Human action recognition is an imperative research area in the field of computer vision due to its numerous applications. Recently, with the emergence and successful deployment of deep learning techniques for image classification, object recognition, and speech recognition, more research is directed from traditional handcrafted to deep learning techniques. This paper presents a novel method for human action recognition based on a pre-trained deep CNN model for feature extraction & representation followed by a hybrid Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifier for action recognition. It has been observed that already learnt CNN based representations on large-scale annotated dataset could be transferred to action recognition task with limited training dataset. The proposed method is evaluated on two well-known action datasets, i.e., UCF sports and KTH. The comparative analysis confirms that the proposed method achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy.