Credit: Netflix

For this weekend, we have decided to take you on an old-school action movie tour on Netflix. The charm those films have… It’s unbeatable. Modern action films are great and all, no doubt, but how many car chases can you watch before they all start looking the same? Instead, give a warrior a grudge and a battlefield full of people standing in his way, and then watch.

Although you do get a bit bored when it’s just hundreds of soldiers swinging swords at each other for two hours. Like, at least tell us why everyone’s so angry! And once you’ve spent half the film watching some guy suffer, well, of course you want to see him get his revenge. You are practically sitting there hoping the villain gets what’s coming to him.

And don’t even get started on historical accuracy. Half these films probably have historians pulling their hair out, especially when mythology gets involved. But you can’t help enjoying the madness.

Anyway, we have five such films on Netflix to get through, and they’re quite a lot. Plenty of sword fights, coming at your service.

The five best movies to watch on Netflix this weekend

Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)

Ancient Rome: what a time to be alive, unless you happened to annoy an emperor, of course. And Roman battle movies have a way of making all those bloody power struggles look like the grandest drama on earth; at least that’s what Hollywood taught us. Gladiator is probably a movie, nay, a revenge story no cinefan has left untouched.

Russell Crowe plays Maximus, a general whom Marcus Aurelius trusts with Rome’s future. But his son Commodus? Oh, the spoilt brat can’t bear the thought of someone else taking charge, so he goes and murders his own father. And poor Maximus becomes part of the mess! His family suffers a terrible fate, and before the boy can even process what’s happened, he’s sold into slavery and forced to fight for his life in an arena.

And now you’ve got a man who’s lost everything, with an entire empire standing between him and revenge. It’s easy to see the anger coming off him! The best part is Ridley Scott doesn’t hold back with those Colosseum battles either, so it’s a delight for those who came for the action.

The Northman (Robert Eggers, 2022)

Vikings and their family issues, we tell you; these people would have a small argument, and someone in a corner would be found dead by the end of it. The Northman is just the Netflix film you need if you want to see some ancient family feud. It starts with young Amleth watching his uncle murder his father, and then he spends the rest of his life carrying that grudge.

Alexander Skarsgård plays the grown-up prince, who has become a Viking raider and has revenge on his mind. Then he finds out his uncle Fjölnir is living in Iceland with his mother. And what does he do? Disguises himself as a slave and gets into their household.

Eventually, Amleth teams up with Olga, a captive who helps him go after his uncle, but some dirty family secrets make the whole mess worse. The fights are brutal, and those bleak Icelandic landscapes make everything feel even more miserable. Funny enough, The Northman draws from the very legend that inspired Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (Guy Ritchie, 2017)

King Arthur’s story has been told a million times, but you can only trust Guy Ritchie’s version to give it some street attitude. In King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Charlie Hunnam plays Arthur as a hustler who’s grown up miles away from the throne. His uncle Vortigern murdered his father and took the crown, and Arthur’s been getting on with life without a clue about his royal blood.

Then the bloke goes and pulls Excalibur from a stone, and well, that’s his peaceful existence out the window! Suddenly, he’s got a tyrant uncle who wants him dead. At this point, it’s natural to wonder what’s with this feud between uncles and nephews.

And Arthur isn’t exactly thrilled about becoming king, either. Can’t blame him when there’s an army after his head! But a bunch of rebels convince him to fight back, and watching Arthur go from looking out for himself to fighting for his people? That’s where the film earns its keep.

Kingdom (Shinsuke Sato, 2019)

Now Shin from Kingdom has some serious confidence, people. The guy’s a penniless orphan working as a servant in ancient China, but he is convinced he’s going to become a great general. Good for you, mate, for dreaming big, but he’s got a long way to go!

Anyway, he spends his days training with his friend Hyou, and things are going alright until the palace sends Hyou on a secret mission. Well, that goes horribly wrong. Poor Hyou comes back with fatal wounds, but before dying, he leaves Shin some instructions. And following them leads Shin to Eisei, a young king who looks exactly like Hyou. As if that wasn’t strange enough, Eisei’s half-brother has taken his throne.

So now Shin’s helping Eisei get his throne back, and by the end, you are rooting for Shin to prove everyone wrong. The guy’s got big dreams, bless him, and he’s not about to give them up.

The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, 2016)

Matt Damon may have struck gold with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, but go back a decade and you’ll find the same guy struggling with his adventures in historical fantasy, and the biggest example of it would be The Great Wall. Zhang Yimou spent a whopping $150 million making this monster epic, and despite pulling in around $335 million worldwide, it still ended up being a costly flop.

Coming to the story, Damon plays William Garin, a mercenary who goes to China looking for gunpowder… Until an army guarding the Great Wall captures him, and guess what this army was guarding: enormous man-eating monsters called the Tao Tei.

Commander Lin and her troops have their hands full trying to keep the creatures out, and once the siege begins, it turns into nothing but pure insanity. With the CGI, you can see where all that money went, even if the studio probably wishes it hadn’t spent quite so much.