Every Paul W.S. Anderson Movie, Ranked
You may look at the poster for In the Lost Lands and imagine it’s another retread of the dark fantasy action genre, but you’d be dead wrong: it’s a Paul W.S. Anderson film, starring his wife and muse Milla Jovovich as a witch in a magic post-apocalyptic land, which means it’s going to be one of the strangest genre releases of the year.
If you judge Anderson’s filmography by its Tomatometer, you’ll see a range of critical flops, often sneaking into cinemas in the dump months of January, February, and September. This is a woefully incomplete assessment of the man’s strengths – yes, there are plenty of dud scripts, wooden actors, and incoherent CG brawls, but the tide is slowly turning on Anderson apologia: his action scenes are guided by excitement, instinct, and a cinematic grammar that is overlooked by popular, middling directors.
Beyond directing the official adaptations of multiple video game franchises, Paul W.S. Anderson imagines action filmmaking through the lens of video game logic. The plots progress in pursuit of macro and micro objectives; the camera emphasizes the geography of scenes like they’re explorable spaces; enemies and bosses have to be defeated for the character to get to the next plot beat. Contemporary appreciation for Anderson will always hover around the critical term “vulgar auteurism”, but devotees compelled by his unique, modern approach to form and aesthetics and those who want to be distracted by legions of monsters getting murked are both speaking the same appreciatory language: No one makes action movies like Paul W.S. Anderson, and less major releases from him makes for a poorer cinematic climate. To celebrate the return of the (questionable) king, we ranked every film directed by Paul W.S. Anderson.
15. The Sight (2000)
After a couple of high-profile flops, Anderson made a more modest, Britain-set film for premium cable. It’s fitting that the weakest Paul W.S. Anderson film is the only one not to be released in theaters – the director is strongest when playing with scale and movement in a manner that just isn’t feasible for HBO thrillers in the year 2000. Andrew McCarthy stars as an American architect renovating a London hotel – but his dormant ability to commune with ghosts makes him pursue a child serial killer stalking the capital’s streets. Anderson stages the C-grade material commendably, but despite a strong lead in McCarthy, the film becomes far less interesting when it becomes a bog-standard spooky detective story. The Sixth Sense had the decency of making the same plot only ten minutes long!
14. Soldier (1998)
Anderson’s ‘90s were eventful but muddled. After the controversy of his joyriding debut Shopping, the early success of Mortal Kombat set him up for two sci-fi blockbusters that bombed at the box office. Time has been kinder to Event Horizon’s reputation, but whatever reclamation efforts there are for Soldier should stay mute for now. Technically set in the same universe as Blade Runner (who cares!), Kurt Russell stars as a mostly-mute supersoldier abandoned by his unit on a junk planet who is taken in by a wary but good-natured community – and when the gun-ho army returns to the planet, our hero tries to stop them single-handedly. Soldier has all the worst traits of ‘90s Anderson: it’s beholden to a tired, tedious screenplay, the camerawork and edits are too slow and predictable, and lavish production design can’t hold a candle to gonzo, fluid VFX work. Why cast Kurt Russell if the role won’t allow him to be even a little charismatic?
13. Mortal Kombat (1995)
Let’s get another early film under our belt: the first, and technically best Mortal Kombat movie is now most valuable to those with memories of watching it growing up. Why wouldn’t a kid like this film? It’s got the pounding electronic music from the games, bright light flashing on-screen every minute, and colorfully designed-characters fighting on incredibly silly and stunning fantasy sets. Watching as an adult, it’s clear that Mortal Kombat is some incredibly hokey nonsense that could be goofy fun were it not for the painfully empty characters and impactless fight choreography. Shoutout to Goro, though – more specifically, shoutout to the poor actor inside that impressive animatronic suit.
12. Alien vs. Predator (2004)
We are now three Alien movies and three Predator movies richer than we were in 2004 (with more on the way), so audiences probably thought this shoddy crossover film was the best they were going to get from both dated franchises at the time. The 2000s were kinder to Anderson – all his action films earned their budget back and his frenetic, hyper-active style evolved simultaneously with digital filmmaking technology. Here, he plays with moody lighting, camera shutter speeds, and a blend of animatronic and VFX characters to sell the sci-fi showdown. But despite all the close ups of booby traps and puzzle mechanisms, Alien vs. Predator sorely needs a level of sharpness and ingenuity that the flat ensemble and story can’t provide.
11. Shopping (1994)
For the first half hour of Shopping, where baby Jude Law is released from a short-term prison stay and immediately joyrides a car with his best friend (Sadie Frost), you may wonder why Paul W.S. Anderson has never directed another film like it. As the stylish, coming-of-age crime drama progresses its second half, you realize perhaps why he’s never returned to the genre: The scenes of intimate conversations and repressed feeling become stilted and lethargic – the mundanity of back-and-forth dialogue is too direct a form of expression for a filmmaker with such restless ambitions. Still, Anderson demonstrates an early talent for reckless car chases and firecracker performances, with the young cast (Law, Frost, Sean Pertwee, Fraser James) locked into their reckless, pent-up frustrations at the tedium of their country’s future.
10. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)
The final Resident Evil film is a bit of a mess, but fair play to Anderson, Jovovich, et al for getting the series across the finish line with an emphasis on excessive set pieces, convoluted character returns, and long-awaited reveals that are ludicrously far-fetched in an endearing way. This is also the first screen performance of Paul and Milla’s child, Ever Anderson, who plays both a young Alice and the holographic red queen first seen in the first Resident Evil – it’s a sweet way of closing this era for the artist and muse first brought together 12 years prior. However, The Final Chapter is tainted by upsetting production history: after insufficient safety measures led to life-changing injuries and one fatality among the stunt team, it’s a reminder that cost-cutting is guaranteed to endanger vulnerable, below-the-line talent first.
9. Resident Evil (2002)
The subterranean action-horror that started it all, complete with all the hallmarks of turn-of-the-millennium genre schlock: Matrix wirework stunts, badass beautiful women, many snapzooms and whippans, and to top it all off, a score that can’t decide if it’s rock or rave music. As a claustrophobic romp that pits a tactical team against infected bodies, complete with steely blue hues and bright interruptions of red, it’s pretty good; as a reignition of Anderson’s career, an upgrade of his stylistic ambitions, and a proud member of the “Cinematic Zombie Revival” movement, it’s a major text. If this was a ranking of Anderson’s most important films, this would be in the top three.
8. Death Race (2008)
Six years on from Resident Evil, Anderson adapted another preexisting property and made a film that captured the exact mood and feel of contemporary action trends. Death Race is washed of color, with a seedy, aggressive tone and carries a vague dystopian critique that never gets in the way of beefy, smashy car chases with MarioKart-esque gimmicks and plenty of petrol fires and chassis crushes. If a racing game had an industrial rock soundtrack, graphic violence, and a cast competing to see who had the gruffest voice, it would be this. It’s a window into the mid-2000s “hard edge” action genre, but when combined with Anderson’s giddy and playfully designed set pieces, we can plainly see how goofy the genre was all along – it may be Jason Statham’s silliest movie without him ever realizing.
7. The Three Musketeers (2011)
Death Race is, however, not Paul W.S. Anderson’s silliest movie. That honor goes to his loose, fantastical adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ canonized adventure novel. A true relic of the Pirates of the Caribbean imitators, Anderson upped the swashbuckling ante by adding flying airships to his chaotic action-comedy, where D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) joins the disparate musketeers (Matthew Macfadyen, Luke Evans, Ray Stevenson) in a fight to stop the French monarchy being undermined on a global scale. It gets more star-studded from here: The rogues gallery includes Christoph Waltz, Milla Jovovich, Mads Mikkelsen, and Orlando Bloom. There’s something LARP-ish about the adventure, which keeps folding in anachronistic traps, artillery, and warships so it can crank up the delight and excitement – to the point that the film threatens to break in half and teeter over the edge, like the airship that lands squarely on one of Notre-Dame’s spires. But honestly? It’s hard to get annoyed at a film this spirited.
6. In the Lost Lands (2025)
Welcome back, Paul W.S. Anderson films that don’t make a lick of sense. Get ready for 100 minutes of witches and werewolves, industrial hellscapes, crusader cults, and aggressively fractured plotting. Jovovich is an outcast witch doubting her place in the world; Dave Bautista is the snake-slinging outlaw accompanying her on a mission for a scheming queen. Early reactions have already correctly identified that Lost Lands is Anderson going “Albert Pyun-mode” – it’s a smaller and slighter genre film than we’ve seen from Anderson in a while, with a dark, smeared digital palette and high contrasts of yellow-white against grey-black. Whatever the hell is going on lore-wise, Anderson has made a disjointed rollercoaster ride defined by sudden sensitivity or rug-pull twists rather than a legible narrative. We’re not sure what it is, but it is delightful.
5. Monster Hunter (2020)
It suffered a delayed, and ultimately botched release during the pandemic, but Anderson’s most recent video game film adaptation is an uncapped and restless film that draws on his sharpest action impulses. Milla Jovovich is an army ranger transported to the fantasy universe of the successful Monster Hunter series, where she teams up with a native hunter (Tony Jaa) to battle howling, scuttling creatures in a desert biome. For just shy of 30 minutes, Monster Hunter faithfully reenacts battles from the game, complete with accurate costumes, weapon designs, and vistas – it’s also the least entertaining part of the film. Thankfully, the bits where Anderson, Jovovich and Jaa recreate “Darmok” from Star Trek or the climactic fight between a dragon and the U.S. military is enough to give a star of approval.
4. Event Horizon (1997)
This is the only ‘90s Anderson film to escape the bottommost entries of this list, but even though Event Horizon embraces cosmic horror, gothic production design, and a sense of arcane torment worthy of Clive Barker, it’s still heavily compromised – about 40 minutes of the gooiest, gnarliest horror was left on the cutting room floor and then permanently lost. The released film – about a mission to recover a lost spaceship that’s just reappeared near Neptune – has plenty to recommend, including one of several descents into madness that Sam Neill has portrayed over his career. Despite feeling tropey and truncated in parts, Event Horizon stands out among Anderson’s early Hollywood efforts – there’s something dangerous and alive in there.
3. Pompeii (2014)
How to describe the pleasures and pathos of Anderson’s Pompeii, a film that never convinces you of its historical authenticity but bowls you over with sincere digital spectacle? The crisp hi-def cinematography does the imitation Roman costumes and sets no favors, but as hammy acting and furious grudges boil over in the historic town – Kit Harington as a gladiator and Emily Browning as a wealthy daughter who both have reasons to hate a corrupt senator, played by Kiefer Sutherland – Anderson sets up a playground (or game board) to deconstruct with volcanic devastation. It’s a film that combines throwbacks to sweeping Hollywood emotion with tightly orchestrated disaster spectacle – in treating Mount Vesuvius like one of his video game monsters, Pompeii packs a proper punch.
2. Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)
The first half of Resident Evil: Retribution is a high point in the series, where Anderson’s action storytelling breaks free of the remaining restraints of narrative logic and embraces the surreality and nonlinear motion of his sci-fi action sandbox. We see Alice kidnapped from the battlefield in reverse, before she wakes up in the suburb from the opening of Dawn of the Dead (2004) and must protect her fake family from a virus outbreak, only to then realize that she’s in a secret Umbrella facility of bright white corridors and simulated cities that respectively feel like platformer and third-person-shooter levels to fight through. What holds it back from the top spot is that Anderson’s unrestrained imagination works best in the first half, and the second half unfortunately recycles some of the drab and dull action from the series’ worst moments. Still, when it’s good, it’s good.
1. Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)
We found it – the best Paul W.S. Anderson film. The filmmaker’s return to the Resident Evil director’s chair began a second (and far superior) trilogy in the series – the fourth entry sets up a more controlled environment for the carnage (a prison tower) and flexes its choreography muscles to prove that Resident Evil has an untapped vitality worthy of our time (and two more films). It’s bookended with high-concept action sequences: opening with a sci-fi anime-inspired Umbrella Corp siege carried out by Alice clones, and closing with a truly bonkers Wesker showdown that bends time and physics to its will. There is no better Anderson adrenaline shot.
Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.