What Hollywood Can Learn From Professional Wrestling (Part 1)
Readers, you and I are going to make a few circles with this piece. I’m going to make a point, you’re going to call me stupid, and then I’ll explain it and you’ll (hopefully) call me less stupid, but (hopefully) a lot more weird.
Every Hollywood action film should have a professional wrestler on cast.
This past week, wrestling fans have been in raptures following a fight involving Kenny Omega and Kazuchika Okada. The two professional wrestlers faced off in the main event of New Japan Pro Wrestling’s headline show “Wrestle Kingdom 11” and brought the house down, wrestling a 47 minute masterpiece that goes past the point of choreographed/fake/predetermined (delete based on your preference) fighting, and straight into the realm of high art.
*Stops writing, kindly suggests you go and watch the match immediately. Don’t worry, we’ll wait.*
What has this got to do with Hollywood action films? Well, if you indulge me, this has a little to do with my Grand Unified Theory that EVERYTHING, boiled down to its base elements, can be traced to professional wrestling…
The professional wrestling we see today in the rings of WWE, NJPW, Lucha Underground and beyond are the result of well over 100 years of performance art. Harking back to fun fair and carnival attractions, wrestling as its best works as non-verbal storytelling. There’s a reason why children fall in love with wrestling, and why it’s proving so popular around the world.
The action of someone throwing a punch at someone else transcends culture and language. If you can make the tale of that punch compelling, then you can tell an effective story, without anyone having to talk.
Which is why Hollywood needs to start making some wrestling hires.
Sitting pretty with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 97%, Mad Max: Fury Road is widely considered to be one of the best action films of the past 15 years. There are a lot of good things going on in Fury Road — it marries a lean, mature (mature as in robust and grown up, rather that put blood and nudity everywhere, although it did that too) plot with some rather impressive rugged action scenes.
Fury Road was essentially one long car chase with very little plot. The reason it worked so well was because the plot was all contained in how the characters fought each other.
Take the initial meeting between Max and Furiosa quickly devolves into a nasty hand to hand fight. Max is waaaaay out his depth, trying to sever his tie to Nux. He just wants to get out and be done.
Furiosa on the other hand, is trying to escape with Immortan Joe’s brides in a carefully co-ordinated plot, and will not allow anyone to get in their way. She is low on time and options.
So much of their motivations are communicated in that fight. From Furiosa’s initial takedown of Max, she is all big overhand swings as she tries to take Max’s head off. She’s not to be messed with, she needs to end this fight quickly and keeps going for the killing blow. There’s a wonderful bit where one of the brides throws Furiosa a wrench, before it gets used to try and pan Max’s head in. It tells you a lot about her relationship with all the brides too — they know each others ins and outs and have been planning things together for a rather long time.
Max on the other hand, isn’t really into this fight. He just wants to escape. He constantly scurries, trips up Furiosa and makes attempts for her neck — he’s not trying to kill her, he’s trying to slow her down enough so he can cut loose. He’s not trying to kill, he just wants to be on his way, which is why when he finally gets a gun, he puts three bullets around Furiosa’s head to finish the fight. Let. Me. Go.
The pair understand everything about each others motivations and mentalities after that scene. A fight got across in two minutes thirty seconds, what would take other scripts 10 minutes of exposition.
If Fury Road is a good example of a film that uses Tom Hardy’s physicality well, then The Dark Knight Rises is an example of one that uses it… less so?
Throughout the entirety of The Dark Knight Rises, the villain Bane is dealt with in hushed tones. Alfred calls him “a man who fights with the power of belief”. He warns Bruce that “any man who is too extreme for Ra’s Al Ghul is not to be trifled with.”
The bulk of film’s first act is spent building Bane as an unstoppable force. Batman is old and slow and out of practice and Bane is someone You Do Not Fuck With. So when Batman finally reaches him in the tunnels, in only makes sense that Hardy laughs off Batman’s clumsy haymakers before he smashes Bats skull open with overhand rights and breaks his back.
The first fight in The Dark Knight Rises is good because it outlines everything that’s happened so far. Batman = slow and clumsy, Bane = big burly bastard who wants to emasculate the hero before killing him. In fact, the first act of The Dark Knight Rises is more a less a wrestling storyline. Your clean cut babyface hero a la John Cena or Hulk Hogan gets mushed by a new monster heel. The belt changes hands, a rematch is set, the hero comes back to win later right?
The only problem is the second fight in The Dark Knight Rises is fucking mess.
Your Big Bad is made. Tom Hardy’s Bane is a superior hand to hand fighter to Batman. Batman has to go to The Pit, do some soul searching and become “reborn” so he can face Bane again.
Classic fight psychology — a former hero champion takes time off to train after an embarrassing defeat, only to return and beat the bad guy who’s taken their place.
WWE’s weird angry cousin, UFC done spun this storyline twice in 2016 with their biggest stars in Conor McGregor and Rouda Rousey. It’s a good narrative to justify why people should pay money to watch people hit each other.
Only, for the storyline is used effectively, there has to be loads of talk about how the returning hero has learnt something in their time off. McGregor was supposed to have changed up his diet. Rousey had worked on her striking defence. There is meant to be a photo from the fight when they lost, and a photo of them before the rematch and your brain is meant to go “ooooh shit, the hero is in the best shape of their life”.
Think how Rocky 3 spent so much time with Apollo showing Rocky how to swim and have sex properly (what you think that mirror scene was?) in between the fights with Clubber Lang.
Back to Batman, does Batman face someone he knows is is physical superior? Does he work to outsmart Bane? Employ some sort of rope-a-dope? Does Batman lure Bane into a trap, a la The Dark Knight Returns comic book where he fights the mutant leader into a mudpit, where his heavier foe will be slowed down and Bruce can surgically take him apart?
Does he fuck. He just throws the same stupid clumsy haymakers, only it works this time around because mask reasons.
It’s one of the (many) reasons The Dark Knight Rises final act is so unsatisfying. Rather than work as a proper culmination of all that’s come before, the final fight with Bane is scurried off before a true villain reveal, a nuke, a funeral and all sorts of shenanigans that left the film feeling overstuffed and…bad? TDKR has not aged well in the past five years.
Instead of using a fight scene to tell a story, TDKR’s second fight breaks the flow of it.
(Annoyingly, Synder has shown a greater grasp of using Batman’s fight scenes to explain who he’s meant to be. Batfleck may be a cold blooded murder, but in BvS, he’s clearly shown to be the fastest thinking fighter in the room, a handy improviser and a keen battle tactican. There’s a reason he’ll lead the Justice League in the next film.)
Back to wrestling, and the best matches use tiny moments to feed into a greater narrative whole. The set up in all great matches is simple: there’s one good guy, there’s one bad guy and they are fighting for supremacy of something. Sometimes it’s a title. Sometimes it’s a lover. Sometimes its for supremacy over each other.
But what all the great wrestling matches do is tell a story using tiny visual hints. A villain will punch in a certain way, or target a specific body part as they look to mock their opponent. A hero will fight in a high energy manner, as an underdog prefers speed to strength. If great action films use fight scenes to tell plot then every great wrestling match could probably fit in a Fast & Furious film.
(This is also secretly why I think Macbeth vs. Macduff might be the first wrestling match. A paranoid king knowing he is doomed to die, fighting byany means necessary, against a slighted hero who lost his wife and child and is willed by destiny? That’s a Hell in a Cell story if there ever was one.)
Every Hollywood action film should have a professional wrestler on cast because if there is anyone, anyone in the world who can save us from repetitive action scenes of one CGI character colliding into another one, it’s the people from professional wrestling. To help co-ordinate. To tell a story in between the lines, and in between the punches.
Think of some of your favourite action scenes and think of why you enjoy them. They have a sense of purpose, of drive and momentum. The Princess Bride’s fencing scene between Indigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts sticks long in the memory because where it first starts as a sword fight between two enemies slowly transforms into a dance between two men with a rapidly growing respect for each other. By the end of the fight, Robert’s cannot bring himself to kill Montoya, such is how they enjoyed their fight.
You know else who was on the cast of The Princess Bride?
That’d be WWE Hall of Famer Andre the Giant.
Now I’m not saying having a wrestler on The Princess Bride helped turned a pretty fun fairytale movie into one of the greatest films ever told. But I’m not not saying that either…
I’m going to keep doing these blogs on a weekly basis in an effort to kind my writing pen sharp while I look for a job. If you like my writing and would like to hire me, I can be found at carlanka.me
If you like my writing and want to pick my brains about something else, including what you’d like me to write next, hit me up on Twitter — @Ankaman616
