Best “dad movie” action heroes of 2026: Watch the best Jason Statham, Liam Neeson, Gerard Butler movies on Netflix and beyond
With the debut of new socko action flick Mutiny, Jason Statham tightens his grip on the kingly scepter signifying his status as the “Dad Movie Action Star” du jour. Guns will go bang. Knives will be plunged into torsos. Explosions will fill the screen. And Statham’s signature poker face will crack us up, intentionally or otherwise.
Whether Mutiny addresses any thematic subject matter that’s at all relevant to our lives as members of the global citizenry? Doubtful. Such is the escapist value of the Dad Action Movie, a subgenre with a large, devoted following of dads and dad-adjacents who appreciate boilerplate shootouts, clumsily directed car chases, pervasive fisticuffs and good old-fashioned stories about good guys whupping the bad guys’ tushes. These movies sometimes pop up in theaters, earning modest box office returns. But far more often, they pop up in your movie-streaming menus like weeds, sometimes nudging their way into top 10 lists — e.g. Liam Neeson’s In the Land of Saints and Sinners, or the umpteenth movie in the Sniper franchise, both of which recently racked up considerable numbers on Netflix.
A big part of these movies’ appeal is the headlining star. Guys like Statham and Neeson bring a type of predictable presence to their films that people find appealing, their personae promising the type of violence against scum who deserve it that functions as comfort-food viewing for a lot of us. No one’s gonna call it “cinema,” but neither is it trying to be.
So we figured it was time to deep-dive into all of our favorite current-era Dad Movie Action Stars. Our criteria: Sly and Ah-nuld are retirees on the genre’s Mount Rushmore. Alan Ritchson, Jason Momoa, and Dave Bautista are a little too new to the scene, and aren’t so easily pigeonholed to the confines of the 46-year-olds-scrolling-through-menus demographic — like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, their movies aren’t quite generic enough in concept and execution, at least not yet.
No, the following are the guys who eschew flash and style in lieu of getting the job done in a workmanlike style with little more than baseline competence. You just can’t help but admire their ability to make an unapologetically mediocre movie, well, slightly less mediocre. These are the Living Legends of Dad Action Movies, 2026:
Jason Statham
Although the next guy on our list has a legit claim for the top spot, Statham earns it by currently being in the midst of a five-movie run of no-nonsense asskickery, with new flick Mutiny preceded by The Beekeeper, A Working Man, and Shelter, with The Beekeeper 2 slated to sting our asses in January 2027. And that will be followed by his Being John Malkovich moment, Jason Statham Stole My Bike, a self-aware action-comedy (from Deadpool and John Wick veteran director David Leitch) that pokes fun at his pokerfaced persona, and likely will show us the further evolution of his signature movie-martial-arts move: the ability to elbow himself in the ribs.
Signature Dad Action Movie: The Beekeeper, the rare instance in which the rest of the film – especially the performances of Jeremy Irons and Josh Hutcherson – falls in step with Statham’s underrated ability to make us laugh with his hard-as-nails game face.
Liam Neeson
Although Statham currently holds the zeitgeist in the grip of his steely-hilarious glare, Neeson maintains his competitiveness in the Dad Action sweepstakes with sheer numbers. Ever since he headlined Dad Action classic Taken in 2008, he’s tough-guyed his way through roughly a dozen-and-a-half generically forgettable (but often modestly entertaining) violent thrillers, including two Taken sequels, a couple of Ice Road trucker flix and a few somewhat-but-probably-not-really-underrated actioners by B+ director Jaume Collet-Serra. And he shows little signs of slowing down.
Signature Dad Action Movie: The Grey, director Joe Carnahan’s smarter-than-expected gritty survivalist B-movie in which Neeson fights a pack of wolves with his damn bare hands. Hell. Yes.
Gerard Butler
The Irish actor who rose to prominence with 300 has ridden the backlash rollercoaster, gutting out some horrible rom-coms, headlining the cruddy Has Fallen movies and bottoming out with the immortal Geostorm. Then he earned his way back into fans’ good graces with two rock-solid Den of Thieveses, rock-solid apocalypse thriller Greenland (note: skip the dud sequel), and rock-solid goofy action-er Plane. I dare say his work is increasingly rock-solid. Are we actually anticipating the release of hostage thriller Empire City? Yeah, sure, why not?
Signature Dad Action Movie: Plane, because there’s just something about a deeply sincere Butler playing a stressed-out, sweating-out-his-eyeballs airline pilot bellowing, “WE NEED ALL THE THRUST WE CAN GET!!!” that’s undeniably hilarious.
Nicolas Cage
This is a weird one on multiple levels — and not just because Cage sits atop the hill as Hollywood’s most eccentric star. His days of headlining blockbusters are over, so now he either headlines oddball direct-to-nowhere actioners, thrillers, Westerns and sci-fi flix (e.g., Willy’s Wonderland, The Old Way, Arcadian) or pops up in oddball projects that earn him critical acclaim (Dream Scenario, Pig, Longlegs). His cheapo Dad Action stuff dates all the way back to 2011’s Drive Angry: a period of his life defined by a career dip, money/tax problems, and the revelation that the dude bought a dinosaur skull that he didn’t know was stolen (I hate it when that happens!). Tangentially, he joins Statham in the Malkovich Self-Awareness Hall of Fame thanks to The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, but that doesn’t count here because it’s a nudgy-winky comedy.
Signature Dad Action Movie: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is a categorical stretch, but any reason to encourage viewing of this thoroughly nutty thriller is a good reason. Here Cage famously teamed up with all-timer director Werner Herzog, who crafted a crack-smoking, alligator-hallucinating character for our ever-loving actor to play into infamy.
Russell Crowe
Crowe is a Dad Movie hall-of-famer thanks to prestigers like Gladiator and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World — the former won him an Oscar and the latter is an underappreciated masterpiece. His dramatic run through the ’00s and ’10s is damn terrific, from The Insider to A Beautiful Mind to even the goofy-good Noah and riotous action-comedy The Nice Guys. But standards have slipped since 2020, with Crowe popping up in forgettable stuff like Unhinged, Land of Bad, and not one but two junky exorcism-related horror outings. He’s typically the best thing in those movies, but that feels like a backhanded compliment, doesn’t it?
Signature Dad Action Movie: Land of Bad ain’t half-bad, actually, even if Crowe doesn’t participate in the shooting and fighting — he’s enjoyably charismatic as a military drone pilot overseeing a mission from a cozy remote office.
Bob Odenkirk
Odenkirk is the newcomer, the fresh new 63-year-old face in the Dad Action cultural experiment. His 2021 hit Nobody found him putting on some muscle and bringing new life to the staid old character trope of an everyman who’s secretly a retired asskicker of a secret agent. Its sequel was so-so, but Odenkirk recently returned to form for Normal, playing a cucumber-cool, hard-as-nails cop taking on an entire town of heavily armed yokels. It’s a hoot, and probably wouldn’t have worked nearly as well without his loveable persona.
Signature Dad Action Movie: Nobody, which finds Odenkirk working with a skilled action director in Ilya Naishuller. It’s an on-point pairing of the star’s charm and the filmmaker’s virtuoso moves.
Aaron Eckhart
We’re starting to hit bottom with Eckhart, who peaked with Thank You for Smoking and The Dark Knight, then began skidding hard into the annals of Dad Movie forgettableness with junkheap ackshun moovie Battle: Los Angeles. Since then, he’s co-starred with Gerry B. in a couple of Has Fallenses, WTF’ed his way through I Frankenstein and, in the 2020s, anchored some grimly anonymous pay-checkers like Rumble Through the Dark and two Muzzle movies, in which he plays a K-9 cop. Woof.
Signature Dad Action Movie: The Bricklayer, which is pretty bad, but also quite funny contextually, coming on the heels of Statham’s The Beekeeper in the blue-collar action-dude sweepstakes. It seems inevitable that Dolph Lundgren will soon star in The Bananahandler.
Orlando Bloom
“We’re in the dregs now,” he said sadly, shedding a tear for Legolas. Famous as all hell for The Lord of the Rings and The Pirates of the Caribbean franchises, Bloom is another poster boy for Nothing Lasts Forever. His films from the last 10 years or so are archer’s arrows that missed the target for miles. The Outpost, Red Right Hand, The Cut… To watch this stuff requires a level of boredom rarely experienced by modern man. Here’s hoping a role in Herzog’s upcoming Bucking Fastard will give him a boost.
Signature Dad Action Movie: The action-comedy Deep Cover isn’t exactly a masterpiece, but Bloom shows some comedy chops, playing a Method actor recruited by the cops for an undercover sting. He’s the highlight of this mediocrity.
Mel Gibson
Yeah. I know. The former superstar’s various headline-grabbing misdeeds found him blacklisted, anchoring during recent years a series of punchy-shooty rent-a-star projects that reads like a who-the-hell-is-that-director list. Hot Seat, Bandit, Desperation Road, Boneyard, Hunting Season… any of these ringing a bell? No? Well, they probably shouldn’t be. If you can perform the Herculean task of “Separating The Art From The Artist,” you should give kudos to ol’ Mel for the pretty funny Fatman, in which he plays a grizzled Santa Claus fighting back against an assassin hired by a coal-worthy kid. Otherwise, he’s been working on a two-part sequel to The Passion of the Christ. Check please!
Signature Dad Action Movie: Dragged Across Concrete is a livewire of a cop-actioner by S. Craig Zahler, pairing Gibson with Vince Vaughn. You’ll love it or you’ll hate it, but you’ll definitely remember it.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
