One other thing I've been thinking about (aside from the fact that "golden age" is quickly approaching peak uselessness as a descriptor on the same level as "overrated" or "pretentious") is that, since the 2010s aren't done yet, we shouldn't hold completed decades against them. The 1980s looks a little weaker when you cut out
Die Hard and
The Killer and
RoboCop and
Predator. I just figure that's worth considering - there's no telling if the best action movies of the decade won't actually come out in the next couple of years.
I guess I've officially gotten old because I can't even bring myself to call Mad Max Fury Road a movie. I call it a 2 hour chase scene with some cool old school explosions. There is NO story there whatsoever.
I also found 2 hours of John Wick going around shooting people in the head to be plotless and repetitively boring.
I think this raises a good question as to how much of an action movie's strength comes from its plot (or lack thereof). I would definitely contest the idea that
Fury Road has "no story" - rather, it streamlines its storyline so efficiently and threads it into the action in such a way that people perceive it as being "a 2-hour chase scene with no story". It's not a bug, it's a feature. Too often, you get these action movies that get a little too bogged down in interchanging scenes of action with scenes of exposition and character development in a way that makes the story suffer as a whole (I'd argue that, for all its strengths,
Terminator 2 is a prime example of how it loses a lot of momentum after the mental institution breakout, especially in the director's cut).
Fury Road still has its fair share of downtime where characters interact with one another and we learn about them in the process, but they are handled in such a compact way that viewers may not register them because they're not as drawn-out as non-action scenes are "supposed to be". The same goes for
John Wick, which I'll grant has a very simple revenge plot but works because it creates this weird underworld full of colourful characters and byzantine rules that add some much-needed dimension to what could have been another been-there-done-that thriller (to say nothing of how its actual action takes more craftsmanship than the likes of, say,
Taken). It's almost a shame how these films involve so much effort in order to look so effortless that the effort can get so easily disregarded.