Universal love is a hard thing to earn in action cinema. Plenty of action movies are iconic. Plenty are influential. Plenty have one immortal set piece, one immortal star, one immortal villain, one immortal line.

Universal love asks for more. It asks for a movie people return to with real affection, the kind that survives changing tastes, new technology, endless imitation, and the usual backlash that comes for anything successful enough to become part of the culture. These are the films that somehow keep clearing every generation anyway.