The recent release of Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire, starring MMA fighter Gina Carano, was as notable for its A-List cast and crew as it was for the casting of an actress not named Jolie in the lead role. As such, it got us to thinking: How many true female Action Heroes are there?
“The good news, Newt, is you’re going to survive this film. The bad news…”
6. Sigourney Weaver
At the close of Alien, 1979’s seminal film about the danger of the phallic “other,” there was little reason to think of Weaver as anything more than a recent graduate of the Jamie Lee Curtis School of Horror Film Survival. Then came Aliens, James Cameron’s 1986 sci-fi action classic of a sequel in which Weaver (as Ripley) outperforms a shipload of bad-ass space marines. In true Action Hero style, if you survived Aliens, it was only because an M41A pulse rifle-wielding Ripley carried your weak-ass self out of the monster’s lair moments before it exploded. And defeated the Queen of the Jawed Penis Monsters in one-on-one combat while wearing a giant mech suit. Weaver even gets to deliver a Classic Action Hero one-liner—“Get away from her, you bitch!”—that, while lacking Schwarzenegger-ian pithiness, elicited cheers from many theater audiences.