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Why a Fight Scene Can Make or Break a Movie

Kay TurnerOct 24, 2017

There’s no denying the power of a great fight scene. A well-shot, perfectly choreographed piece can absolutely make a movie. In films like Atomic Blonde, Kickboxer, and The Quiet Man, the combat was just the finishing touch on an already brilliant piece of cinematography. A gripping fight scene can also save a story that’s probably best left forgotten. Take the game-to-movie crossover/bastardisation Street Fighter starring Jean Claude Van Damme. Any readers finding themselves thinking “wait, what? That movie was great” probably haven’t sat down and watched the thing since their youth. Gone are the days when the simple fact that Ryu and Ken were on the big screen was enough to declare the title anything but mediocre.

Of course, not all fight scenes are created equal. There are those that leave the viewer in more discomfort that the character on the receiving end of the beating. In such instances, fight scenes can completely ruin an otherwise good movie. Whether it’s bad choreography, wooden acting, or Casio-keyboard sound effects, the characters in these flicks would probably have been better off just talking through their grievances, rather than squaring up.

Cinema is full of shocking examples of combat which in turn has inspired many to satirise the ever-powerful movie fight scene. Often, comedic writers will use physical engagement to get laughs. Whether to keep the action “all ages” as in the mass, galleon-based slobber knocker of Disney’s Hook, or because of physical limitations of the movie’s stars as in Team America: World Police, the comedic film fight scene has many guises.

Finally, there are those movies that are straight-up bad. So bad in fact that they often provide as much enjoyment as a brilliantly shot masterpiece. Many of these spectacularly poor offerings have fight scenes, and they frequently prove to be the film’s highlight. For most of these titles, even a brilliantly intense punch up between characters wouldn’t stop the whole package from stinking but at least there’s plenty of fun to derive from watching second rate martial artists pull every punch and completely miss the beat on timing cues.

Best Around

Without doubt, one of the finest examples of cinematic violence happens during the Korean masterpiece Old Boy. Park Chan-wook’s work is often highly stylised and perhaps the pinnacle of this is during the corridor scene in his most famous title. Thanks to the single take and fixed camera there is a strong sense of a classic two-dimensional beat ‘em up. In the scene, Oh Dae-su tears through a crowded corridor of attackers. Armed with a hammer and not exactly fresh from the gym, the businessman isn’t your typical all-action hero. During the iconic scene, he’s constantly dragged to the ground and there’s no sense that he’ll make it through the dense field of opponents at all. As mentioned, the whole scene is captured in just one shot and thanks to the intricacies of the choreography, it took an impressive seventeen takes over the course of three days to get just right.

Another absolute classic in which the fight scene is as strong as the rest of the movie is Drunken Master. The martial arts throughout one of Jackie Chan’s strongest comedic roles is simply remarkable. Predominately the fights are typical Kung Fu flick duels – set in big open clearings in China with two guys showing off their dazzling Kung Fu skills. Chan’s character Wong Fei-hung is sent to train with revered master, Beggar So. His regimes are infamously brutal and the style he teaches is a form of Drunken Boxing known as “The Eight Drunken Immortals”. Each has their own unique take on the form. Wong masters them all bar one which he feels is too feminine. During the final fight between our hero and his nemesis and feared combatant Yim Tit-sam, Beggar So encourages Wong to draw upon influences from each of the seven styles he managed to master to create his own version of the final one. The result is a hilarious demonstration of martial arts in a style which Wong calls “Drunken Miss Ho”. The ensuing fight and rest of the movie, for that matter, is just fantastic.

Bad Movie Saved

Rocky V never quite lived up to its prequels. The rest of the series is so legendary that it’s had many different franchised products come out over the years. Possibly most recently being the online slot machine bearing the Italian Stallion’s name which joins an already packed cannon of no deposit fighting themed games.

However, in Rocky V Balboa isn’t even in the ring. It’s hard to see the point at all. The movie about Rock’s cocky, underappreciative protégé feels like it’s going nowhere. We see the franchise’s hero down on his luck, and a shadow of his former self. It’s hard to image that this is the same guy who knocked out Ivan Drago in front of baying crowd of communists just a few short years ago. All that changes in the last fifteen minutes of the movie though.

Possibly the greatest fight of the entire series starts with Rocky drowning his sorrows in his local boozer. Arrogant as ever, Tommy Gunn and his entourage show up demanding that Rock come out of retirement so that Tommy can step out from beneath his former manager’s shadow. Surely, the whole movie wasn’t building up to a Rocky VI with the two training for ninety minutes to square off in the ring?! Nah, Rocky’s ring’s “outside”!

Unlike other Rocky fight scenes, we’re privy to the whole brawl. It goes Rock’s way, then Tommy’s, and it swings back and forth a couple of times. Finally, Balboa receives a cerebral visitation from late trainer Mickey who tells him that he “didn’t hear no bell”. Of course, this inspires him to get to his feet and absolutely paste the cocksure Gunn, and his smarmy manager too for good measure. Rocky goes out as he does in every other movie in the series, to his ever-loyal fans chanting his name, Adrian in arm.

Another movie which would be completely hopeless without its combat scenes is the 1992 film adaptation of the Capcom classic, Street Fighter. The obvious necessity to make the movie child-friendly, the huge number of unique characters sharing limited screen time – each requiring tasteful backstory-writing, and the often-bewildering casting choices (Kylie Minogue, really?) should have made this movie an absolute flop. The Street Fighter franchise is a strong one but isn’t totally infallible. However, thanks to some relatively no name actors performing some solid fight routines and a legendary star taking a role at his kids’ behest, the movie somehow manages to scrap a pass. One of our favourite fights is the seemingly hopeless battle between Ryu, and a tag team of Sagat and Vega. All seems lost when from out of nowhere, his righthand man, Ken, appears. Together, the two make short work of their adversaries and we even see the rare “hadouken” which captured nearly every kid’s imagination in the early nineties.

Of course, the final battle between Guile and Bison needs mention too. Jean Claude Van Damme was a weird choice for a US marine corps but his on-film martial arts record speaks for itself. Then there’s the villain of the piece, the pseudo-communist, would-be dictator, Bison. Played masterfully by Raúl Juliá, an actor of such esteem that he even makes lines like “it levitates my desk where I ride the saddle of the world” sound menacing. Thanks largely to Juliá’s delivery and partially to JCVD’s athletic performance, the showdown between the two is undoubtedly one of the movie’s highlights. It’s so good we can almost forgive the muscles from Brussels’s appalling delivery of just about every line in the whole thing.

Comedic brawls

Wayne’s World was a fantastic movie. Hilariously funny and with a hard rocking soundtrack, it was however missing one thing – a fight scene. Of course, thanks to the original’s tremendous success, a sequel premiered the following year. This time around, Wayne has his own place and he and Cassandra are getting more serious. In one of Wayne’s World 2’s funniest scenes, the title character meets his lover’s father, Jeff, for the first time. Being Cantonese and this being before political correctness became political insanity, Jeff insists on battling Wayne in typical martial arts movie-style. In the dialogue before the epic fight, Wayne requests that the two be dubbed instead of subtitled. The response of “very well, if that is your custom. Prepare to die” in out of sync voice over is truly hilarious, as is the ensuing combat. During the fight, just about every Kung Fu movie convention is parodied to hilarious effect. The scene is a fantastic comedic piece and one of the most amusing fight scenes in cinematic history.

Just terrible

We’ve had the great, hilarious, and the not so great. Now, all that’s left is the bad. Even if this kind of movie included a Park Chan-wook fight scene or a Raúl Juliá cameo they’d still be stinkers. Take Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter, for example. The whole movie is a car crash. It borders on the brilliant but remains firmly rooted in the banal. It has that modern B-Movie quality that makes it hard to tell if the director was trying to create a hard hitting religiously-inspired action flick, or a parody of the worst that SciFi channel has got to offer.

Possibly the most bizarre scene in the film is when Jesus is accosted by a car full (and we do mean full) of “atheists”. They announce themselves as atheists (helpful) when they first encounter Jesus before attacking him. Ever the equalitarian, the son of god lays out both male and female foes one after another. As the action continues, it becomes more and more apparent that the title character is being assaulted by a full dojo’s worth of second-rate martial arts students. Cue missed timing signals, painfully stage-managed flying kicks and about as much care for realism as a Pablo Picasso exhibition. It’s so bad that there can be no way the director thought they were creating anything other than trash. Either way, Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter is hilariously tragic, or tragically hilarious. We’re just not sure.