutalize him with a pen, a shoe, and a field hockey stick. She does pretty well (or at least, well enough not to be a Faux Action Girl), but she still needs the help of Daddy Brian Cox, who also mans up just in time.
• The Retreat (2021): Renee proves herself as one during the film, breaking free, rescuing her girlfriend Val and with her successfully turning things on their kidnappers/would-be-murderers. This includes being good with a gun (previously she mentions going hunting with her family). Val, though not as skilled, also managed to hold her own in concert with Renee. They manage to kill all their tormentors as a team.
• In the third Riddick movie, Dahl (Katee Sackhoff) is a seasoned mercenary and sniper, and beats up an attempted rapist.
• Riot Girls: Nat and especially Scratch are, like the title implies, girls very capable of kicking ass with whatever they can get their hands on.
• Robin Hood: The Rebellion: Although Marian is not as accomplished a warrior as Robin, she nevertheless holds her own in several fights against Guy of Gisborne, and engineers her own escape from the Sheriff's dungeons.
• In Rogue (2020), Samantha 'Sam' O'Hara (Megan Fox) is a mercenary captain commanding her own squad, and racks up a body count larger than any of the men she commands.
• Rebel Moon has at least two female asskickers on the heroes' team including protagonist Kora (Sofia Boutella) and Nemesis (Bae Doona).
• Sheroes:
  • Diamond is quite skilled with guns, including handguns and sniper rifles. She also teaches Ezra and Ryder to shoot a bit too.
  • Ryder's a very skilled martial artist and skateboarder, using both these in the film against opponents.
  • Ezra assists them to a lesser degree using guns.
  • Near the end, Diasy fires a bazooka to blow up a truck driven by drug traffickers pursuing them.
• The women of Old Town in Sin City, as they have to rely on each other for protection from rowdy customers.
• Sky Riders: Delia and the other female hang-gliding enthusiasts are just as capable as their male friends when it comes to Storming the Castle.
• Sorceress: The twins both have been trained as warriors. Both of them are good with a sword. Also, their mother stabbed their father to save them from him, so perhaps it runs in the family.
• Spring Breakers: Brit, Candy and Cotty all seem like ordinary girls in their late teens, but embark on a violent armed robbery. They wield guns and hammers while doing so. At the end of the film Brit and Candy go on a killing spree, gunning down Big Arch along with his men wiedling automatic weapons. Where the pair learned to do this is really anyone's guess.
• Star Wars:
  • Princess Leia Organa from Star Wars often switches in and out of the Action Girl role. She must have got it from her mother, Padme Amidala, who is, incidentally, the best shot with a blaster in the entire series.
  • Rey, first introduced in The Force Awakens, and The Hero of the Sequel Trilogy is a self-sufficient scavenger-turned-Jedi who is extremely strong in the Force and pretty much the galaxy's last hope against the First Order and Kylo Ren. Notably, she seems to have learned all of her skill in combat by herself, receiving no formal training other than a brief visit to Master Luke on Ahch-To. Growing up on Jakku means one needs to learn to take care of themselves after all.
  • Jyn Erso, The Hero of Rogue One, is a Rebel soldier trained from childhood by a particularly violent sect of anti-Imperial militants called the Partisans, and is also the person responsible for securing the Death Star plans that allowed the Rebellion to claim victory in A New Hope.
• Emma in Steps Trodden Black carries around a switchblade and benches more than her male friends. Her first reaction upon seeing the films monstrous antagonist is to attack it with a hatchet.
• Babydoll, Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie, and Amber from Sucker Punch. They go up against robot zombies, medieval knights, a furious dragon mother and army of robots with barely any protection, and leave scores of bodies behind every single time.
• Surrounded: Mo is a woman who's a former soldier. She's quite skilled with a gun, describing herself as the best soldier in her unit (which seems believable) and shoots experienced opponents down many times during the film.
• Swashbuckler: Far from being a spoilt. pampered noblewoman, Jane Barnet is fanatically dedicated to freeing her father, regaining her family fortune and liberating Jamaica from Durant's tyranny. She also shows herself be as good with a sword as most of the men, and able to hold her own in Bar Brawl; decking Alice with a single punch.
• Sweetheart: Jennifer quickly proves herself very competent in survival skills and even takes down a huge monster that had killed all her friends, getting only minor wounds in doing so. Why she has the skills while they didn't is not explained in the film.
• The Terrorist: Malli, of course, being a female suicide bomber.
• They Look Like People: Mara playfully demonstrates judo throws and submissions during a date with Christian. Later, when she's Alone with the Psycho, she confidently threatens to knock Wyatt on his ass unless he gets out of her way. Still later, when he's following her to apologize, she pops him in the nose.
• Through Black Spruce: Annie learned to hunt and shoot from her Uncle Will, which she uses very effectively in the film to protect her family. The poster shows her sighting down a rifle's scope.
• Quorra of TRON: Legacy can do just about anything, from showing kickboxing skills and driving Light Runners to piloting Light Jets and being able to give one of Clu's minions a headshot.
• Selena in 28 Days Later has this kind of scheme going on. Since 28 Days Later is on the cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, she may be badass and violent, but she's still just a rather athletic chemist (pharmacist) with a machete. It's therefore understandable when she gets a bit Chickified toward the end when surrounded by a bunch of soldiers.
• Undercover Brother. Both Sistah Girl and White She Devil (after she reveals herself as The Mole) demonstrate exceptional martial arts combat skills, including beating up several trained male combatants.
• Voyage of the Unicorn: Miranda turns into one near the end, taking down multiple trolls with only a staff despite her lack of any fighting skills or training shown before.
• Carrie in Vicious Fun. She seems like a Dark Action Girl until you learn that she only hunts serial killers.
• Fox in Wanted. So much that some people on this wiki have gone as far to say that every scene she was in was a Moment of Awesome.
• All orc women in Warcraft (2016), as they go to battle alongside their male counterparts. The two named she-orcs stand out especially - Garona's kill count rivals that of Lothar, while Draka at one point murders another orc with her teeth.
• We Are the Night: The female vampire quartet are all quite capable of combat, largely with their super strength. Lena kills a Russian mobster, then the others slaughter all but one among their gang. Charlotte then kills an entire SWAT team, while Lena and Louise get into a vicious battle later.
• Went the Day Well?: Ivy and Peggy, Land Army Girls who play a role in the climatic shootout, being among the few locals with any kind of military training in a position to help during the climax. Both are decent shots, move around to counter the German advancement, and keep cool heads.
• What Keeps You Alive: Both Jules and Jackie are good with guns, particularly the latter, who is also handy using a knife.
• Gwen Conliffe from The Wolfman (2010) eventually becomes the Victorian equivalent of this when she becomes so motivated by trying to save Lawrence that she totes a gun around while running around in a dark forest in the middle of the night — certainly breaking the Damsel in Distress version of her character from 1941.
• Oto Tachibana from Yamato Takeru is a fireball-slinging Kung-Fu Wizard priestess (and knife fighter) who doesn't hesitate to face down a Physical God.
• Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold: Yellow Hair was marketed as being a female version of Indiana Jones. She spends much of the movie rescuing her male sidekick from the various scrapes he gets himself into.

Franchises and creators with large bodies of Action Girl work

• Action Girls were not common in early movies, as the true form usually requires convincing hand-to-hand combat skills. However, a female character in a Western or Pirate movie could get away with the role. Maureen O'Hara is probably the most famous. She had a powerful screen personality, great acting skills, and an ungodly beauty that could carry any part. She also always looked to be having enormous fun whenever she got in a swordfight, most particularly in Against All Flags (as a Pirate Girl) and At Sword's Point (as the daughter of one of The Three Musketeers!).
• Any movie directed by Andy Sidaris, combined with copious Ms. Fanservice/Stripperific.
• In Slasher Movies, the Final Girl ends up being this half the time, the other half they become a Damsel in Distress instead. It depends on the movie, but many final girls who become Action Girls include:
  • Nancy Thompson from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), who drags Freddy Krueger into the real world, booby traps the house, and sets him on fire.
  • Laurie Strode in Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, after spending the first two films as the Screaming Woman, has finally had enough of Michael Myers' bullshit.
  • Marybeth from Hatchet is a deadly shot with a gun and never backs down from a fight against Victor Crowley.
  • Sidney Prescott from the Scream films always stands up to the killer at the end of each movie, and truly grows into the role in Scream 4, where she actively hunts down the killer and fights them with confidence.
  • Tina Shepard from Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood uses telekinesis to deliver a ridiculously badass beatdown to Jason Voorhees.
  • Lori Campbell from Freddy vs. Jason after spending most of the movie as a Damsel in Distress whose harassed by Freddy Krueger, takes a level in badass during the Final Battle pouring a trial of gasoline leading to Freddy and Jason blowing both freaks sky high. Then after Freddy tries last one last time to kill her and boyfriend Will before getting stabbed from behind by Jason, Lori decapitates Freddy with Jason’s own machete.
  • Erin from You're Next deserves a special mention while most Final Girls are victimised before they take a level in badass, her treatment of her attempted killers is so gloriously brutal that it becomes a case of The Hunter Becomes the Hunted. She’s so vicious that when the police arrive they mistake her for the killer.
  • Jessie from Wrong Turn is proactive throughout the movie, but although she picks up a Distress Ball in the climax, she ultimately proves herself to be this by fighting back against the evil cannibals harder than before. She wields a bow& arrow and an axe within the same fight.
  • Michelle in Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III becomes one at the end of the film, blasting one of the villains with a shotgun after he calls her a "brainless bitch."
  • Carly from House of Wax (2005), who kills both of the movie's killers.
  • Erin from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) who cuts off Leatherface's arm, rescues an abducted child, and kills Sheriff Hoyt with Car Fu.
  • Grace from Ready or Not (2019) is forced to fight back against a wealthy family trying to hunt her down on her own.
• James Cameron likes writing Action Girls into his films:
  • In Aliens, Ellen Ripley was slowly converted from a Final Girl into an early example of the Action Girl. Her performance earned her an oscar nomination and the number 8 spot on the AFI's Greatest Heroes list. She frequently appears on lists of the best female Heroes. We also see Vasquez, a butch action girl.
  • In the first two Terminator films, Sarah Connor grows from Damsel in Distress to one of the most badass heroines of all time, perhaps the only other that can truly stand beside Ellen Ripley.
  • Mace in Strange Days. It pretty much takes an entire police SWAT team to kick her ass. Justified in that she's a professional bodyguard, whom you'd reasonably expect to be able to kick someone's ass if necessary.
  • Most recently, in Avatar we have Trudy Chacón who goes out all guns blazing, the Na'vi princess Neytiri and — while not quite an Action Girl in this film — Sigourney Weaver's Dr. Grace Augustine, who's still no Damsel in Distress.
    • The sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, gives us Ronal, who rides into battle right alongside her husband and fellow clan members and is seen taking out enemies like a pro. Mind you, she does this while pregnant.
• The "Fighting Woman" or "Da Nu" has a long tradition in Chinese and Hong Kong cinema. In particular, characters played by Cheng Pei-Pei (60s and 70s), Brigitte Lin, Michelle Yeoh (both 80s and 90s; coincidentally, she played the aforementioned Wai Lin), and now Zhang Ziyi.
  • Yeoh, Zhang and Cheng came together as Shu-lien, Jen, and Jade Fox of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The sequence in the bar is FANTASTIC, as well as the fight between Shu and the rebel Jen.
  • Thai actress Jeeja Yanin has also made a name for herself in martial arts movies in recent years, starring in films such as Chocolate Raging Phoenix, and Jukkalan (a.k.a. This Girl is Badass)
  • In the 1980s, the so-called "girls with guns" subgenre took off in Hong Kong action cinema. Despite its name, the "guns" in question were usually quickly discarded in favor of bareknuckle brawling, thus making more straightforward Action Girl stars out of Michelle Yeoh, Cynthia Khan, Yukari Oshima and Cynthia Rothrock. The latter two were actual martial artists (and Oshima was also a stuntwoman), making this borderline Truth in Television.
• Milla Jovovich frequently plays Action Girls. She has the attractiveness to get by in Hollywood, and the lean, rangy body of a female athlete.
  • Alice, Resident Evil Film Series.
  • Leeloo, The Fifth Element.
  • Violet, Ultraviolet (2006).
  • Joan of Arc, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc.
• Mothra has been the Kaiju version of an action girl since her first appearance, and is arguably one of the most successful ones ever, starring in her own film series, and appearing frequently in the Godzilla franchise. In the case of the latter, she's one of the few monsters to ever defeat Godzilla (and did it with no fancy powers), is willing to stand up to King Ghidorah in her larva form, and usually takes on the role of The Smart Guy and Only Sane Man during team-ups.
  • Akane Yashiro from Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, the Ace Pilot of the Millenium Era Mechagodzilla, and one of the few humans with the guts to take on the King of the Monsters one-on-one.
• The Hunger Games: Katniss Everdeen has been the breadwinner in her family since her father died, and was a talented hunter even before that. She's lethal with a bow and when she enters the Hunger Games, she puts those skills to use. She quickly proves herself to be formidable, intelligent and determined. She manages to beat out other competitors that are not only physically stronger and working together, but whom have been training their entire lives to kill.
• In Stiletto, Raina cuts a bloody swathe through the LA underground as she extracts a very hands-on vengeance for her sister's rape.
• Wendy: Wendy is a young tomboy who gets into all kinds of action running, diving and escaping along with the boys. The same goes for Cudjoe Head, as the only other girl there.
• Werewolves Within: All of the women in town have guns except for Cecily which they're quick to use (though not always skillfully). Jeanine also is the one to kill the werewolf using a crossbow.
• Willow: Sorsha, although she starts off as a Dark Action Girl before her Heel–Face Turn. She's a skilled swordswoman who defeats several soldiers in hand to hand combat. Throughout the film she also carries a bow along with a quiver on her back, but never uses them in the film. However it obviously indicates that she's an archer too.

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