Best Butt-Kicking Babes

EW.com (Entertainment Weekly’s online outlet) has offered up its list of the 24 Greatest Butt-Kicking Babes from movies and TV. It’s hard to argue with a list that digs deep enough to include Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore from Goldfinger (#9), or Miranda Otto as Eowyn from Lord of the Rings (#18), or Anne Paillaud as Nikita in the original La Femme Nikita (#13). And I gotta love a list that recognizes personal faves like Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor from the Terminator movies (#8), and Uma Thurman as Black Mamba from Kill Bill (#3), and Pam Grier as Coffy from, well, Coffy (#6), and Summer Glau as River Tam in Serenity (#12). And you have to admire a list that has a long enough memory to note the great Joan Crawford as Vienna in Johnny Guitar (#19).

But where’s Diana Rigg’s landmark leather-clad Emma Peel from The Avengers TV series, who broke new ground for female action characters in the 1960s? And where oh where, sweet jeezus, is Milla Jovovich, this generation’s biggest female action star? Neither is on the list, which inexplicably includes Yvonne Strahovski from NBC’s new series Chuck. Ms. Strahovski certainly has her charms, but for crying out loud, she’s only been on the tube for four short weeks!

By the way, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley from the Alien films came in at #2. Who was #1? Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy Summers from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. OK, I’ll buy that.