20 Female Action Movie Heroes Who Could Go Toe-To-Toe With Anyone
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There have been oodles of lethal female action heroes throughout history, and more and more have been popping up lately, which is a very welcome development. But who are the single most bad*ss female action heroes in cinematic history? Would you prefer Ellen Ripley or Sarah Connor in a fight against Selene's main opponent, the Lycans? Here are some of the greats. Now it's up to you to determine who among them should reign supreme.
- 1141 VOTESPhoto: Aliens / 20th Century Fox
Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) goes through a series of intense emotional and physical transformations as she deals with the titular tormentors in the Alien saga. We appreciate the character's growth and arc, and understand it through the prism of her experiences. She begins life as the very capable warrant officer of the very blue-collar commercial ship the Nostromo, and then witnesses her (expendable) crew mates get leveled by an alien life form her bosses hoped to harvest and weaponize. Naturally, she becomes more skeptical of her next set of cohorts, and more prepared to deal with her extraterrestrial adversaries. Across each successive encounter, she grows and changes, but is never less effective or tactical in her strategy, becoming more hardened and heartless and ready to do anything to defeat the critters... at least until she kind of becomes one (more on that in a minute).
By the end of Alien: Resurrection, her fourth bout against the title baddies, Ripley has seen it all: lethal Xenomorphs who incubate themselves in her shipmates, burst through their chests at birth, and spit acid; treacherous secret robots; noble-minded secret and not-so-secret robots; evil corporate suits; the death of everyone she has ever known across centuries of cryogenic freezing in between alien battles; her own death; eight resurrected mutant Ripley clones built by lab techs with varying mixtures of Ripley and Xenomorph DNA; and a weird human Ripley-Xenomorph grandchild. It's also worth noting that the Ellen Ripley who has seen all this in Resurrection is in fact the eighth clone of the actual Ellen Ripley, who technically died by jumping into a molten pit at the conclusion of Alien 3 after discovering she had been impregnated with a Queen Xenomorph. This Ripley has inherited some Xenomorph attributes, including acid-blood and super-strength.
Across every iteration and shade of Ripley, she is never less than absolutely lethal when it comes to decimating her opposition.
More Ellen Ripley
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- 2127 VOTESPhoto: Terminator 2: Judgment Day / TriStar Pictures
Sarah Connor's transformation from a mild-mannered waitress with a weird pet iguana to the ultimate survivalist bad*ss who's just mildly insane transpires over the course of her first two on-screen appearances, in James Cameron's original The Terminator and its sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Her core human vulnerability is what makes her such an indispensable character and one of the best action heroes in movie history. Sarah (Linda Hamilton) is barely scraping by as an LA waitress during the events of the original movie. She's a sweet, unassuming woman who quickly finds herself in danger, as a mysterious killer is systematically slaughtering every Sarah Connor in the phone book. Luckily for Sarah, she is the third such listing, and is on high alert when the handsome killer approaches her at a downtown club, Tech Noir, clutching a .45 longslide with a laser sighting and wearing a fashionable jacket. That's when her adventure really gets weird - the killer is blasted with a shotgun by a different handsome-yet-dangerous man in a fashionable jacket, who convinces her to tail him if she wants to live. This is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who explains that her would-be assailant is actually a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a lethal cyborg sent back from the future by a machine-led military force hellbent on eradicating humanity. Kyle, too, has been sent from the future, but his mission runs counter to the T-800's: He is a soldier, sent back in time to protect Sarah, to ensure she lives to give birth to her eventual son John, who will lead our species to survival against a robot apocalypse. What John may not have told Kyle, however, is that he is actually John's father, doomed to die protecting Sarah - but not before falling in love with her and conceiving John. Throughout the course of the first film, Sarah learns how to fight and fend for herself while fleeing the first Terminator with Kyle.
By the the events of the second movie, which takes place around 1995, Sarah has undergone a total transformation of mind, body, and soul. Hamilton wanted to ensure that the character looked like she had toughened up after her experiences in the first movie, and thus began an extensive training regimen to prep for the sequel. She began working out six days a week for three hours a day to get into peak athletic shape. Her T2 Sarah Connor arrives totally shredded, and looks and behaves like an army operative. She has befriended pockets of survivalist sects all around Southern California and Mexico, and had been training John in the ways of militaristic strategy during his formative years until she was institutionalized in a psychiatric ward. John (Edward Furlong), now a punky preteen, is in a foster home when he finds himself attacked by a new Terminator, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), before being rescued by another T-800 model (Schwarzenegger again), who informs him that future-John now reprogrammed the T-800 and sent it back in time to protect him from the T-1000. This time, Sarah is ready when John and the T-800 bust her out, and soon the trio are on the run together - a makeshift family of misfits on a mission to save the world from a terrifying apocalyptic fate.
What makes Sarah Connor perhaps the metric against which many modern American action heroines are judged is the gravitas and depth of Hamilton's performance and physicality, coupled with Cameron's sparkling scripts. We appreciate and understand Sarah's process as she grows and changes across the first two movies, plus the sixth franchise entry, Terminator: Dark Fate, Hamilton's return to the franchise. She remained in impossibly impressive shape, and looked capable of taking down just about anybody, human or cyborg, even into her 60s.
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- 3110 VOTESPhoto: Underworld / Screen Gems
The Underworld franchise is far from the only horror-action-sci-fi mashup of supernatural monster slaying at the hands of tough, slick action heroines, but it is one of the most durable. Since launching in 2003, the series has churned out five installments, four of which star Kate Beckinsale as "death dealer" Selene, a vampiric huntress initially tasked with taking out werewolves in an ever-escalating interspecies war. Over time, Selene comes to realize that romance should not be bound to any one species, and she embarks on a star-crossed affair with human-turned-werewolf/vampire hybrid Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman).
Selene is the best death dealer in the business, and she's smarter than her vampire colleagues. A great fighter with a tragic past, she is reticent to trust most of the figures in her life. Beckinsale, a talented and versatile actress, gives the character more nuance and care than the uninitiated might initially expect, even as she's mowing down Lycans. That's probably the reason the character has proved so durable - and so indispensible to the series. You can't really make an Underworld movie without its signature character. It's worth noting that Beckinsale does make an appearance in the only movie in the series in which she does not star, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, a prequel in which Beckinsale lookalike Rhona Mitra plays a very Selene-esque vampire.
The seemingly ageless Beckinsale (maybe she really is a vampire?) has apparently balked at continuing the series with any fresh installments.
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- 495 VOTESPhoto: Resident Evil: Afterlife / Screen Gems
Through six grisly Resident Evil adventures, Milla Jovovich's Alice has battled hordes of mutant zombies. After beginning her journey as an employee of the Umbrella Corporation responsible for creating a zombification virus who tried (and failed) to get the word out about her bosses' experiments, Alice became a rugged survivor, resourceful and clever - and constantly on the lookout for more guns.
The director of the Resident Evil series is Jovovich's real-life husband, Paul W.S. Anderson. Because Alice appears across six movies, and Sonya Blade from the original Mortal Kombat has also deservedly made the cut, Anderson is the most-represented director on this list, having helmed seven total films featuring two characters that qualify.
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- 5107 VOTESPhoto: Kill Bill: Vol. 1 / Miramax Films
A revenge picture is only as good as its hero.
Fortunately, when it comes to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies, we are rooting for Beatrix "The Bride" Kiddo (Uma Thurman) to enact her sweet vengeance and kill Bill (and everyone else who gets in her way) every step of the way.
Beatrix was betrayed by her former colleagues, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, and left for dead on her wedding day after she left the hitman life and tried to start a normal family - albeit while pregnant with the baby of DVAS ringleader Bill (David Carradine).
Beatrix was found and taken to the hospital, where she ends up lying comatose for four years. Bill initially sends assassin Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) to finish off Beatrix, but ultimately decides he would rather the crew take care of her after she awakens and is able to fight them.
Our heroine beats some insurmountable odds and eventually goes on the warpath, knocking off her old associates one by one. She engages in kung fu battles and swordfights aplenty (including, at one point, taking down an entire yakuza army), but she also survives being buried alive. Through a complicated narrative structure, we track Beatrix's entire training and ultimate career with Bill as well as her contemporary efforts. She is tough, fierce, and ultimately fair. She punishes those worthy of punishment, but spares the innocent. If ever Beatrix needed to kill anyone else, there's no doubt that audiences would flock to the scene of the crime.
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- 6103 VOTESPhoto: The Matrix / Warner Bros.
We could never dodge the awesomeness of Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss). Trinity isn't just a great action heroine, capable of besting computer code within its own context or fighting machines as they attempt to breach Zion, the final bastion of humanity, beyond the fabricated confines of the Matrix. Trinity is also a fashion icon. Like Arnold's T-800, Trinity isn't just a lethal bad*ss. She also looks incredibly cool while she does it. Her iconic style only serves to add to her legend. She favors leather and shades, always in black, and makes everything look cool as she bends gravity to her will.
By end of the original The Matrix, Trinity is also unafraid of her own emotions, totally open and honest about her feelings toward Neo (Keanu Reeves). She is fiercely tough, able to knock out legions of Agents (evil digital hunters within the confines of the Matrix) with her kung fu acumen and loads of cool guns. But she is never not herself. She has a sense of style and personality that is honest and unique. Trinity's coolness doesn't just derive from her ability to save the world. It also stems from her inimitable ability to dress to kill.
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- 798 VOTESPhoto: Guardians of the Galaxy / Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Crafty assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana) has never had it easy. Raised by the evil all-powerful being, Thanos (Josh Brolin), after he wiped out half of her people, Gamora eventually renounces her past to join forces with Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and the Guardians of the Galaxy, a wise-cracking group of jet-setting space rogues. Her rediscovered goodness is short-lived, however, when her pops resurfaces and does away with her. The character is dynamite in a gunfight, and it takes the most powerful being in the universe for her to meet her initial demise.
Of course, because Gamora is an MCU character and all character deaths in Marvel movies are fairly meaningless, she isn't actually gone for long. A Gamora from a different timeline, where she has never met her Guardians of the Galaxy friends, is introduced in Avengers: Endgame, and will ultimately have a testy dynamic with the team in the third Guardians of the Galaxy film. Tough, romantic, and smart, Gamora stands as one of the more memorable characters in Marvel's most memorable entourage.
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- 881 VOTESPhoto: Edge of Tomorrow / Warner Bros.
Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), the extraordinarily gifted war hero who mysteriously took out hundreds of encroaching alien hostiles during her first day of combat in Edge of Tomorrow, has a secret behind her abilities: She's a time traveler, experiencing the same day over and over again across a Groundhog Day-esque "time loop." A PR man, US Major William Cage (Tom Cruise), is forced into battle and suffers a mortal wound. But Cage also winds up taking out one of the aliens, called "Mimics," during a later military strike. The creature bathes him in its blood as he lays dying.
Then, beyond the realm of death, Cage wakes up.
And he realizes he is trapped in a time loop. Soon, he finds the so-called "Full Metal B*tch," billboard-famous British Special Ops soldier Rita, on the front lines, who quickly deciphers his predicament, and instructs him to locate her after his next demise. He complies, and soon she is training him throughout his time loop, in the hope that he can figure out a hack to ultimately take down the Mimics in time. Rita is essentially the sage, experienced mentor and deftly capable colleague rolled into one character, quick with a quip but also ruthlessly efficient in all things when necessary. She seems to take special delight in killing Cage and restarting his next loop.
- 973 VOTESPhoto: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon / Sony Pictures Classics
Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), one of the key heroes in the poignant romantic martial arts period epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is the baddest of the bad, a brutally efficient and gifted swordfighter who runs a private security force, laying waste to all haters in circa 1800s China. Shu Lien's only real vulnerability is against the Green Destiny, a mythically powerful sword capable of turning whoever wields it into a terrific fighter. Crouching Tiger is, in part, a tale of doomed romances and shifting allegiances, and Shu Lien tackles both issues with grace and skill.
As portrayed by Michelle Yeoh, a longtime veteran of Hong Kong actioners with serious stunt fighting gravitas, Yu Shu Lien shines bright in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a big worldwide crossover box-office sensation upon its release. The character is almost always the smartest person in the room, and her fighting defies the traditional laws of gravity. There's a reason Shu Lien became the main star of the film's belated 2016 sequel, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny.
- 1096 VOTESPhoto: Wonder Woman / Warner Bros.
Gal Gadot is the only actor to crack this list with real-life combat experience. An actual, legitimate bad*ss, Gadot served in the Israel Defense Forces as a combat fitness instructor for two years in her early 20s. This has made her an incredibly convincing action heroine across both the Fast & Furious and DCEU movies. Gadot's signature role, of course, is as the first big-screen incarnation of Diana Prince, AKA Wonder Woman, appearing thus far in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, two Wonder Woman films (2017 and 2020), and Justice League.
Patty Jenkins's first Wonder Woman is the standout. A fantastic, rip-roaring origin story and period action-adventure in which superhuman Amazon Diana has to save the world from infernal forces during WWI, Wonder Woman gives us a terrific heroine full of curiosity and, well, wonder as she discovers the intricacies of human nature, having arrived fresh from an exotic island that's home to a femme fighting force. Gadot is balletic as she moves through the various fight scenes, and showcases a spirited energy in the more intimate character-building moments.
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- 1185 VOTESPhoto: Mad Max: Fury Road / Warner Bros.
One-armed war captain-turned-freedom fighter Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) pivots from a world of militant service under the grotesque mutant Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) to one of adventure, promise, and the moral high ground when she rescues "The Five Wives," a quintet of sex slaves seemingly fated to sire mutant progeny for Immortan Joe. Furiosa's deft gunmanship and expert tank-driving help save the Five Wives, along with nominal series lead "Mad" Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy).
The entire movie essentially boils down to one prolonged, epic chase sequence, as Joe and his many suicidal cronies pursue Furiosa and Max, who are working to transport the Five Wives to a neutral zone free of Immortan Joe's jurisdictional influence, "The Green Place." Furiosa is the breakout star of the story - a cool woman of few words with a mysterious past who can handle herself in a variety of intimidating action set pieces, as portrayed by one of the most gifted actors of her generation.
More Imperator Furiosa - 1254 VOTESPhoto: La Femme Nikita / Gaumont Film Company
In Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita, hapless teen junkie Nikita (Anne Parillaud) is trained as a covert government operative under an assumed identity after killing cops during an armed robbery gone bad. Having gotten in her hitwoman reps early, Nikita proves especially skilled at her craft.
Until an attempted document theft at an embassy... goes bad. Just like old times.
This time, Nikita actually has someone she cares about in her life - her new lover Marco (Jean-Hugues Anglade) - so she actively strives to make amends for the professional slip-up. To keep Marco safe, she eventually determines that she needs to surrender the stolen document to her employers and leave Marco behind, even as she hopes to make a clean break from her life as a ruthless government operative.
- 1358 VOTES
Hanna
Photo: Hanna / Focus FeaturesWithout question, Hanna Heller (Saoirse Ronan) belongs firmly in the "Killer Child" pop culture pantheon.
The genetically enhanced 15-year-old super-assassin at the heart of Hanna has been undergoing rigorous training by her former CIA operative dad who knows too much, Erik (Eric Bana), since she was a toddler. Hanna does battle throughout the film against Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), the current CIA officer tasked with taking down Erik.
Despite being just a kid, Hanna works her way through several highly skilled CIA spies with incredible cunning and alacrity, using deceptive acting techniques along with excellent shooting and fisticuffs skills.
- 1471 VOTESPhoto: The Old Guard / Netflix
In The Old Guard, Andromache of Scythia (Charlize Theron) is a 6,000-year-old near-immortal mercenary who can heal from any injury and strives to take on noble missions. Andy has her roots in the Bronze Age - the character is the wife of Hector, a key character in Homer's Iliad.
Along with a small crew of similarly long-lasting killers, Andromache and her team are betrayed by a CIA employer (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who exposes their immortal nature to a sadistic pharmaceutical executive (Harry Melling) in the hopes of capitalizing on their regenerative capabilities. They discover that their immortality actually does arrive with a shelf life, which one of their number (Matthias Schoenaerts) sees as a potential salve.
Charlize Theron has been an action-movie icon for many years now, and Andy is really just the latest example of Theron's similarly near-immortal ability to create cool, grounded characters through which her audiences can bear witness to extraordinary action set pieces and outrageous sci-fi scenarios.
- 1579 VOTES
Mrs. Smith
Photo: Mr. And Mrs. Smith / 20th Century FoxOne-half of the most scorching cinematic action couple possibly ever, Jane Smith (Angelina Jolie) is a character with a unique problem: She has an incredible and fulfilling job, and a husband with the same career about which he's equally passionate. Unfortunately, neither Smith has any idea about the other's vocation, so the couple is romantically frigid when Mr. and Mrs. Smith kicks off. The characters bemoan a total lack of spark in couples therapy, totally unaware that their core problem is actually pretty common among couples: a lack of total honesty.
Jane and her husband John (Brad Pitt) met on separate international espionage missions, but because they are both for-hire assassins working for separate syndicates, they maintain detailed "cover lives." Their ruses are so good that they fool each other, two of the best covert killers on the planet. When working gigs where they ultimately discover their true identities, the Smiths initially engage in a violent shootout at their cozy suburban mansion, secretly rigged with two separate arsenals of pro-grade firepower. Eventually they team up and go on the run, determined to take down their employers - but not until they rediscover that romantic spark, thrilled to be finally romantically engaged on all levels thanks to their new openness about their chosen career paths. Mrs. Smith is a lethal assassin who, over the course of the film, discovers that she does her best work when she can be in a completely honest relationship with a fully committed, loving partner.
- 1645 VOTESPhoto: Tomorrow Never Dies / MGM
Over the decades, MI6 superspy James Bond has been paired with a variety of so-called "Bond Girls" (a bit of an outmoded idiom, but no matter). Though always fairly capable and cool to a degree, Bond's romantic counterparts frequently find themselves in need of a good rescue by the dashing and debonair secret agent. The franchise underwent a significant shift in this department by the time of the second Pierce Brosnan adventure, Tomorrow Never Dies. The Brosnan Bond finds himself teaming up with Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh), a Chinese Ministry of State Security agent, to defeat Elliott Carver (Jonathan Pryce), a demented Rupert Murdoch-esque news mogul with designs on starting World War III for the benefit of his broadcasts. With him every step of the way is Wai Lin, who, as portrayed by Yeoh, is clearly a better hand-to-hand combatant, though she benefits from a lot of the gadgetry supplied to Bond by Q (Desmond Llewelyn). Outfitting Bond with a bad*ss female spy counterpart from a rival power may not have been a new trope (this also happens in The Spy Who Loved Me and Licence to Kill), but never before was that counterpart so believable as a fighter or such a dimensionally realized personality.
"I get to work with a decadent agent of a corrupt Western power," Wai Lin complains at one point, in a wry bit of self-deprecation from a series that generally doesn't dabble in such things. Bond is ready with a pithy, flirtatious retort, because of course he is. But it's just an echo of her initial line. This time, finally, we've met a super-spy who brings her own sense of flair and panache to the table without sacrificing an ounce of lethality. We leave the movie utterly convinced of Wai Lin's toughness. This is a Bond Girl who can do the rescuing. Why wasn't there a spin-off Wai Lin movie series?
- 1757 VOTES
llsa Faust
Photo: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation / Paramount PicturesAs is the case in a lot of spy adventures, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) is a complicated character. We first believe her to be a lethal terrorist assassin, a freelance field operative for Solomon Lane's (Sean Harris) bad-guy collective the Syndicate in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. It turns out she's actually an MI6 spy, undercover to infiltrate Lane's operation. She and Impossible Mission Force world-saver Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) soon become crucial colleagues after a few face-offs while she is still masquerading as a villain. Ilsa is a brilliant spy, adept at a variety of combat scenarios, and also looks really cool in a dress.
Not every Ethan Hunt associate recurs from movie to movie. There's a reason Ilsa has stuck around (she is set to be a main player for a third straight movie, the as-yet-untitled seventh installment in the series): Ferguson and Cruise sport a unique chemistry. Both performers radiate the characters' mutual collegial respect, mixed with a subtle-but-unquestionable romantic dynamic. A makeout scene between the pair in the sixth installment, Mission: Impossible - Fallout, was ultimately left on the cutting room floor, but was filmed because Ilsa Faust has proven to be one of Ethan's most memorable foils.
- 1853 VOTESPhoto: Coffy / American International Pictures
Cool, calm, and collected nurse by day, vengeful vigilante by night, the bodacious and bad*ss Flower Child "Coffy" Coffin (Pam Grier) takes down scores of mobsters, drug dealers, pimps, and corrupt city councilmen as she avenges a tandem of atrocities. In the intense, fast-paced Jack Hill actioner Coffy, our title heroine is striving to penalize a slew of crooks for two sins. The first is her little sister's heroin addiction, which she avenges by any means necessary, including disguising herself as a lady of the night to seduce and ensnare a drug peddler and gangster. The second is the attack on her incorruptible cop pal Carter, who was confronted by two anonymous crooks intent on penalizing him for his unwillingness to accept bribes.
Coffy uses a variety of weapons to take down various cadres of crooks, including guns, wine bottles, and cars. She can withstand brutal odds stacked against her success. Grier is always mesmerizing and utterly convincing in any of her many tough-minded heroine roles, and Coffy is one of her best: sharp as a tack, deadly, and determined.
More Coffy - 1962 VOTESPhoto: Fast & Furious / Universal Pictures
Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez) undergoes quite the evolution across the span of the Fast & Furious franchise. She transitions from being an expert high-speed DVD thief and illicit street racer in the first and fourth flicks to an amnesiac international terrorist in the sixth to her (to date) final form: a car-driving super-spy. Her inclusion here is unique in that, even within the context of her own movies, she is essentially a likable villain until the end of Furious 6. She is a highly skilled thief, able to make daring transactions at a race track clip, but she is not a traditional "hero" for several movies.
The signature Letty may still be the original model (ditto Dom and Brian). Brash, tough, and amazing at auto repair, Letty is a bit of an antihero at first, along with her original crew. They're thieves, but they operate by a code, unlike some of their competitors. When undercover LAPD detective Brian O'Connor (Paul Walker) infiltrates their ranks, Letty is slow to let her guard down. We get the sense that she's been deceived before, and she's a fast learner. Her instincts ultimately prove right when Brian's true identity is revealed. Over the course of several movies, Brian eventually ingratiates himself with the crew. He himself breaks bad and joins Dom as an outlaw, but by the sixth movie, when Letty is an outlaw working for the villainous spec ops soldier-turned-thief Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), Brian and Dom are essentially super-spies. By the seventh movie, they're all super-spies. But we don't come to these movies for consistency - we come to them for awesome car chases and a diverse array of memorable characters who vacillate across both sides of the law.
Letty is fiercely loyal to Dom (well, most of the time), great at taking sharp turns at high speeds, and cannot be stopped by conventional means (she survives what is initially assumed to be a fiery demise with just a concussion and some memory loss). Rodriguez is always utterly convincing, no matter which side of the fence Letty is playing on. She (and presumably her stunt double) adeptly holds her own during a memorable hand-to-hand combat scene through the subways of London against former pro MMA fighter Gina Carano.
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- 2066 VOTESPhoto: Mortal Kombat / New Line Cinema
Special Forces operative-turned-Earthrealm Mortal Kombat combatant Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras) may transition from being driven by a personal/professional vendetta against one-eyed British crook Kano (Trevor Goddard) to becoming a reluctant savior of the entire human race, but she never loses her cool, even when she is abducted by Shang Tsung during the climax of the first Mortal Kombat.
The character has been recast (first with Sandra Hess and more recently Jessica McNamee) in subsequent big-screen incarnations, but the Wilson-Sampras vintage deserves special acclaim here. This Sonya is a well-rounded character: tough, funny, and utterly believable in her fight scenes. Wilson-Sampras apparently did all her own stunt work, and was something of a real-life bad*ss during production. In an oral history for The Hollywood Reporter, Wilson-Sampras said, "In the very beginning [of filming], I dislocated my shoulder. I did a partial dislocation, but it was weird because I was totally fine. They were worried. They popped it back in and we kept going. It was all good."
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