After all the months of anticipation, rumors, and debates over the merits of accelerator suits, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra finally storms into theaters this weekend, ready to rescue us from the late-summer movie doldrums. We don't know about you, but your pals at RT certainly appreciate the effort, and in honor of these real American heroes, we've decided to dedicate this week's Total Recall to our favorite Hollywood action teams, and all they've done to save us from decades of nefarious bad guys intent on stealing our crops, hijacking our planes, and just generally giving us a hard time.

The action team reached its arguable high point in the '80s, but it's actually been a fixture in the cinema for decades, and we've sorted through a cross section of the best examples to bring you a list that includes classics from the '50s and '60s (Seven Samurai, The Dirty Dozen) as well as definitive entries from the more recent past (Delta Force, Kill Bill). Whether it's shadowy assassins or flag-waving members of the U.S. military that send you running for the popcorn, we've got something that'll get your testosterone pumping. There's no time to waste -- let's go Total Recall!

21%

Rotten

10. Navy SEALs (Navy SEALs)

Released in 1990, as the military action craze of the 1980s faded away -- much like the box office mojo of its star (as Rob Vaux of the Flipside Movie Emporium wrote, this was "the film where we began to suspect that Charlie Sheen might not be as cool as we thought") -- Navy SEALs melded armed forces-boosting thrills, a dense, Clancy-worthy plot, and a soundtrack boasting the combined might of Bon Jovi, Lou Gramm, and Lisa Hartman. If it had been released a few years earlier, it might have been a sizeable hit; as it was, however, critics had no use for these SEALs' skills (eFilmCritic's Oz moaned, "Ohmigod. Bad" repeatedly), and audiences were too busy lining up for Ghost and Die Hard 2 to pay any attention to the exploits of Sheen, Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, and the rest of their terrorist-defeating buddies. But it wasn't Charlie's fault -- heck, Delta Force 2: Operation Stranglehold couldn't even beat The Witches at the box office later that year, and it starred Chuck freakin' Norris. Sometimes, it seems, people just aren't in the mood to watch a crew of clean-cut heroes overcome the odds and save the day.

48%

Rotten

9. S.W.A.T. (S.W.A.T.)

It takes a special sort of gravitas to pull off a name like "Hondo," but if anyone can do it, it's Samuel L. Jackson. Here, Jackson plays the leader of the titular LAPD squad, sent in to shake things up after a renegade crew member (Jeremy Renner) wounds a hostage and leaves the force in a snit. (Who's the shadowy bad guy behind the events of the film? Three guesses, and the first two don't count!) Like any self-respecting cinematic commando unit, the Clark Johnson-directed S.W.A.T. is a volatile mixture of disparate personalities, including former SEAL Jim Street (Colin Farrell), single mom Chris Sánchez (Michelle Rodriguez), and the shady T.J. McCabe (Josh Charles) -- all of which are wrangled into action against the sinister Alex Montel (Olivier Martinez), a French drug kingpin who promises $100 million to whoever springs him from prison. Though critics were sort of lukewarm to S.W.A.T.'s TV-inspired big-screen adventures, a not-inconsiderable number of scribes were charmed, including New York Magazine's Peter Rainier, who wrote, "there is something sneakily gratifying about all this."

20%

Rotten

8. The Delta Force (The Delta Force)

In the great military action sweepstakes of early 1986, Iron Eagle may have had Louis Gossett, Jr. and a soundtrack featuring Queen and Twisted Sister, but Delta Force -- released one month later -- boasted the incomparable terrorist-busting duo of Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin, not to mention supporting turns from Robert Vaughn, George Kennedy, and Joey Bishop. Continuing the grand '80s tradition of settling real-life scores on the big screen, Delta Force offered a thinly fictionalized version of the TWA Flight 847 hijacking -- only instead of the heroic efforts of a real-life flight attendant, Force's conflict is settled with some good old-fashioned Hollywood head-bustin'. The only movie ever to feature both Robert Forster as an Arab terrorist and a final act that features freed hostages singing an anthem to the U.S.A., Delta Force was 1986's undisputed champion of cinematic jingoism... at least until Top Gun came along in May.

67%

Fresh

7. Charlie's Angels (Charlie's Angels)

As with most lists culled from action films, this week's Total Recall is a male-dominated affair -- but despite Hollywood's tendency to forget it, girls are just as capable of kicking butt as the hairier sex, a fact proven by the easy-on-the-eyes trio that lent its name to 2000's Charlie's Angels. Equally comfortable punching someone's lights out as they were jiggling in slow motion, the Angels may have followed the orders of an unseen dude (the titular Charlie), but in every other respect, they were more than capable of holding their own against any adversary -- even the creepy Thin Man (played in truly thin and creepy fashion by Crispin Glover). Despite often questionable taste in men (Tom Green?) and a largely unfortunate sequel (2003's Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle), the Angels' original cinematic exploits were so much fun that, as ReelViews' James Berardinelli wrote, "You'd have to be a hopeless curmudgeon not to be entertained on some juvenile level by this motion picture."

72%

Fresh

6. The Fraternity of Assassins (Wanted)

"Kill one person, maybe save a thousand." Sounds sort of noble, doesn't it? And when you get to do it with bullets that can curve around obstacles (or strike from miles away), so much the better. On the other hand, when you're taking your orders from a mysterious loom -- and following the command of a team leader as cagey as the duplicitous Sloan (Morgan Freeman), things are bound to get a little hairy after awhile, as was discovered by Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) after the Fraternity tricked him into (spoiler alert!) killing his own father. The aftermath of this little misunderstanding left most of the group (another spoiler alert!) deceased, but based on the developments of Wanted's final act -- as well as the fact that there's a sequel in the works -- we suspect we haven't seen the last of the Fraternity and its magic loom. Watch your back!