Women in action movies are all too often relegated to the roles of love interest, sidekick, or damsel in distress. But this week’s Lucy puts Scarlett Johansson front and center in a story about an ordinary young woman given extraordinary intelligence (and a bunch of other cool powers) by an experimental drug. Suddenly she’s routing Korean gangsters, eluding the French police, and racing through the streets of Paris like a Formula 1 racer. In Lucy’s honor, The Dissolve’s devoting this week’s staff list to other great female badasses of film history. Here are our favorites (minus Ellen Ripley from the Alien series, who seemed so obvious we left her off with this loving tip of the cap), in alphabetical order:

Michelle Yeoh as Yu Shu Lien and Zhang Ziyi as Jen Yu in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000): One of the best things about the two badass heroines of Ang Lee’s Oscar-winner Crouching Tiger is that they’re such different characters, such polar opposites. Yu Shu Lien is about the control and patience that comes with age, while Jen embraces youthful passion, anger, and in the film’s funniest fight, hubris: Cutting her way through an inn full of combatants, she yells a bunch of over-the-top braggadocio about being an immortal dragon who topples mountains. And yet the two women are evenly matched in combat, with Yu Shu Lien showing the flexibility, craft, and mastery to match Jen’s legendary sword and carefully honed skill. They’re both distinctive characters with an important part to play in the story, which isn’t always true for martial-arts badasses of any kind. Cheng Pei-pei also gets a shout-out for playing the movie’s primary villain, the sly, murderous Jade Fox. American films often have trouble coming up with one female character worth cheering or booing, and here’s a film with three of them, facing off in some breathtaking, dramatic, and above all, story-significant showdowns. —Tasha Robinson

Gina Carano as Mallory Kane in Haywire (2011): I don’t remember many of the plot specifics of Steven Soderbergh’s twisty 2011 espionage thriller; what I do remember are the visceral thumps, bumps, and grunts that defined Gina Carano’s highly physical performance in the film. A former MMA fighter, Carano was dinged for the acting abilities—or lack thereof—she displayed in the film, but it’s much harder to deny her badass credentials watching her in action. Soderbergh calibrated Haywire fairly specifically to Carano’s talents, and it functions best as a showcase of her ass-kicking abilities, sans stunt-double or camera-angle trickery. Her down-and-dirty fight with Michael Fassbender’s MI6 agent is a particular highlight; the way Mallory discreetly slips off her high heels as she prepares to beat the shit out of her adversary—while wearing a slinky cocktail dress, no less—is a perfect image of female badassery, the physical shedding of a perceived vulnerability in preparation for a knock-down, drag-out fight, free of pesky gender-role expectations. —Genevieve Koski

Uma Thurman as The Bride in Kill Bill: Vols. 1 and 2 (2003/4): Over the course of two installments and several chapters, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill takes a chronologically winding path to follow “The Bride,” an initially unnamed heroine played by Uma Thurman, as she plots revenge on those who wronged her on her wedding day, culminating in a confrontation with the titular Bill (David Carradine). The film wastes no time establishing The Bride’s kickass bonafides, opening with a brutal kitchen confrontation in which she takes down Vernita Green (a.k.a. “Copperhead,” played by Vivica A. Fox) in Green’s own kitchen. But for all its propulsive action and expert aping of film styles from anime to 1970s grindhouse horror, the film’s greatest accomplishment is the way it turns what could have been a revenge machine into a three-dimensional character. Thurman’s multifaceted performance—filled with vulnerability and driven by a need deeper than just drawing blood—has much to do with it, as does a script that makes its jumps in time meaningful. We see The Bride bloodying her hands as she undergoes unforgiving training in the martial arts. Moments later in screentime, but years later in story time, it’s this training that allows her to escape from being buried alive. Sometimes it’s the things that hurt us that keep us alive. —Keith Phipps

Anne Parillaud as Nikita in Nikita (1990): Long before Lucy, Luc Besson had one of his first big international hits with the similar action picture Nikita (called La Femme Nikita in the U.S. and in its long-running TV adaptation). Anne Parillaud plays the title character, a juvenile delinquent cop-killer who’s plucked out of prison and transformed into a deadly assassin who’s allowed as an adult to live her own life, except when the government needs her to kill. Besson uses this premise as an excuse to string together stylish set-pieces, with Nikita executing stealthy hits and capers around the world, often by using her femininity to lead people into underestimating her. But it’s Parillaud who gives Nikita soul, playing her as someone who appreciates the skills she’s been taught, but still holds on to her adolescent anti-authoritarian streak, questioning whether these jobs she’s forced to do—and does so well—are really justified. —Noel Murray

Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991): Ms. Hamilton is already getting a fair amount of love in our Movie Of The Week discussion of T2, but this list would not be complete without her, not just for her performance as one of the toughest mama bears in movie history, but for the physical and emotional transformation Hamilton pulled off in the transition from the first Terminator to the second. The Sarah of the original film was a meek waitress in desperate need of rescuing from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s killbot. After surviving that ordeal but anticipating another, Sarah turned herself into a shredded survivalist; T2-era Hamilton she could out-chin-up most of the Avengers. There’s a fascinating contrast in the film between Sarah, whose paranoia about the rise of the machines has made her increasingly unstable and violent, and the new Schwarzenegger Terminator, who’s growing more humane under the tutelage of John Connor (Edward Furlong). In a sense, Sarah Connor becomes a human Terminator, and in her ferocious drive to protect her son at any cost, she’s even more intimidating than Robert Patrick’s T-1000.—Matt Singer