The 51 Greatest Movie Fight Scenes…According To One Guy
From Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung to Donnie Yen, Tony Jaa and Iko Uwais, these are the fights that stand the test of time, and multiple rewatches
Most will remember the scene that did it for them. Maybe it was seeing Bruce Lee pick up the nunchaku. Maybe it was Jackie Chan fighting off a motorcycle gang or Tony Jaa crashing a fight club. Whatever scene or movie it was, it unlocked an entire genre that felt, because it was at the time only accessible at your local (often independent) video store if you were lucky enough to have one, like something entirely new. Sharing that one great scene meant passing around a DVD, perhaps borrowed from a friend’s older brother, if one even existed.
Of the many things the internet has given us, one of the few which undoubtedly qualifies as Neutral Good, as free as possible from the unending push to iterate forward and backwards and sidewards all in the sake of satisfying nebulous shareholder desires for more no matter the cost to creativity, is the Fight Scene Rabbit Hole. Someone mentions a scene you loved, and there it is, ready for watching, followed immediately by a dozen more suggestions which beget a dozen more suggestions and suddenly it’s two hours later. Sure, those videos get taken down even as many of them being difficult to watch, stream or acquire. The absence doesn’t last long. Some benevolent soul will upload again. Fight scenes, no matter how difficult they are to find or how grainy the footage is, are for the people.
What follows is one man’s list, one man’s opinion. If you harbor wildly different tastes, then maybe this list isn’t for you. Which is how this should work. Good lists are always anchored in opinion before data. Good lists also require definition. So, before we get going, some ground rules:
-A Fight Scene is not a Battle Scene. They can be large in scale with many combatants, but they are inherently not conflicts between two warring parties. Braveheart’s Battle of Stirling Bridge is not a Fight Scene, nor is the Battle of Helm’s Deep from The Two Towers.
-A Fight Scene is not a Shootout. Guns may be involved, briefly, but the focus is on fists, feet, hands and the short-range tools they hold — knives, stabbing weapons, big sticks, etc. This disqualifies Gun-Kata, Gun-Fu, and any other firearm-blending variants.
-Practicality Matters. This is not a diatribe against digital effects, merely a matter of fact. Digital effects are required to pit Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and all their powers against the forces of inevitability, but when it comes to close combat less is more lest we lose our suspension of disbelief. Not surprisingly, the fewer digital crutches that are available the better the choreography tends to be, and the best wire work is often used as an accent, not a focus. Fights don’t have to be realistic, but you should believe they could happen if they play by their own rules.
-Production Matters. Even as the heart and soul of any fight scene are the fighters and their moves — sorry Bloodsport, love you but the fights don’t hold up under scrutiny — you could put Donnie Yen and Iko Uwais in a room and end up with a terrible fight scene if all the exterior elements don’t do their part. Direction, cinematography, editing and music, it all matters.
-Movies Only. With apologies to Warrior, Daredevil, Game of Thrones, Martial Law, Gangs of London, Into the Badlands, The Continental and many others, we had to draw the line somewhere.
-One Fight Per Movie. Quite a few of the movies higher up on the list have three or even four scenes that qualify given the level everyone involved was working at. But that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun, so you’ll get 51 unique movies.
That’s it. We’ll do a ranking because unranked lists are for cowards, but the focus of this endeavor is the journey, to lead you down the rabbit hole far enough that you discover something new for the next time you need a little fisticuffs comfort food. Which is why the Honorable Mentions section is going to be obnoxiously long.
51. Martial Club (1981, Hong Kong) — Zig Zag-Alley
You can’t have your main character walk with his main (semi-friendly) adversary down something called Zig-Zag Alley and not have something special cooked up.
When Captain America: The Winter Soldier came out back in 2014, you couldn’t go online without seeing someone comment, ‘Did you see that elevator fight?’ And sure, it was a very good sequence, along with the street fight between Cap and Bucky one of the two or three best fights in the entire MCU. It also fit snugly into one of the most niche fight scene sub-genres, the Small Spaces Fight. Since Martial Club there have been fine entries from Jackie Chan in Legend of the Drunken Master (against Martial Club’s director, Lau Kar Leung, underneath a train), Jet Li in Unleashed (in a bathroom, choreographed by Yuen Woo-Ping) and the trailer duel between Uma Thurman vs. Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill Vol. 2, but to this day nobody has done it better than Gordon Liu and Johnny Wang Lung Wei, each adjusting their stances and styles as the walls slowly close in around them and the camera goes over the top. Out of context the lack of follow through of the blows can be off putting at first, but it fits the Kung-Fu demonstration theme of the film.
2016’s The Final Master has something of an homage to Zig-Zag Alley that might be divisive, due to the chosen style, if it had been more widely seen.
50. Raging Fire (2021, Hong Kong) — Church Fight: Donnie Yen vs. Nicholas Tse
One of the first fights on the list comes in what might be the last great Hong Kong action movie, at least for the time being. While the former glory of Shaw Studios and Golden Harvest has long since faded as tastes in Hong Kong shift toward effects-heavy Xianxia films — you can draw parallels to the fading of the Western genre and the rise of comic books films in the US, themselves going through a bit of a Western-adjacent downturn — Benny Chan’s final film ends with a throwback fight that has a little bit of everything. While he’s more upheld time-honored tradition (while incorporating fresh flavors to keep up with modern trends) than revolutionized the genre, not many have done more to keep the fight scene alive over the past 20 years than Donnie Yen.
49. Game of Death (1978, Hong Kong) — The Pagoda: Bruce Lee vs. Dan Inosanto
For a long, long time, well after Game of Death was actually released (in somewhat embarrassing fashion), this scene didn’t even exist. At least not in the form that would have made this list. Then Bruce Lee’s original footage was discovered in the 1990’s, filmed before he left the production to make Enter The Dragon, and reconstructed for the 2000 documentary A Warrior’s Journey. For a long, long time, Lee’s best fight was easily with Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon, but that’s only because we didn’t know this even existed.
Lee is a worthy legend and half the movies on this list might not exist were it not for him, but Norris aside most of his fight scenes feature him beating up on unqualified goons. The performance is magnetic, and Lee’s speed may as well have been a mutant ability, they just aren’t particularly interesting. In Dan Inosanto, Lee has a worthy opponent, and it just so happens we get some of the best displays of Lee’s charisma at the same time. Who knows where Lee’s career would have gone had he not passed. The easy bet is he would have continued to challenge himself as he does here, and his choreography would have evolved with the times he created.
You may have caught Inosanto’s daughter, longtime stunt performer and actress Diana Lee Inosanto, in The Mandalorian and Ahsoka recently as Morgan Elsbeth.
48. The Transporter (2002, France) — Bus Garage: Jason Statham vs. Buckets of Oil
Spoiler Alert: there are not many American made films on this list. Hollywood does action well, but the fight scenes, if they aren’t just out-and-out slugfests where characters either randomly stop defending themselves when the plot demands it or rely on the lame trope of gaining an advantage and throwing their opponent across the room rather than finishing the fight, are typically side dishes to shootouts and chases — at least right up until the superhero era when fights became less about actors performing choreography and more about how to creatively bounce different power sets off one another. It just so happens there was a movie industry in Hong Kong that, for over two decades, was constructed almost entirely on the foundation of the fight scene.
Statham has had a fine career, but The Transporter was both a breakout role and a tease. It’s not his fault that this came out the same year as The Bourne Identity. By the time Transporter sequels came around they started to mimic the nausea-inducing editing of Bourne which would plague Hollywood studios for another 10 years. At the time Luc Besson — of Leon: The Professional, La Femme Nikita and The Fifth Element — used his name to promote the movie, and Louis Leterrier made his career here, but it was Hong Kong’s Corey Yuen (director of the next film on this list, getting a co-director credit here) who has his handprints all over this scene which puts engine oil all over Statham. Besson and Leterrier apparently knew it was a good move, as they went and hired Yuen Woo Ping for their next project, Jet Li’s Unleashed aka Danny the Dog.
If you enjoy bus fights, Bob Odenkirk did about as well as anyone could possibly expect in Nobody (catch Daniel Bernhardt, who once replaced Jean-Claude Van Damme in the Bloodsport series and one-upped him on the fight scenes, as one of the goons there) and Don Lee has turned himself into one of action cinema’s great punchers, highlighted in The Roundup. Many are partial to the bus fight in Shang Chi but like most of the movie it lacked physicality, which might be why that movie’s best fights are in the more elegant Wuxia style.
47. Yes Madam (1985, Hong Kong) — Finale: Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock vs. Dick Wei
It’s not entirely fair to use Rothrock as this example as she’s fantastic in her debut film here, as well as in Righting Wrongs alongside Yuen Biao (who sometimes doubled for Rothrock) and in a quick scene against Sammo Hung in Millionaire’s Express among other appearances, but if you want to show the power of the Hong Kong martial arts industry watch her here and then in some of her more rudimentary North American movies. Rothrock could hang with the best of them, there just wasn’t enough talent in Hollywood to maximize her skills. This same year, Corey Yuen also released No Retreat, No Surrender, featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme in what might be his best fight scene.
This is also Michelle Yeoh’s first starring role, even though the movie would be retitled In The Line Of Duty II after the success of Royal Warriors (aka In The Line Of Duty) a year later. Yeoh’s career doesn’t really take off until the early 1990’s when she jumps into the Police Story franchise after a brief retirement.
This is also a good place to shoutout Dick Wei, one of the most reliable and ubiquitous fighters in 80’s Hong Kong after getting his start with Shaw Brothers and the late 70’s Venom Mob movies (Five Deadly Venoms, Crippled Avengers). He isn’t on this list very much because his fights were a little less grandiose than the very best from that era, but he’s worth watching against Jackie Chan in My Lucky Stars and Heart of the Dragon.
46. Thundering Mantis (1980, Hong Kong) — Final Fight: Leung Kar Yan vs. Sanity
This is not a very good movie. What is important to know, however, is that it is mostly a lighthearted yarn, almost inconsequentially so. Bryan Leung, known to many as ‘Beardy’, spends most of the runtime cracking wise and, generally, being a goof. There’s a couple good training sequences and the choreography is serviceable, if old fashioned and rudimentary, but it’s a derivative piece that you have on in the background while doing something else. Until the ending. Nothing can prepare you for the ending, when Leung suffers such extreme duress that he loses his mind and literally devours his opponent in one of the great freeze frame endings of the Freeze Frame Ending era. There has never been anything else like it, which is probably for good reason. Imagine, for a moment, Hugh Jackman ever going this feral as Wolverine, and how audiences would have reacted.
The Legend of Beardy, as it were, is that he didn’t have any formal martial arts training but could pick up just about any choreography on set. As one does. Worth checking him out in The Victim, too.
45. Hidden Fortress (1958, Japan) — Spear Duel: Toshiro Mifune vs. Susumu Fujita
Like most fight scenes, this list tilts towards the unrealistic and the extreme because that’s what generally makes for good entertainment. Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress, however, reminds us that even in the midst of adventure, most people in a fight really don’t want to get hurt and/or die. Toshiro Mifune running literal circles around his opponent isn’t cowardice, it’s sensible. He wins, too, not with a fatal blow but by simply creating such an advantage for himself that his opponent immediately sees his own defeat. There’s plenty of great katana action in the chambara films of the 1960’s (outside of Kurosawa’s masterworks, the Zatoichi and more manageable Lone Wolf and Cub series have enough of it to last you a year), but it’s Mifune with a spear in his hands that stands just a cut above.
For more good examples of practical, yet fun, duels, see Ridley Scott’s The Duellists.
44. They Live (1988, United States) — Rowdy Roddy Piper vs. Keith David
If you find yourself wondering where all the boxing scenes are, they aren’t here because they’re almost all held back by the format. In trying to be fun and entertaining, cinematic boxing matches, where the rules prohibit anything other than punching, are too often reduced to fighters trading one ridiculous haymaker after another. That’s not to say they have to be realistic, only that Sylvester Stallone taking 15 right hooks to the face is inherently less cool than, say, Jackie Chan split-kicking two guys down a flight of stairs. One format is dynamic, the other grows a little stale even if the fight itself comes in a great movie (the best Rocky fight is the long take from Creed, but the best movie in that genre is Warrior).
Besides, John Carpenter, capitalizing on the wrestling talents of Piper, already made the legendary, and hilariously long, Great Western Brawl (itself inspired by John Wayne’s The Quiet Man). This is what we call commitment to the bit, as well as perhaps the best metaphor in existence for convincing a two-year old to do anything. Now put on the damn glasses.
43. Ip Man 2 (2010, Hong Kong) — Tabletops: Donnie Yen vs. Sammo Hung
The most famous scene in Yen’s remarkably consistent Ip Man series is undoubtedly the unveiling of the Thousand Fist Punch against the black belts in the first entry, but it’s this gimmick fight — something that will come up again with Yen later on — from the sequel that leaves the most lasting memory. Not only would the mere concept of this one look ludicrous in the hands of lesser talents than Yen, Hung and longtime-Yen collaborator Wilson Yip, only an experienced hand would even conceive of pulling it off. In a series with more than a dozen worthwhile-if-traditional fights, it’s the tea table which gives us something we’ve never seen before.
Honorable Mention for Ip Man gimmicks goes to the lazy Susan exchange in Ip Man 4 and the whiskey glass from Ip Man Legacy, both of which follow in the long-standing tradition of fight scenes where nobody wants to admit that they’re actually fighting — the best example being the wine tasting from Dirty Ho.
42. Knockabout (1979, Hong Kong) — Yuen Biao + Sammo Hung vs. Liu Chia-Yung
Of the Three Dragons, everyone knows Jackie Chan and has seen at least one of his movies. Sammo Hung is a name a lot of people know — he did have a CBS series with Arsenio Hall after all — even if they can’t name a particular movie of his. Yuen Biao, however, is a name you might go your entire life without hearing. A shame, that, because he was an unbelievable talent in his own right — just in a more traditional manner than the other two.
While the finale of Knockabout begins in an open field like many Golden Harvest films — they didn’t put the same amount of financing into sets as Shaw Studios until surpassing their rival in the 80’s — it’s anything but traditional, transitioning into incredible acrobatic feats once Hung joins the fray and finishing off with Chekov’s jump rope. Maybe he didn’t quite have the it factor to separate himself in the long run, but there’s a timeline where Biao becomes the biggest action star in the world.
41. Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends (2014, Japan) — The Royal Rumble
It’s amazing that over the last decade we’ve been blessed with five live-action remakes of a popular 1990’s anime, the last two releasing straight to Netflix, that might be the best and most consistent action series of the millennium out side of John Wick, and most people don’t even know they exist. Hopefully that changes over time and Kenji Tanigaki’s work (as action director here, his talents were utterly wasted in the Snake Eyes film) gains more exposure because some of it has to be seen to be believed. The scene in question is the culmination of the original trilogy, with just about every named sword-wielding character still standing — each of them hilariously getting a WWE entrance like Stone Cold Steve Austin walking down the ramp as glass shatters — teaming up to take out the Darth Vader-esque Shishio. While just about every scene on this list improves within the context of their respective movies, this one almost demands the build-up of three films to maximize the comic ridiculousness.
40. Troy (2004, United States) — The Duel: Brad Pitt vs. Eric Bana
Yes, really. Sword and Sandle epics were back en vogue following the success of Gladiator, with varying results. Troy mostly wastes an excellent cast with its ho-hum and gods-less interpretation of Homer’s work, but you’d never guess how much of a waste it was based on this little miracle of a scene. Wolfgang Petersen is a legend, but the guess is that second-unit director Simon Crane (check his IMDB, he’s been around the block and then some as a stunt coordinator and second-unit director) was the one orchestrating the back and forth between Achilles and Hector that could only end one way. A nice twist on the Honorable Fighter here, as Achilles allows Hector a brief respite after tripping on a rock not out of a sense of kinship with his opponent, he simply didn’t want to be robbed of his own legacy.
39. Last of the Mohicans (1992, United States) — Russell Means vs. Wes Studi
The shortest fight on this list — the second in the clip — that also happens to punctuate one of the greatest final 20 minutes you’ll ever see. It’s barely even a fight, coming in at just a few moves longer than the quick-draw finale of Sanjuro, but that’s the point. Michael Mann knows you’re expecting this big, climactic revenge duel along the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Heck, Wes Studi’s Mogwai squares up like he’s expecting it, too, but where Mogwai has spent the entire movie setting up, explaining and executing his plan to destroy The Gray Hair, Chingachook isn’t playing for the cameras, the crowd or a good story. That man killed his son. That man must die. Russell Means pauses for just a moment after breaking both of Mogwai’s arms, but there’s no speech, no one liner. He allows the moment, his opponent’s impending death, to sink in. All that killing and for what? Revenge served neither man, but it must be taken all the same.
What we said about production mattering up in the rules section typically covers how well a fight scene is shot and captured. You don’t typically get wide, sweeping vistas, barring the occasional rooftop, and many directors will choose to leave music out of their fights entirely. Clearly not the case here, with Promentory being one of the best pieces of music ever featured in any movie, much less a fight (Duel of the Fates would have been considered, had its fight made the cut). It’s too soon to put David Fincher’s The Killer on here, but the fight in the Florida house is a wonderful recent example of what we’re lucky enough to get when a great director tackles a fight.
38. Chocolate (2008, Thailand) — Dojo Fight: JeeJa Yanin vs. Gravity
You can feel the budget here a little bit more than in director Prachya Pinkaew’s films with Tony Jaa, and the choreography isn’t quite as precise, but the moves are just as if not even more creative, delivered convincingly by all 5-foot-4 of JeeJa Yanin. The finale of this one is one fight stacked on another, opening with a rooftop 3-on-1 and ending with a scrap on the side of a building that would make the Jackie Chan Stunt Team proud, with this dojo sequence sandwiched in the middle, itself a three-tier process going from goons to a one-on-one — maybe not the best portrayal of a mental illness in a movie somewhat built around one, but a nice callback to the character learning all her moves from copying kung-fu movies — and back to goons only this time with swords.
37. Magnificent Butcher (1979, Hong Kong) — Sammo Hung vs. Lee Hoi Sang
While this will be blasphemous in some corners, a fair bit of Hong Kong’s kung-fu output from the 60’s and 70’s doesn’t hold up particularly well. It can feel a little stiff and wooden, and though the movies themselves are still a ton of fun and there’s a respect to be had for the performers in the way you would for elite dancers, it can get a little tiresome watching everyone go through their rigid steps when many fights go on a few minutes too long. If any purists are curious as to the lack of directors King Hu (though Touch of Zen is more fluid than much of what came after), Chang Cheh (Five Deadly Venoms, Crippled Avengers), or the first true star of the genre in Jimmy Wang Yu (The One Armed Swordsman, The Chinese Boxer, Master of the Flying Guillotine), that’s it. Hugely influential, but their best movies surpass their own individual fight scenes.
Still, one of my personal favorite sub-genre of fights from that era is the Style Fight, two combatants cycling through one form after another in order to counter their opponent like an NBA coach finding the right pick-and-roll coverages, only if those coverages were named after mythic creatures. Many will likely lay claim to the final fight of 1978’s Drunken Master as the pinnacle in that category, as Jackie Chan taps into the Eight Drunken Gods, or Snake In The Eagle’s Shadow, but Yuen Woo-Ping one-ups himself a year later with Sammo Hung with an even more dynamic fight which portends the more fluid, kinetic styles that will define the 1980’s.
36. Tiger On The Beat (1988, Hong Kong) — Chainsaw Fight
When you hear the words Chainsaw Fight you probably think of Dennis Hopper in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. For more recent enthusiasts, maybe Mandy. For those with real culture, maybe Phantasm 2. Truth is, fun as those movies are, the fights always sound cooler than they really are due to the sheer impracticality of swinging chainsaws around. Leave it to legendary kung-fu director and performer Lau Kar Leung, in one of his rare modern-day settings, to find a way to deliver the goods, bringing in Gordon Liu to duel Conan Lee (best known for Corey Yuen’s Ninja In The Dragon’s Den, which features a pretty great fight on stilts) while Chow Yun-Fat has fun with a shotgun on a rope in the other room.
35. Avengement (2019, United Kingdom) — Bar Fight: Scott Adkins vs. Everyone
Scott Adkins should be one of the biggest stars in America. Had he come along a decade earlier, maybe he would have been. Instead, he’s had to settle for being the King of Direct-to-Video (with Michael Jai White in competition) for the last decade, turning in reliably good-to-great fight scenes in everything from the Ninja series to a great long-take experiment in One Shot, his run as Boyka in Undisputed, a fight with Donnie Yen in Ip Man 4 and almost earning himself two additional candidates for this list with 2022’s Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday (Clown Fight, anyone?). It was with Avengement, though, where Adkins tested his range, both as an actor and a fighter, topping the runtime off with what might be the best bar brawl ever shot (sorry, Road House and pretty much all of your favorite westerns).
34. The Protector (2005, Thailand) — Tony Jaa vs. Staircase
Back to Thailand, which partially led the 2000’s fight-movie movement before Indonesia — The Rebel and Furie from Vietnam are pretty fun, too — took over the game for a bit. Watch this more than once or twice and you’ll start to see the seams, as you will for most one-takes, but there’s a reason that almost nobody attempts something at this scale without guns or some digital trickeration (love you, John Wick) — it’s exhausting. Throw in some stunts (how many times did that one dude have to take that railing dive) and the fact that Jaa has to actually climb the stairs rather than just take on goons as they run on screen and what the entire crew here managed to pull off is breathtaking. Twelve years before a decent riff on this idea in Atomic Blonde, Jaa was pushing boundaries and his own physical limits.
33. Undisputed 3: Redemption (2010, United States) — Scott Adkins vs. Marko Zaror
Referenced a minute ago, Michael Jai White was poised to take over the direct-to-video action scene with Undisputed 2 in 2006, but Scott Adkins was such a revelation as the villain Boyka that he essentially usurped the franchise to the point that 2010’s excellent Undisputed 3 (the fourth is just OK) became his own star vehicle. You can’t argue with the results, as the final fight — with John Wick 4’s Marko Zaror as the heavy — might be the best ever filmed in a ring. Sure, Boyka magically healing himself by tying his knee up with a mop is ridiculous — though not any more so than Mr. Miyagi’s magic hands — but it’s all worth it as a setup for the money shot that closes this one out.
32. Eastern Promises (2007, United Kingdom) — Bath House: Viggo Mortensen vs. Would-Be Assassins
It doesn’t all have to be spinning backhands, flying kicks and impeccable choreography. There’s nothing more primal than a man fighting for survival in his birthday suit. Even if the scene itself wasn’t as good as it is, Viggo Mortensen deserves your respect for baring it all (as Jackie Chan did a few years earlier in The Accidental Spy) for his art and our entertainment, fighting dirty — he even throws some presumably innocent bystanders into the fray — with no hesitation to buy himself at least another day. David Cronenberg might be the odd name out in this list, but between this and A History Of Violence he and Mortensen proved that the best action scenes can come from some of the most unlikely places.
Speaking of Viggo, his brief clash with the Uruk-Hai Lurtz at the end of Fellowship of the Ring is one of the best bursts of action in that trilogy, if not all of the classical fantasy genre.
31. Once Upon A Time In China 2 (1992, Hong Kong) — Jet Li vs. Donnie Yen
It’s not often that two legends squared off against one another on screen — as publicized as the behind-the-scenes negotiations were between The Rock and Vin Diesel for Fast Five, you have to imagine that sort of thing goes back many years — and it’s a little disappointing that Jet Li and Donnie Yen never actually fought hand-to-hand to test their styles, always squaring off with lengthy weapons. That shouldn’t detract from what is otherwise a wonderfully inventive back-and-forth with Yen even giving you cause to look at your laundry a little differently.
30. John Wick 3 (2019, United States) — Blade Museum
While the John Wick series is already legendary — along with The Raid, you could easily argue that it saved the action genre, at least in Hollywood, from the post-Bourne editing style of the 2000’s — the one consistent blemish is that the hand-to-hand combat generally leans more towards serviceable in the face of the revolutionary firearm styles. That’s in part because Keanu Reeves, who we most certainly do not deserve, is both getting older and his movements are relatively stiff after aggravating a spinal injury (first suffered while filming Chain Reaction) while making The Matrix, so despite his best intentions and willingness to train and rehearse (prep time that most Hollywood action flicks aren’t afforded enough of) there’s an unavoidable rigidity whenever he has to put his hands on anyone. In the case of John Wick 3, that led to Yaya Ruhian, Cecep Arif Rahman and Mark Dacascos being somewhat wasted during the finale.
Fortunately, the same movie features the best melee in the series as Wick wanders into a what is presumably a weaponry museum or shop and has nothing but walls and walls of blades with which to defend himself from his would-be assassins. Credit Reeves and director Chad Stahelski for the little details, like knives bouncing off bodies since nobody would be making perfect throws in a desperate, off-balance, back-foot fight for their lives. And there aren’t many better ways to punctuate a scene than a flying axe to the dome.
29. Dirty Ho (1979, Hong Kong) — Puppet Master: Gordon Liu vs. Yue Wong
Lau Kar Leung’s Dirty Ho (a Shaw Brothers production) is easily one of the best kung-fu movies ever made. It also barely features a true, classical fight scene until the very end. Instead, it’s a film that excels in secret fighting, in characters dueling either unbeknownst to themselves or to those around them. One hilarious sequence features Gordon Liu fighting for his life while sampling wines in a crowded room, with onlookers having no idea what is going on. Later, he and Yue Wong fend off an army while Liu is in a wheelchair.
The jaw dropper, however, is Liu convincing Wong’s character (the titular Dirty Ho) that Kara Hui’s (also known as Kara Wai, incredible in My Young Auntie in a starring role and a regular in Lau Kar Leung’s catalogue) courtesan is actually his bodyguard and a kung-fu master, all through puppeteering her movements. It’s one thing to even conceive of such an idea. To pull it off so flawlessly is nothing short of genius.
28. Sword of the Stranger (2007, Japan) — Final Fight: No Name vs. Luo Lang
The Best Fight Scenes In Anime is an entirely different list altogether — Ninja Scroll and Fist of the North Star are good starting points for those inclined, and Netflix’s Blue Eye Samurai is a recent jaw dropper — but Sword of the Stranger gets an exception nod as it’s a bit more grounded than your typical shonen and also because it’s so damn beautiful. Key animator Yutaka Nakamura, who has worked on everything from Evangelion and Mobile Suit Gundam to Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist and My Hero Academia, paces this duel, full of classic Honorable Warrior moments, perfectly and ends it right before it has a chance to wear out its welcome. It also may feature the best piece of music on this list, non-Promentory (Mohicans) division.
27. Police Story 2 (1988, Hong Kong) — Playground Fight: Jackie Chan vs. Bad Dudes
Has there ever been a more obvious and perfect setup for a brawl than Jackie Chan Walks Into A Playground? This isn’t Chan’s best sequence, but it may be the most perfect distillation of his genius, Chan in full ‘I don’t want no trouble mode’ as a gang of goons violently encounter his environmental shenanigans, the entire scene shot and edited with ultimate clarity while ending with a car-crash stunt that could have easily spelled Chan’s doom. Police Story 2 doesn’t carry the five-star badge that the first in the series does, dragging a bit between the action despite a larger role for Maggie Cheung, but the highs are almost as high, featuring another bus stunt that almost killed Chan — he was supposed to jump off a moving bus through a fake glass window, instead he jumped through real glass — and a finale in a fireworks factory that almost answers the question that opened this paragraph.
26. Pedicab Driver (1989, Hong Kong) — Sammo Hung vs. Billy Chow
We’re getting to the point where our one fight per movie rule is leading to some tough decisions, as Pedicab features two fights that would qualify, including a pole fight between Sammo Hung and 53-year-old Lau Kar Leung that nearly rivals anything in Eight Diagram Pole Fighter. Nothing elevates a fight like a great kicker, though, and there’s a reason Hung saves former World Champion kickboxer Billy Chow for the end after Chow presumably impressed Hung by playing lesser goons in Eastern Condors and Dragons Forever. It’s telling of his feelings on Chow, too, that Hung essentially gets his butt kicked — and pinched(?) — for the duration until landing one of the more creative final blows you’ll ever see, perhaps building off similar move used by Chow (being doubled) a year earlier in Hung’s Paper Marriage. Credit Chow for taking the kick right in the face to sell the knockout. Hopefully he took out the toothpick first.
25. SPL/Killzone (2005, Hong Kong) — Alley Fight: Donnie Yen vs. Wu Jin
The choice is between this and Yen’s throwdown with Sammo Hung at the end, but it isn’t a very difficult choice at all once you give it a watch. Legend has it that Yen and Jin improvised much of this fight — there’s behind the scenes footage of them coming up with moves on the spot while watching dailies — which is ludicrous considering most people can’t even improvise walking past each other in the hallway. You have to imagine both actors connecting more than a few times with their weapons at the speed they were going. All the bruises were worth it.
24. SPL/Killzone 2 (2015, China) — 2 vs. 1: Tony Jaa + Wu Jing vs. Max Zhang
Wu Jing is back. Donnie Yen isn’t. Instead, Tony Jaa and Max Zhang join the party for an unrelated sequel. This selection includes the larger brawl with the goons because of how seamlessly the action transitions between them and the Max Zhang matchup. This isn’t the best 2-on-1 around, but it’s close with how well Jaa and Jing’s characters work together with the power of friendship, doing the opposite of what most superior forces in fight movies do — taking turns is often the only ways for heroes to realistically make it through — by attacking from different angles, high and low, at the same time, which makes it all the more impressive that Zhang keeps finding ways to fend them off before resorting to his needles. Maybe it was the only way to do it once you decide that Jaa will get stabbed, but it’s a shame that this one has to end with a cheesy window dangle that we’ve seen a thousand variations of.
23. Once Upon A Time In China (1991, Hong Kong) — Jet Li vs. Ladders
At some point in their youth, everyone encounters a handful of movies that really open up the world of what is possible on screen. For someone growing up in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, Oldboy and City of God would have both been that type of ‘Wait, You Can Do That?’ film among new releases at the time. For those scouring the video store shelves, Evil Dead 2 might have unlocked a specific brand of horror, and for kung-fu, especially for someone first exposed to Jackie Chan, Once Upon A Time In China had the same effect. Using ladders in this way just didn’t seem like something it was even possible to do, even with cinematic trickeration, much less in something made a decade earlier, and upon seeing it in action you realize just how much more there is to see.
A couple demerits here, years later, for the intercutting which ruins the flow of the fight a little bit, and for the fact that Jet Li had to be doubled for a handful of shots after injuring his leg on, of course, a ladder. Still a wonderfully inventive bit of direction from Tsui Hark (one of the few directors who would feature both on lists for fights and for shootouts), just not quite in a Top 20 spot as it would have been years ago.
22. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012, United States) — Scott Adkins vs. Andrei Arlovski
There’s an arc of Schitt’s Creek where Catherine O’Hara’s Moira Rose gets what she considers a comeback role, but when she arrives on set she discovers it’s a crummy, low budget project that nobody, the director included, really cares about beyond the paycheck. Still, she dives into the performance, rewrites the script and convinces the director that no matter how low the expectations are, they can still show up and make the best movie with what’s available to them.
You get the sense that director John Hyams had a similar approach to the sixth Universal Soldier, which has no business being as good as it is. Granted, this fight makes it seem like more of a pure action movie than it really is — think more Heart of Darkness — but everyone was on their game when it came to this centerpiece, perfectly paced with a brief baseball bat duel (see also The Warriors) and one of the more shocking final blows ever conceived.
21. Kill Bill (2003, United States) — Uma Thurman vs. Crazy 88
It seems popular in some corners to downplay Quentin Tarantino’s work given his tremendous abilities as a pastiche-ian — which wouldn’t matter if he wasn’t equally as good a writer — but that seems like a pretty lame excuse to dislike a catalogue full of good-to-great works. It ignores, too, that pulling together hundreds of influences into something that feels as fresh, exciting and new as Kill Bill is a colossal task that few could have pulled off. It’s not as though Tarantino is hiding from the things he loves, either. There’s Gordon Liu. There’s Sonny Chiba. There’s Bruce Lee’s outfit and a weapon from Crippled Avengers. Doesn’t the House of Blue Leaves look just like the inn from Eight Diagram Pole Fighter? Yuen Woo-Ping is not there by accident. The duel with O-Ren Ishii may be ripped straight from Lady Snowblood, and you can feel Tarantino’s love for The Chinese Boxer throughout, but appropriating is pretty much the entire language of genre film for a reason.
End of the day, who cares what part of the backlash cycle we’re in? The House of Blue Leaves sequence is as astounding today as it was 20 years ago, Tarantino hitting all the right buttons to keep the massacre feeling fresh from second to second, swapping color palettes and music while using every part of the set as The Bride dispatches with the Crazy 88. Best of all, the package is so cool that it encourages young watchers to seek out those influences and inspirations and discover classics for themselves.
For a fun twist on the homage discussion, 2006’s City of Violence out of Korea has an ending that feels in direct discussion with Kill Bill while also essentially stripping its inspiration of all its references. It stars one of Korea’s premier action choreographers, so you know it’s good. And of course there are other great fights within the overarching Kill Bill project, including Thurman vs. Vivica A. Fox and the aforementioned trailer duel.
20. Who Am I? (1998, Hong Kong) — Jackie Chan vs. Ron Smoorenburg and David Leong
Once again, great kickers make all fights better. As the story goes, Ron Smoorengburg was a local audition in Rotterdam during the filming of Who Am I? and Jackie Chan liked his kicking so much he slotted him right into the finale fight. Trouble was, Smoorengburg had never gone through choreography before, so members of the Chan Stunt Team (including the late Brad Allan, whose fight in Gorgeous you should definitely check out) had to double him for some of the more complicated steps. Still, Smoorenburg, who has worked regularly as a stunt performer in the two decades since, had all the goods as a kicker and his reach was in stark contrast to Chan’s smaller stature without resorting to a more conventional giant strongman type of matchup.
You could say this about quite a few of the scenes on this list, but this one might be the most precise and structured of them all, taking a beat whenever necessary, keeping momentum at all the right times and mixing in plenty of Chan humor. You flow from the first one-on-one, then a second, then a vertigo-inducing 2-on-1 and finally, after both goons go out with a laugh, Chan gives Tom Cruise a run for his money with the infamous building slide. *chef’s kiss*
19. Rob Roy (1995, United Kingdom) — Liam Neeson vs. Tim Roth
Rob Roy was well received by critics back in 1995 but opened relatively small and was clearly going to need some word of mouth to have much of a run in theaters. Then a month later a little movie called Braveheart came out and there’s a reason many people haven’t heard of this one despite Tim Roth being nominated for Best Supporting Actor as the despicable Cunningham.
Fortunately, it also features what might be the best traditional sword fight ever filmed. Choreographer William Hobbs — a Hollywood mainstay with credits like The Duellists, Willow, The Man In The Iron Mask and The Count of Monte Cristo to his name — keeps things rather simple, highlighting the size and style difference between Roth and Liam Neeson’s Roy. This is not a movie where the hero gets to be a superhero, with Neeson generally two steps behind Roth the entire fight until he brute forces a victory in such a manner that makes you think Mel Gibson was paying attention when he made The Patriot a few years later.
Related: The other great Hollywood sword master in demand with Hobbs was Bob Anderson, whose work includes The Princess Bride (who doesn’t love the Cliffs of Insanity sequence), Highlander, The Mask of Zorro, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (the blacksmithy fight between Will and Jack is another favorite). Between Anderson and Hobbs, chances are any Hollywood sword fights you loved between 1975 and 2005 had their hands on it.
18. Ong Bak 2 (2008, Thailand) — Tony Jaa vs. Everyone
Anyone who loves fight movies should be eternally grateful for Tony Jaa coming along at a perfect time for the action industry. Aside from the technical prowess and endurance of the one-shot in The Protector, most probably fondly remember his first show-stopping appearance at the fight club in Ong Bak. His best pure fight, though? The finale in the sequel when Jaa runs through an assortment of what are basically Sith Inquisitors, each with their own chosen weapon. A real crowd pleaser that never overstays its welcome despite running well over 10 minutes, including a sequence around, underneath and right on top of an elephant.
If you like fights where the hero cycles through a bunch of different weapons or fights different styles, Bruce Lee’s cavern escape from Enter the Dragon goes through similar steps. The primo example is Lau Kar-Leung’s Legendary Weapons of China, a film designed entirely around this exact concept, while the second half of Heroes of the East is just Gordon Liu fighting different Japanese styles, including ninjutsu and, a personal favorite, crab style.
17. The Night Comes For Us (2018, Indonesia) — Julie Estelle vs. Hannah Al Rashid + Dian Sastrowardoyo
Poor Joe Taslim. He has a great one-on-one with Raya Yuhian in The Raid only to get outshone by all the other great fights in that movie. He gets wasted in Fast and Furious 6 as he has to play down to the ability (and lack thereof) of his opponents. He was the best part of the Mortal Kombat reboot that otherwise stunk. Nobody saw The Swordsman. And in his own star vehicle, featuring a lengthy duel with Iko Uwais, he again gets one-upped by his co-stars, with everyone clamoring for a Julie Estelle-focused sequel.
Speaking of Estelle, before her appearance as Hammer Girl in The Raid 2 she had zero fight training, with Yaya Ruhian coaching her up for that role. By the time The Night Comes For Us comes along — with a solid appearance in Headshot in the interim — she’s a bonafide badass, taking over the movie for this 1-on-2 against a pair of assassins. And it is absolutely brutal in all the best ways. That’s what we call killing them until they’re dead.
As for Taslim, hopefully his time will come. He’s excellent on Warrior, where his fight with Andrew Koji would be a contender for the best ever put on television. Fingers crossed for a bit more focus on the fights in Mortal Kombat 2, but in the meantime you can also check him out as a mustache-twirling villain in The Swordsman.
16. Disciples of the 36th Chamber (1985, Hong Kong) — Wedding Battle: Gordon Liu and Hou Hsiao Team Up
The 36 Chambers of Shaolin is in the running for most famous of all kung-fu movies. It’s excellent in its own right, featuring what is essentially an hour-long training montage with the premier fight coming after Gordon Liu ‘invents’ the three-section staff weapon, but throw in the entire legacy of the Wu Tang Clan and it’s one of those films that people know even if they haven’t seen it.
The entire Chambers trilogy is good fun, but the best sequence of the series comes at the end of the second sequel with Liu and his disciples — including an insufferably lunk-headed protagonist played by the ever-nimble Hou Hsiao who never seems to learn any sort of lesson — trying to escape a wedding party. This amount of chaos shouldn’t be nearly as legible as it is, with wide shots capturing multiple concurrent fights, but Lau Kar Leung has his hand on your shoulder the entire time so you don’t miss a thing. We’re here to celebrate fights and not to put down other genres — lord knows modern visual effects artists need some support — but this is one of those set pieces, with bright colors popping all over the screen, that makes you wonder when we lost our way with our assembly-line superhero movies of the past decade. Even the best of those never look this good.
15. Fearless (2006, China) — Sword Fight at Night: Jet Li vs. Chen Zhihui
After his run of American action flicks — with Hero mixed in right in the middle — Jet Li joins up with Ronny Yu, coming off Freddy vs. Jason of all things, and reunites with Yuen Woo-Ping for the umpteenth time for one of the better top-to-bottom kung-fu flicks of the millennium. Playing famed martial artist Huo Yuanjia — Li ran the gamut of historical martial artists, also playing Fong Sai-Yuk, Chen Zhen and, of course, Wong Fei-Hung — Li gets to go toe-to-toe with a variety of different styles, including a fun gimmick fight on top of a tower. It’s this fight to the death in a restaurant that leaves the most lasting memory, with swords flying fast and furious until the fight devolves into smashing whatever one can get their hands on.
14. 13 Assassins (2010, Japan) — The Grand Finale
With all due respect to Kurosawa, it’s Takashi Miike — in the middle of an incredible 30 year run of making 2–3 movies a year before his recent foray into television — who is responsible for the best large-scale samurai fight. Yes, we’re bordering on an out-and-out battle here, but since the premise of the fight in a small group against many, with numbers increasingly being whittled down until the one-on-one capper between reluctant friends, we’re making an exception. It also lasts for just about 45 minutes. As far as we’re concerned, if the entire final third of your movie is one of the best fight scenes ever filmed, you made one of the best action movies, period.
There’s always Seven Samurai to go back to, as everyone should at least once, for a similar concept — famously borrowed for The Magnificant Seven — but it’s also worth watching Miike’s more outlandish Blade of Immortal just to watch the director try and outdo himself.
13. Hero (2002, Hong Kong) — Mind Battle: Jet Li vs. Donnie Yen
Still would’ve been nice to ever get a proper hand-to-hand fight between these two, but we’ll have to settle with the most beautiful scene on this list — also the only one that happens largely in the minds of the two combatants. Nobody should be surprised that Li and Yen deliver on the promise, even if we’re left wanting a little bit more.
Zhang Yimou, who had a hand (really a handful) in keeping wuxia alive in the 2000’s, never disappoints (2018’s Shadow is also a jaw dropper on the style front), but cinephiles might be interested to know that Hero was shot by longtime Wong Kar-wai collaborator Christopher Doyle. In other words, Hero is what you get when you pair the eye behind In The Mood For Love with some of the best martial artists of a generation. This type of talent doesn’t come together very often.
12. Iron Monkey (1993, Hong Kong) — Pole Fight
The final true gimmick fight on the list — in some ways a proto-superhero fight — is also one of the more famous, a premier Have You Seen This, Have You Heard Of This scene of the 90’s that had that one copy of the Iron Monkey DVD at the local Hollywood Video perpetually checked out. Wire work or not, the sheer practical and logistical difficulty of filming this — they may be controlled, but those are real flames beneath them — had to have been astronomical. One has to imagine that the Wachowski’s had this, along with the underrated Wing Chun, in mind when cooking up The Matrix, also featuring a ton of wire work in addition to the groundbreaking visual effects, a few years later.
Like any good gimmick fight this one doesn’t rely entirely on the gimmick, with a fun preamble that recalls Dhalsim from the Street Fighter games — a character inspired by one in Master of the Flying Guillotine — and a proper setup. And like any good 2-on-1, you get some real teamwork to defeat the big bad. As a little bonus, the little kid in this one is supposed to be Wong Fei Hung. Yes, that one.
11. Flashpoint (2007, Hong Kong) — Donnie Yen vs. Collin Chou
We’re firmly in the territory where any of these could have a good argument for the No. 1 spot. Ten years ago, maybe Flashpoint, one of many collaborations between Yen and Wilson Yip, would have been the choice. It’s certainly a product of its time as Yen is firmly in his MMA era, reflecting the escalating popularity of the sport around that time, while featuring the increased physicality and speed that was becoming more and more commonplace. It also lends to the semi-realism that every strike feels earned as we get real counters and grapples — clean hits to the face only happen when the person being hit has a reason to either be stunned or to have dropped their guard. We even get one of Yen’s patented wind-up punches — a direct tribute to Sugar Ray Leonard — and as Yen goes for a second one, he fakes it. Yen is not one to skimp on the details. Not so sure about fighting in a leather jacket, though.
10. Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (1984, Hong Kong) — Staff Fight: Gordon Liu vs. Phillip Ko
There’s just something about the staff that brings out the best in traditional choreography, which may be why Lau Kar Leung’s (yes, him again) Eight Diagram Pole Fighter transcends the genre to become one of the world’s premier action films and certainly the most complete picture to come out of Shaw Brothers Studio before they shelved big-screen production in 1987.
We could have easily gone with the Coffin Pyramid finale, which has to be seen to be believed both for its classical attributes and shockingly (and darkly funny) bursts of violence. We ever so slightly prefer this bout between Gordon Liu and Phillip Ko in part because of the fast-paced storytelling. As the fight plays out you can tell Liu’s 5th Brother is doing something secondary to fending off the Abbott, you just can’t tell what it is exactly. It’s not until the lights go out, and the Abbott has been faked right out of his own shoes, that the realization hits, leading the Abbott to immediately relinquish his position. Go back through a second time and see if you can find the moment where Liu realizes he has the upper hand.
9. Rurouni Kenshin: The Final (2021, Japan) — Takeru Satoh vs. Mackenyu
We are once again standing here, asking people to watch one of the best action series of the past two decades. While the earlier selection from the third film was more of a kitchen sink extravaganza, the last fight in the story — chronologically, even though the prequel film came out last for some reason — is a pure one-on-one speed rush.
The Kenshin stories cheat a little bit, for our benefit, because they rig every fight against the main character with his refusal to kill. Sure, he delivers well over 100 concussions over the course of the series but his reverse blade — the dull edge is on the outside — means he can’t just take out his opponents with one or two well placed blows like you would see in Lone Wolf and Cub. He doesn’t just have to be better, he has to be significantly better than his most skilled enemies, and in Mackenyu’s (Sonny Chiba’s son, as it happens) Enishi he has met his equal. It’s a credit to Kenji Tanigaki that with all the wild, acrobatic, impossible moves being pulled off, the action never feels floaty. As such, we never lose our grounding in real-world physicality, which makes it all the easier to get sucked into the results of months and months of training.
If you’re going to watch the series, which any action fans should as long as you can tolerate the anime-based characterizations, we recommend going 5–1–2–3–4.
8. Prodigal Son (1981, Hong Kong) — Yuen Biao vs. Frankie Chan
Even by 1981 the styles in Hong Kong were changing. Faster. More fluid. Bigger hits. More dangerous stunts. Fights were gradually becoming less like dances and more like, well, fights. Sammo Hung’s Prodigal Son is a bit of a snapshot of an industry in transition, and this final bout between Yuen Biao and Frankie Chen, moving at double speed with hits that are starting to feel real — not to mention that stair dive — is simultaneously the best of the old style and a sign of things to come.
7. Fist of Legend (1994, Hong Kong) — Jet Li vs. Billy Chow
Kickers. Make. Everything. Better. Billy Chow should have been in every American action series for the past two decades. He should have kicked Vin Diesel in the face. He should have kicked Captain America in the face. He should have kicked Batman in the face if the Dark Knight trilogy had the courage to have a decent hand-to-hand action scene.
Before Jet Li came over to Hollywood to play the heavy in Lethal Weapon 4 — the finale with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover is pretty fun even if it’s entirely beneath Li’s talent — if we had to guess as to what scene Li was best known for, it’s this one. One of the more grounded Yuen Woo-Ping fights of the 90’s, the progression here, from Chow’s physical advantage to each fighter looking for weaknesses until finally arriving at Li finding the solution and wearing Chow out, is as perfect as in any fight without a gimmick. Nobody and nothing is going to save Li and his victory doesn’t feel as though it was required by the script in the same way that, say, Frank Dux beating Chong Li does.
6. The Raid (2011, Indonesia) — Iko Uwais + Donny Alamsyah vs. Yaya Ruhian
The miracle of this scene in a miracle of a movie — director Gareth Evans was in Indonesia filming a documentary of the pencak silat style and it spoke to him so much that he moved there — is how purely entertaining it manages to remain while the fight itself is a brutal, live-or-die slugfest. Yaya Ruhian’s Mad Dog is clearly the best fighter in the movie universe, having already taken down Joe Taslim, establishing early stakes as we know Iko Uwais’ character can’t do this all on his own. It doesn’t feel like a contrivance that Ruhian almost wins, either. Sure, there are a couple beats where one of the good guys is knocked down and probably could have come back into frame earlier, but of every 2-on-1 fight we’ve seen this one feels the most authentic with regard to that timing. You never once feel, ‘Wait, where is Iko?” because Iko very clearly just got knocked to the ground and shouldn’t be able to get up. The best moment might not be a move at all, coming when Ruhian gets grabbed mid-air and slammed horizontally to the ground. There should be more mid-air tackles when guys try cool aerial moves.
This may have been the star-making turn for Uwais — he owns the movie — but it’s Ruhian who you come away with the most respect for after this scene. There’s a reason Evans brought him back as an entirely different character, and again as choreographer, in the sequel, and why he got the call for John Wick 3. You just don’t forget the guy who kept fighting with a fluorescent light bulb sticking out of his neck. Shame there hasn’t been more of a demand for his services, but given the type of movies being made today it’s tough to find where those missed opportunities would have been.
Special mention needs to be made of Uwais’ earlier hallway fight, which features one of the most memorable and brutal finishing moves — watch it in a theater one day and wait for the gasps from the crowd.
5. Wheels on Meals (1984, Hong Kong) — Jackie Chan vs. Benny Urquidez
Remember how we were saying how much the styles of fights were changing in Hong Kong by the early 80’s? This scene, also directed by Sammo Hung though when paired up with Chan it increasingly became Chan doing his own action direction, was released just three years after Prodigal Son and it barely even feels like the same sport.
Few have ever looked cooler in suspenders and a bowtie than famed kickboxer Benny ‘The Jet” Urquidez — later on he would train and then fight John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank — and he gets a handful of great moments here, landing one kick square in Chan’s chest while taking off his jacket and snuffing out a candelabra with another. As he tells it, he and Chan choreographed the entire fight through Chan’s interpreter, with Urquidez bringing his up-tempo rhythm to the scene. Some of those hits look real? They were.
The first half of this fight feels like the classic, reluctant, underdog Chan the world would come to know. The second half, though, at times feels like a different actor altogether, dancing more like Bruce Lee — Chan was a bit player on Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon — than the persona Chan would gradually develop. Some might prefer the rematch a few years later in Dragons Forever, itself deserving of a spot on this list though including it would be a little repetitive, we just prefer the storytelling in this one.
4. Police Story (1985, Hong Kong) — Mall Fight: Jackie Chan vs. Everyone
Both the opening set piece of Police Story and the closing fight would be in contention for the top of a list of greatest action sequences. One of the only reasons this isn’t even higher is that it feels like the top three should be more intimate affairs in the spirit of this list.
I feel very confident in saying that we will never, ever, get another scene like this again. It’s not just that there won’t be another Jackie Chan, it’s that insurance companies probably won’t allow one to exist. So unless a Jackie-level talent comes along with a massive stunt crew and apparatus that can support all these nutso hits between and down escalators, and it all happens in a self-funded, independent production directed by someone who also has an incredible eye for filming a fight scene, this just isn’t happening. Fun as something like the gym fight/shootout in Extraction 2 was earlier in 2023, you’re always aware when the visual effects kick in. Even while Chan kept the stunts and fights flowing for another two decades, he never tried something quite this chaotic ever again.
So many moments that could be a favorite, including Chan taking cover in the world’s tiniest stairway as a motorcycle rockets over top of him, but the kicker is that after the famous pole slide — generally not a fan of the multiple-angle replay as it tends to take you out of the scene, but it has never been more earned than here — Chan immediately pops up and gets right back into character, going straight for the McGuffin.
3. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, Taiwan) — Michelle Yeoh vs. Zhang Ziyi
The only reason there aren’t a couple more Yeoh fights on here is that quite a bit of her mid-90’s production was heavy on wire work — though we are partial to the spear fight from Wing Chun — that tended to feel a bit floaty, while The Heroic Trio is basically a comic-book movie with few actual fights.
A year after Yuen Woo-Ping made his name in Hollywood with The Matrix — the subway fight from the original and chateau from Reloaded are both honorable mentions, almost making it on cinematography alone — he’s back as action director in what might be the finest of all wuxia productions. We’ve tried to avoid spending this entire list saying, ‘It’s about the storytelling’ because that would get old after a bit, but it easily applies here, with Zhang Ziyi’s character growing in confidence as her stolen sword, The Green Destiny, shreds through all of Yeoh’s — who has a chance to end the fight early but clearly doesn’t want to injure the misguided youth — selections. Yeoh gets to play the more skilled fighter troubleshooting a nearly impossible problem perfectly, with that great bit of comedy thrown in with the oversized spear, and it’s perfect that the fight ends with Yeoh choosing the weapon that can still win even as it’s broken. The movie’s wire work may not be for everyone, but it’s used with a subtle touch here as director Ang Lee keeps pulling the camera back, or placing it over the top, to make sure we never miss a move.
2. Legend of the Drunken Master (1994, Hong Kong) — Jackie Chan vs. Ken Lo
Three Jackie fights in the Top 5? He’s the greatest action star we’ve ever had, so it tracks. Good luck finding someone who can so effectively pull off the physical acting required to perform the drunken boxing style — it took some restraint not to have Chan verbally call out and draw attention to each of the eight drunken gods as he cycles through their styles — while also being willing to literally get raked through hot coals.
While Yuen Woo-Ping’s absence is a bit conspicuous — after 1978’s Drunken Master he didn’t work with Chan again until 2008’s Forbidden Kingdom — this sequel was supposed to be a great team up between Chan and Lau Kar-Leung, working together for the first time. While the partnership lasted about halfway through filming, Kar-Leung eventually departed the set due to a stylistic disagreement and for this final sequence, a classic multi-tier finale with Wong Fei Hung fighting through a miniboss and goons, everything was in the hands of Chan and his stunt team. On top of all of that, the actor who was supposed to play the big bad had to bow out due to injury so in stepped Chan’s bodyguard, Ken Lo, whose kicking was nothing short of a revelation.
If anyone in your life ever asks for a kung-fu recommendation, this is the go-to. You can’t go wrong with Chan crawling through and eventually breathing fire on his way through choreography that even some of the greatest stars on this list couldn’t dream of executing.
1. The Raid 2 (2014, Indonesia) — Kitchen Fight: Iko Uwais vs. Cecep Arif Rahman
While Quentin Tarantino, at least from reading what made it to the screen, approached Kill Bill with so much affection for the genre that he set out to make the best version of the things he loved, you get the sense that Gareth Evans approached the second Raid movie by putting aside all his inspirations and trying to blow them all out of the water. Maybe the best way to pay respect to your idols isn’t to pay homage — it’s to beat them. Evans, Iko Uwais, Cecep Arif Rahman and Yaya Ruhian took zero shortcuts getting there.
This is the Sistine Chapel of fight scenes. Even if it isn’t your personal No. 1, it is unassailably qualified for the top spot. No matter how many times you watch it, it only gets better. One can only hope that someday, somebody has so much respect for this fight — just two men in a kitchen, surrounded by white walls, metal and wine bottles — that they decide to push it down a peg, too.
Honorable Mentions
Note: This excludes any fights mentioned in the text of the main list
Versus — Tak Sakaguchi vs. Hideo Sakaki (So perfectly Year 2000)
Rumble In The Bronx – Gang Hideout: Jackie Chan vs. Thugs (An entire generation of kids was introduced to Chan with this weaponized envionment)
Mad Monkey Kung Fu – Final Fight (Hsiao Ho, maybe the most acrobatic member of the Lau Kar-leung company, gets weird)
Oldboy – Hallway Brawl (One of the last cuts from the main list and as influential as any)
Kung Fu Hustle – Three Masters vs. Harpists (Wish Stephen Chow had done more straight action movies because he’s as creative as they come)
Martial Arts of Shaolin – Boat Finale (One of those scenes that would probably just be filmed on the Volume today, and lose all of its magic in the process)
Mad Max: Fury Road – Tom Hardy vs. Charlize Theron (Maybe the most perfectly shot Western fight until…)
The Killer — Florida House Throwdown (Requires a good television/monitor)
Project A – Hotel Stairs (We just don’t throw guys down giant sets of stairs like we used to)
The Young Master – Jackie Chan vs. Hwang In-Shik (If you’re just going to film your finale in a field, do it in a field on top of a mountain)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest – Water Wheel (The Blacksmithy duel between Jack and Will is the fight with the best storytelling in the series, but the DMC finale is the most creative)
The Odd Couple – Sammo Hung vs. Lau Kar Wing
The Last Duel – The Duel (If your movie is called The Last Duel you better have a great fight at the end. Ridley Scott did not disappoint)
From Russia With Love — Sean Connery vs. Robert Shaw (Wouldn’t be as memorable if it wasn’t Bond, but iconography matters, too)
In The Line Of Duty IV – Donnie Yen vs. Michael Woods (If you look up Michael Woods on IMDB, his headshot is him getting kicked in the chest by Yen from this fight)
Righting Wrongs – Cynthia Rothrock and Yuen Biao vs. Melvin Wong (There are two versions of this fight, the original where every character dies and another, recut after poor test screens, where both Rothrock and Biao’s characters survive)
Hydra – Final Fight (Kensuke Sonomura invents Jacket Fighting)
Lost Bullet 2 – Alban Lenoir vs. An Entire Police Station (France is doing Fast and Furious better than Fast and Furious)
Five Element Ninja – Claws and Straw (The original Thanos fight)
Pacific Rim – Battle For Hong Kong (Only works because Guillermo del Toro insisted that the giant robots actually move like giant robots, and because they used cargo ship as a sword)
Eastern Condors – Multi-Fight Finale (A movie so full of action that Sammo Hung facing off with Billy Chow again is merely a side dish)
The Protector – Jackie Chan vs. Bill Wallace (Almost reaches the heights of the Urquidez bouts)
New Dragon Gate Inn – Desert Chase (Absolutely nutty cinematography with a memorable ending)
Blood and Bone – Michael Jai White vs. Matt Mullins (Jai White is as reliable as they come, even in baggy 2000’s clothing, but his prime years were probably wasted by 90’s Hollywood. He was 39 when Undisputed 2 released and 42 in Blood and Bone)
My Father Is A Hero — Jet Li Tonfa Fight
Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday – Scott Adkins vs. Andreas Nguyen
Warrior – Tommy Gym Fight (After what he showed in this, Bronson and as Bane, I’m expecting sweet, sweet music from Tom Hardy and Gareth Evans in the upcoming Havoc)
Duel To The Death (1983) – Norman Chu vs. Damian Lu (One of the most common ‘I saw this movie where they did this thing and I can’t remember what it was’ movies, featuring an all-timer fight setting)
Ong Bak – Fight Club (As historically significant as any other scene listed)
Spooky Encounters – Possession Fight (You can’t explain this movie, you just have to see it)
The Street Fighter – Boat Rescue (Sonny Chiba’s fights are incredibly important, but their brutality has since been matched and exceeded)
Thunderbolt – Pachinko Parlor (Might have made the main list had Chan not had to have been doubled for much of it due to injury)
The Adventure of Robin Hood – Finale Melee Extravaganza (We used to make things in this country)
