Coming across movies with badass female leads isn’t as easy as you might think and by badass we don’t necessarily mean our ladies have to be leather clad and tough, there’s a certain badass-ery in ladies with admirable qualities who can just be themselves. This is our top list of 6 must-see movies with badass female leads.
Would this list even be legit if Legally Blonde wasn’t the top of it? I think not. Elle Woods is the best in the game of fictional badass female leads. Smart, strong, kind, caring, independent and brings a little, who are we kidding, brings a lot of glamour into everything she does so effortlessly! After her boyfriend breaks up with her for not being “serious enough”, she enrolls into the same Law course as him at Harvard in an effort to show him how serious she can be and win him back but after a rocky start, realizes she deserves better and is an amazing lawyer. If everyone tried to be half the person Elle Woods is, the world would be a much better place.
Eat Pray Love, a movie based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir, follows the main character at the start of the break down of her marriage. Successful and living the seemingly perfect life, Elizabeth Gilbert wonders if there is more to life. She divorces her husband and travels to Italy, India, and Indonesia in search for herself. Elizabeth Gilbert is on my top 6 badass female leads as she is brave enough to take a big risk to search for her own happiness, something that many would be too afraid to do.
I’m ashamed that I waited so long to watch this film, but it’s one I think everyone should watch and will probably find themselves relating to one way or another. Violet Jones is obsessed with being perfect. She wants everything in her lift to be absolutely perfect, her hair in particular. When a trip to the hair salon goes wrong she is forced to own her natural hair, something she’d never done before. Heartwarming and relatable, with a little help Violet finds happiness in being herself despite what anyone else thinks.
The Bride, our leading lady in Kill Bill, is probably the most physically skilled badass on this list. While I wouldn’t recommend taking such a literal approach in being like The Bride, it’s undeniable she is a strong and resilient character which are qualities we should all try to have. The Bride wakes up from a four-year coma after her former partners in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad tried to take her out while pregnant at her own wedding, and she sets out to seeks her revenge. Followed up by Kill Bill: Volume 2, Tarantino is not shy to having strong female characters star in his movies.
Giving The Bride a good run for her money is The Mockingjay, Katniss Everdeen. From The Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins, the series was adapted into films, with the first released in 2012 starring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. Set in a future dystopian North America, each year the country hosts an annual “Hunger Games”. When Katniss’ sister, Primrose, is picked to fight to the death, Katniss takes her place instead which over time causes a huge political uproar and sends the country into shambles. Brave, selfless, standing up for others and, in the words of Effie Trinket, courageous, Katniss is someone that I looked up to as a teen and I think will be looked up to by teenage girls for years to come.
This one takes on a different tone from the previous two movies. The Devil Wears Prada was released in 2006, starring Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep. The movie originally came from Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel of the same name. The Devil Wears Prada follows Andy Sachs, a freshly graduated journalist who has moved to New York in the hopes of landing her dream job. After an awful interview with a global fashion magazine, she stumbles into the job as Miranda Priestly’s assistant. What I love about Andy is that despite her crappy and unsupportive friends and boyfriend, she sticks it out and gets really good at her job even though it’s not what she wants. Andy shows us that determination, hard work, and believing in yourself will get you anywhere.
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