All 16 Tony Scott Movies, Ranked Worst To Best

No filmmaker ever caught more flack for unabashedly being the kind of filmmaker he wanted to be than Tony Scott. The critical brickbats hit hard in 1983 with his first film, “The Hunger,” and there was rarely ever letup. He was the style-over-substance Antichrist born of commercials and music videos. According to Metacritic, only four of his 16 films were positively reviewed during their initial theatrical release (“Crimson Tide,” “Enemy of the State,” “Unstoppable,” and “Spy Game”), all begrudgingly so. The TV Guide review of “Crimson Tide” backhand-praises Scott as “Hollywood’s slickest hack.” The man was anything but beloved.

Where are we on Tony Scott today? 12 years after his terribly sudden and wholly unexpected death, he’s become a cause amongst trash cinema devotees, who hold him up as a master of aesthetically pleasing mayhem. There are those who adore him, and even prefer him to his more prestige-friendly brother Ridley Scott, but aside from the vastly improved critical standing of “True Romance” (which received mixed reviews in 1993), it feels like we’re where we’ve always been. He’s the devil who washed away the grit of adult-skewing, New Hollywood-influenced dramas with empty spectacle. He didn’t uplift or edify; he sold.

His detractors were almost always wrong, and ignorantly uncharitable — and we know this now because, over a decade since he left us, there have been dozens upon dozens of massive action films that would’ve at least been compulsively watchable under his adrenalized gaze (Scott was a danger junkie who rock climbed in his downtime). We didn’t need “Cherry” or “The Gray Man” under any circumstances, but at least they would’ve hurtled with high-style velocity with Scott behind the camera instead of slop merchants like Joe and Anthony Russo. Scott gave us a charge and worked like a man, well, on fire. According to a must-read Sunday Times Magazine profile by Ariel Leve, he barely slept while making a movie, rising at 3 AM to storyboard the day’s work and blazing toward wrap with very few breaks.

This intensity pulsates from even his weakest efforts. When I set out to rank his movies, I dreaded revisiting his worst movies only to find that they’re all eminently watchable. The material may be lousy on occasion, but the films are never less than propulsive. Even after they’ve revealed themselves to be preposterous or simply dumb, you hang around to watch the show – because Scott was first and foremost a showman who knew how to pace and, obviously, cast. We never realized how good we had it until he was gone. With this in mind, here are his films ranked from least to finest.

Scott’s weakest film in a walk is “The Fan,” largely because he cares so very little for the milieu. This is fine in the early going, when writer Phoef Sutton is dialed into the impotent rage of Robert De Niro’s baseball superfan, who takes out his frustrations on his ex-wife and, eventually, the professional athlete (Wesley Snipes) he initially revered. But once the film turns into a standard-issue psycho thriller (replete with stock suspense beats), Scott’s film sputters. This is unfortunate because Scott, who loved actors and trusted them to, in his parlance, rock-and-roll, gets two fine star performances out of De Niro and Snipes. “The Fan” might’ve worked better had it been set in the world of professional football, which was at least aggro and violent in a way Scott understood (as he demonstrated in a film that ranks a good deal higher than this one).

Scott had amassed some serious box office clout after “Top Gun,” but rather than spend that capital on a more personally appealing, less overtly commercial film straightaway (he’d scratch that itch a few years later with “Revenge”), he hopped back in bed with producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer and delivered the most hotly anticipated sequel of 1987. It’s hardly a surprise that a generational comedic talent like Eddie Murphy can generate big laughs in a film that slathers on the glitz to the detriment of its limp plot, but up until this film he’d never had to work this hard to amuse us. It was a sign of struggles to come. It’s also an off-puttingly mean-spirited film. And yet, like all Scott films, eminently watchable.

If you ever wondered what Jacques Tourneur’s “Out of the Past” might look like if it wasn’t just cold around the heart but utterly, irrevocably frozen at its core, this is the movie for you. Kevin Costner stars as a hot-shot Navy pilot who takes up the offer of a vacation on the sprawling estate of a macho, macho mob kingpin (Anthony Quinn) whose life he once saved during a hunting expedition. Upon arriving, Costner falls madly in love with his friend’s beautiful wife (Madeleine Stowe) — an unwise dalliance given that Quinn has every inch of his property under intense observation 24/7. The smoldering first act is vintage Scott, particularly the scorching hot (and wholly ludicrous) sex scene in a speeding jeep, but it turns into a slog once Costner and Stowe are beaten and left for dead (she’s rather viciously sliced up and consigned to a bordello). Scott’s the ideal director for this material; I’m just not sure this nastily shallow material was worthy of his time.

Tony Scott and Tom Cruise’s need for speed isn’t quite as cinematic when fixed to an oval racetrack, so it’s not terribly surprising that this trashy, lunkheaded little number never quite takes flight. And yet it’s a real hoot thanks to the Scott’s usual murderer’s row of supporting players. Though we know the movie was made under extreme duress (it blew by its originally scheduled Memorial Day release when principal photography started late), what’s not to like about a bro film featuring the fully-engaged likes of Robert Duvall, Michael Rooker, Randy Quaid, John C. Reilly and Caroline Williams. “Days of Thunder” might not have been fun to shoot, but it’s a helluva good time at the movies. Grab a sixer, fire up a cigar for the man they called Tone and let ‘er rip (and learn from /Film about the film’s real-life inspiration).

In 2002, Scott directed a commercial for BMW as part of its “The Hire” series titled “Beat the Devil.” It’s ostensibly about James Brown (as himself) attempting to get his youth back from Satan (Gary Oldman), who he sold it down at the Las Vegas crossroads as a young man. Stylistically, it’s Scott hurling everything including the kitchen sink at the screen and wondering what if anything will stick. He applied this assaultive aesthetic to “Domino,” a highly fictionalized biopic about the life of model-turned-bounty-hunter Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley), stirred in a surfeit of inspired left-field casting choices (Tom Waits, Dabney Coleman, and “Beverly Hills 90210” actors Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green playing themselves), and let us make sense of the unceasing visual turmoil. It works maybe a quarter of the time, but you’ve never seen anything quite like it. I could sit through it again right now just to marvel at its big-swing creative choices. The film’s screenwriter Richard Kelly called it “punk rock,” and that feels bang-on to me.

No one was clamoring for a remake to one of the finest crime thrillers of the 1970s, a film of shaggy perfection that boasts a vintage Walter Matthau performance and one of the all-time great final shots. But from that booming opening credits sequence scored to Linkin Park and Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” Scott signals that he means business, and the film never lets up over its taut 106-minute runtime. Casting Denzel Washington as a deskbound train dispatcher is a minor misstep in that he’s not entirely convincing as a beatdown working stiff, but John Travolta is a roaring hoot as the hijacker with a convoluted stock manipulation scheme. Scott shoots New York City as the remorseless concrete wonder that it is. He makes you feel this movie.

Tony Scott’s feature directing debut opens appropriately with a caged Peter Murphy brooding through a live performance of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” It’s meant as a provocation: the vampire movies you grew up on are no longer; long live the new, erotic era of bloodsuckers. But with envelope shredders like “Daughters of Darkness” and “Vampyros Lesbos” in 1983’s rearview, there wasn’t anything inherently shocking about “The Hunger” (unless you read it as a commentary on grooming). There was, however, something undeniably hot about a fang-bearing love triangle involving Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, and Susan Sarandon. The screenplay is wafer thin, but as a piece of vampire-themed erotica it dusts any film or television version of Anne Rice’s novels.

If you pumped Robert Ludlum full of amphetamines, tied him to the world’s most uncomfortable chair, and forced him at gunpoint to write a spy thriller in under 24 hours, you’d probably emerge with something as rushed and barely coherent as the screenplay credited to Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata for “Spy Game.” As with other cinematic concepts that sound awful in theory, it works when your director is Tony Scott in rare Cuisinart-cutting form. The primary draw here is the pairing of Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, and it’s a sandy blonde bonanza of double- and triple-crosses that bewilders and bedazzles in equal measure.

When we talk about the greatest car chases of all time, we need to set aside an honorable mention for the gonzo pursuit of the past in Tony Scott’s mind-breaking sci-fi action flick “Déjà Vu.” Scott’s favorite star, Denzel Washington, mans a Humvee in the present (all the better to smash automobiles with) in an attempt to trail the truck of a terrorist (Jim Caviezel) who will plant a bomb on a New Orleans ferry that will kill 543 people in the past. To do this, he needs to drive on a busy bridge with one eye glued to a headset display that allows him to see four days behind him. This being a Tony Scott movie, there’s a lot of twisted steel by the end of this sequence. The rest of the film is just as enjoyably loony. You’ll either get off on the gleefully unapologetic implausibilities or run screaming after the first twenty minutes. I obviously think quite highly of it.

The film that drove a spike in U.S. Navy enlistment, turned bomber jackets into a fashion phenomenon, and vaulted Tom Cruise to the top of the A list is a hilariously shallow crowd-pleaser about a cocky fighter pilot who becomes the greatest fighter pilot on the planet after learning to live with the death of his co-pilot, which wasn’t his fault. Basically, Cruise’s Maverick learns nothing, but you’d have to be an awful killjoy to deny the nirvanic sensory overload of Scott’s finest feature-length commercial. This isn’t faint praise. It takes talent to sell at this level. And we happily buy into it because Scott surrounds his high-wattage stars (let’s not forget the teeth-clicking cool of Val Kilmer’s Iceman) with his patented assortment of colorful character actors. Everything is in its right place in “Top Gun.” It’s simply about being hot s*** and not apologizing for it (even if it is a lie told with style).

The luridness of 1990s Los Angeles is captured with smokey, strip-club anti-glamor by Scott in his rollicking rendition of a Shane Black ashes-to-ragged-glory detective yarn. Bruce Willis is perfectly cast as a former Secret Service agent who unexpectedly catches a murder case that pairs him with a disgraced pro football quarterback (Damon Wayans). The twists and turns of Black’s hard-boiled narrative are deftly complemented by Scott’s ecstatic staging of the outsized action set pieces. Thirty-three years ago, critics moaned that the buddy-cop formula had grown stale, but like a good blues song it’s all in the way that you play it, Scott and Black are deep in the groove here. It’s a bummer they never crossed paths again.

This is probably the first major studio film to bluntly drive home that the United States (and the world) was rapidly turning into a full-scale surveillance state (honorable mention to Wim Wenders’ “The End of Violence” for getting here first), yet, amazingly, this doesn’t get in the way of “Enemy of the State” being a raucously entertaining time at the movies. In fact, this might be the most entertaining film Scott ever made (with a wild ending that evokes the climactic carnage of “True Romance”). Bolstered by a sharp screenplay credited to David Marconi, it’s definitely one of Scott’s smartest, especially when it brings Gene Hackman in to play a surveillance-nut callback to Harry Caul from Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation.” But this is really Scott and Will Smith’s show, with the latter’s quick-witted persona propelling the film forward at every turn. These two absolutely should’ve hooked up again.

“Creasy’s art is death. He’s about to paint his masterpiece.” Of the five films Tony Scott made with Denzel Washington, “Man on Fire” is undoubtedly the most ambitious in terms of performance and theme. It’s a dark, remorseless action film about a man beyond salvation who goes on a killing spree to rescue the child (Dakota Fanning) who made his shattered life worth living. Washington is working a jagged variation on the alcoholic soldier he played in “Courage Under Fire,” and it’s more horrifying than invigorating to watch his Creasy torture and murder anyone connected with the kidnapping of this pure daughter of a sullied automobile magnate (Marc Anthony). Scott’s locked in on Washington’s wavelength, creating a distorted collage of light and sound that darkens as Creasy nears his terminus. At two-and-a-half hours, it does feel like a wallow at times, but the craftsmanship is stellar. There are those who believe Scott painted his masterpiece with “Man on Fire.” I get it.

Tony Scott has several films in competition for the Mount Rushmore of Dad Movies, and if I’m doing the chiseling, this submarine action-thriller starring top-of-their-games Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman is taking the granite honors. It’s a pretty simple setup: prickly sub commander Hackman gets a capable new second-in-command in Washington, whose fitness for the job is suddenly challenged when an order to launch the ship’s nuclear arsenal is potentially contradicted by an incomplete second order. Old-school Hackman only recognizes the complete first order, and prepares to fire; Washington, knowing the fate of the world hangs in the balance, stages a mutiny to hold fire until the entirety of the second order can be received. Place Scott in a confined submarine, and you’re going to get a different kind of light show, though the fireworks are largely set off by the leads and their formidably talented co-stars (e.g. George Dzundza, Viggo Mortensen, and James Gandolfini). Many lawns have gone unmowed on a perfectly clear Saturday due to this movie.

Tony Scott’s final film is arguably his finest. I’m ranking it second because the top film has greater emotional resonance, but, wow, is “Unstoppable” ever a full-throttle Hollywood action classic. The premise is amusingly simple: an unmanned freight train hauling loads of toxic chemicals accidentally gets started down a Pennsylvania train track, eventually becoming a speeding disaster that only a veteran engineer (Denzel Washington) and a rookie railroad man (Chris Pine) can stop. Scott’s love affair with Washington was most floridly expressed in “Man of Fire,” but here he gets to hitch a winningly minimal project to possibly the greatest actor of his generation and watch him fly. Unlike some of Scott’s other films, the complications here are not unrealistic or forced; they’re in-the-moment, do-or-die crises. As a result, he’s able to rein in his hyperkinetic style and give us one helluva hurtling show. It’s a white-knuckler with very few equals.

Tony Scott was the first filmmaker to understand there was genuine warmth lurking under the chatty, violent surface of Quentin Tarantino’s pulp fictions. This tale of Clarence (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette) didn’t fare all that well with critics upon its initial release in 1993, and part of this had to do with critics’ sense that Scott’s style somehow got in the way of Tarantino’s snappy dialogue. On the contrary, Scott’s patented shimmer-and-smoke aesthetic enhances the performances. Scott’s love for actors was never more apparent; the care he takes in letting Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper settle into their classic confrontation, where the latter deftly guides the former through a historical anecdote spiked with a grievous, no-comeback-save-for-a-bullet insult, is textbook subtlety from a man rarely accused of employing it. “True Romance” brought something lovely out of Scott. Knowing that it was his favorite of his cinematic children tells you everything you need to know about the man, that for all his flash and bravado he loved how completely weird and wild and wonderful human beings — and life — could be.