Thrillers live and die on tension, and Hollywood has learned that ideology can be a useful tension engine: make the villain a corporation, a patriarchal institution, a government agency run by white men in suits. The problem is that when the politics become the point, the thriller stops working as a thriller. The best entries on this list are conservative-friendly not because they avoid darkness but because they build their tension around competence, duty, and personal stakes rather than systemic critique. The worst entries at the bottom are instructive in their own way: they tell you exactly what you are walking into.
This list ranks thriller films from 2023 to 2025 by VirtueVigil score margin (Traditional minus Woke), highest to lowest. Full spectrum: most traditional at the top, most woke at the bottom. Every film has been reviewed in full using the VVWS methodology.
#1 — John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)
The cleanest scorer in the thriller genre: a woke score of 0.5 is essentially zero. John Wick: Chapter 4 is a film about a man who pays his debts, honors his word even when it costs him everything, and refuses to be owned by any institution no matter how powerful. The film's code of honor is pre-ideological, drawn from samurai films and old Westerns, and it is applied without irony or qualification. Keanu Reeves' performance treats John Wick's values as genuine rather than naive, and the result is one of the most purely traditional action-thrillers of the decade.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of John Wick: Chapter 4
#2 — The Accountant 2 (2025)
Ben Affleck returns as Christian Wolff, the autistic forensic accountant and lethal operative, and the sequel doubles down on what made the original work: a protagonist who operates by an iron internal code, protects the vulnerable, and refuses to compromise his values for convenience. The sequel brings Jon Bernthal's Brax back into the mix and gives them a genuine brotherhood to protect. A tradScore of 26.46 reflects consistent themes of loyalty, sacrifice, and the idea that having a personal code and the discipline to follow it is itself a form of virtue.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Accountant 2
#3 — The Beekeeper (2024)
Jason Statham plays a former operative who goes to war against a phishing empire that defrauded an elderly woman who showed him kindness. The Beekeeper is unapologetically populist: the villains are corrupt elites, the FBI protects them, and the hero operates outside institutional channels because institutions have been captured. Statham's Adam Clay is defined by a simple code: protect the innocent, punish the predatory, finish what you start. A tradScore of 25.48 reflects genuine content around protecting the vulnerable, personal accountability, and the satisfaction of consequences delivered without apology.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Beekeeper
#4 — Last Breath (2025)
Last Breath is a survival thriller about a deep-sea diver trapped on the ocean floor with limited oxygen while his crew races to reach him before time runs out. The film is built on competence under pressure, team loyalty, and the willingness of men to risk everything to bring one of their own home. A tradScore of 24.29 against a woke score of 3.4 gives it one of the strongest traditional profiles in the 2025 thriller category. No agenda, no subtext: just professional men doing everything in their power to save a life, driven by the codes that bind them together.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Last Breath
#5 — Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)
Christopher McQuarrie closes out Ethan Hunt's story with the series' most ambitious practical stunt work and a thematic throughline that has been consistent across the entire run: one man's willingness to sacrifice himself for the safety of everyone else. The Final Reckoning treats national security, institutional loyalty, and personal sacrifice as real goods worth dying for. A woke score of 1.1 is nearly zero. The franchise ends as it began: a celebration of competence, courage, and the idea that some people choose to carry burdens that others cannot.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
#6 — Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
The penultimate Ethan Hunt film introduces the Entity, an AI threat to global stability, and uses it as a framework for a film fundamentally about what it means to be human: the willingness to sacrifice for others, the refusal to let technology make decisions that belong to people. A tradScore of 22.12 reflects consistent content around duty, loyalty to the team, and the kind of masculine courage that Hollywood used to celebrate without embarrassment. The train sequence alone earns its place on this list.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Dead Reckoning Part One
#7 — The Equalizer 3 (2023)
Denzel Washington's Robert McCall settles in a small Italian coastal town and finds himself protecting its community from the Camorra. The Equalizer 3 is a film about a man who has internalized a code of protection so deeply that he cannot stop applying it, and the film treats that compulsion as a virtue rather than a disorder. A tradScore of 20.88 against a woke score of just 3 makes it one of the cleanest traditional scorers in this period. Antione Fuqua's direction and Washington's presence turn what could be formula into something genuinely satisfying.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Equalizer 3
#8 — A Working Man (2025)
Jason Statham plays a construction worker who rescues the kidnapped daughter of his employer, operating entirely outside institutional channels in a world where the police cannot help and the official options have all failed. A Working Man is a blue-collar revenge thriller built on the traditional values of the working class: loyalty to the people who trust you, the willingness to put yourself in harm's way for others, and the dignity of men who solve problems rather than process paperwork. A woke score of just 1 is exceptional for a 2025 release.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of A Working Man
#9 — Guy Ritchie's The Covenant (2023)
A military thriller about an American soldier who goes back to Afghanistan to save his interpreter, who risked everything to keep him alive. The Covenant is a film about debt, honor, and the obligation that exists between men who have bled together. Jake Gyllenhaal and Dar Salim deliver performances that ground the film's moral stakes in recognizable humanity. A tradScore of 21.28 reflects deep investment in loyalty, sacrifice, and the idea that some debts cannot be discharged by bureaucratic process. One of the most genuinely conservative films about the Afghanistan era.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Covenant
#10 — Black Bag (2025)
Soderbergh's elegant spy thriller puts loyalty to marriage and loyalty to country in direct collision. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett are impeccable as intelligence operatives navigating a treason investigation that threatens to destroy both their partnership and their marriage. The film's restraint is its strength: it trusts that adult viewers understand the weight of commitment, and it never cheapens the stakes. A tradScore of 18.75 for a film that treats marriage as a genuine bond worth protecting even under maximum institutional pressure.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Black Bag
Bottom of the Spectrum: Films to Avoid
For full transparency, here is the bottom of the 2023-2025 thriller rankings by traditional values margin.
Conclave (2024) — STRONGLY WOKE
Edward Berger's Vatican thriller uses the setting of a papal election to push progressive theology, including a climactic twist designed to validate a specific ideological position on gender within the Catholic Church. A woke score of 42.6 is among the highest in VirtueVigil's entire database. Full review here.
Saltburn (2023) — STRONGLY WOKE
Emerald Fennell's class-horror film is technically accomplished and deliberately transgressive in ways designed to provoke conservative viewers specifically. A woke score of 35. Skip it. Full review here.
The Data on Thriller Values
The thriller genre in 2023-2025 shows a clear pattern: films built around individual competence, personal codes, and duty score traditionally. Films built around institutional critique, gender politics, or transgressive content score woke. The good news for conservative thriller fans is that the top of this list is genuinely excellent: John Wick 4, The Accountant 2, The Beekeeper, and both Mission: Impossible entries represent the genre at its best. Browse the full catalog for more.