Female Action Heroes Part 2

Part 1 looked at Alice from Resident Evil, Ripley from Alien, The Bride from Kill Bill, Trinity from the Matrix and Sarah Connor from Terminator. Now for the rest of my top ten female action heroes!

Hit girl from Kick Ass is a young but seriously skillful vigilante with an impressive ability to use any weapon and hand-to-hand combat to beat her opponents. She's notably brutal and remorseless when fighting and is easily the strongest and most powerful character in the comic series/film. She's a joy to watch.

I love the Hunger games trilogy so was really hoping they'd do a daycent version of the first film, which thankfully they did. Jennifer Lawrence is pretty amazing as Katniss, a teenager form the poorest district in Panem (the ruins of America), who volunteers as a tribute to replace her little sister in The Hunger Games- a battle to the death between 12 children. Being incredibly skilled at archery and hunting, she survives to the end and eventually becomes a symbol of the revolution for the twelve districts against the oppressive leadership of the Capitol. She's strong, brave and a fighter and I personally am glad that the young'uns have someone cooler than yer wan from Twilight to look up to when it comes to Young Adult literature. 

Ah, Scarlett. It feels like a bit of a cop out putting Black Widow in, cause lets face it, one of her most prominent features is how hot she is but equally she's a skilled warrior and the fact that she has no superpowers but still kicks ass AND wins is incredibly cool. She's an expert martial artist, marksman, weapons specialist and has extensive spy training. She also seems smarter than most of the male characters (except for Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, I think they're all on a par, really) and is one of the most capable and uncompromising female characters that's been in anything in a long time. 

Having read the books and found them disturbing, I was reluctant to watch the first film in the Millenium trilogy but I gave in as I really liked the character of Lisbeth Salander, a skilled computer hacker with an eidetic memory and the ability to change her identity at the drop of a hat, in order to get up to all sorts of mischief. Having had a terrible childhood, she's antisocial at best and potentially has Aspergers. She's not your classic hero, more of an antihero really, which is what I like about her. The part in the first book and film, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo where she takes her incredibly graphic revenge on her attacker is, although obviously unpleasant viewing, also a real moment of victory for such an abused and downtrodden character. She rocks.

Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. I recently had to stop watching Game of Thrones because of the amount of really disturbing sexual and general violence in it but I tune in pretty much only for the scenes with Daenerys in it, who considers herself the rightful queen of the seven kingdoms and is all set to claim the Iron Throne as her own. She's super clever and commands an army of warriors through her strength and by being a really good leader. I generally want to punch the air whenever she's on screen cause her scenes are just extremely cool and also, you know, DRAGONS. 

I could easily have included Scully from the X Files, or Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs in here too but if I did we'd be here forever.

Let me know in the comments if I've left anyone really important out of the list!

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