Sometimes you just want car chases, explosions and a hero who walks away from it all. There’s nothing quite like a good action movie where you can turn your brain off and watch the good guys beat up the bad guys. Or throw them off trains. Whatever you’re into.
For big dumb fun, slick spy thrillers, ’80s throwbacks and modern stunt-heavy blockbusters, the Roku Channel should be one of your first stops. It’s one of the best free streaming services out there, with a surprisingly deep library of action movies that cover everything from cheesy comfort watches to great, high-impact thrillers.
So if you’re trying to scratch that itch for bonkers and violence and explosions, you can queue up plenty without spending a dime. Here are some of the best action movies you can watch right now on the Roku Channel — all for free.
‘Sisu’
Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) is a former commando turned gold prospector. He keeps to himself and spends time with his dog near the tail end of World War II. When he strikes gold and heads toward the nearest town to cash in, he crosses paths with a retreating Nazi unit that decides to steal his haul and leave him for dead. They think he’s just some old man with a shovel. But they couldn’t be more wrong.
In one long, bloody payback trip. Aatami hunts the Nazis across minefields, burning towns, and empty backroads, picking them off with whatever he can get his hands on and refusing to stay down no matter what they throw at him. If you like your action super violent and gory, this revenge flick is more than worth the 90-minute runtime.
Watch on the Roku Channel
‘John Wick 4’
Four movies deep, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is still on the run from the High Table and still very hard to kill. After surviving the fallout from the last movie, he finally gets a real shot at taking down the organization instead of just running from it. That means he has to challenge Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), a High Table member who requests that John win the pair’s duel or die.
Of course, nothing about getting to that duel is simple. The Marquis sends wave after wave of assassins, hikes up the bounty on John’s head, and forces old friends like Caine (Donnie Yen) to fight John. The action never stops in this fourth installment, and guess what — there’s another movie after this one in the works.
Watch on the Roku Channel
‘Platoon’
Take it all the way back to the ’80s with this classic. Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) is a college dropout who volunteers for Vietnam. He has no idea what he’s in for when he gets there and finds he can’t hack it inside his own platoon. Two sergeants act as a kind of beacon for his success: Elias (Willem Dafoe), who still tries to hang on to some kind of humanity, and Barnes (Tom Berenger), who’s hardened by battle as the group trudges its way through Vietnam.
But if war weren’t enough to complicate things, the platoon itself begins to break down, divided and torn apart by different beliefs and arguments as well as the horrors they’re witnessing. By the end, Chris is a completely different person from the kid who first stepped off the helicopter. That’s just one of the ways war can affect someone their whole life, and even though this action flick is heavy on explosions, it can take a mental toll, too.
Watch on the Roku Channel
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