Normally I'd give a little rundown of all the major action films that have come out this past year and maybe some eloquent words on the artistic merits of what makes a great fight scenes. But this time I just wanted to get straight into the list without wasting your time. So keep on reading for what I believe are the top 12 fight scenes of 2023!
#12. The Killer
Martial arts heavy fight sequences are the bread and butter of these kinds of lists but it takes a special appreciation to acknowledge the less technical but equally intense scenes out there that are stil worthy of this article. Categorized as "brawls", this type of fight scene in the eyes of some can be far less exciting yet when staged well can provide a whole nother type of hand-to-hand action that isn't simply the usual choreographed dance we're used to. Realism can be refreshing admist all the flashier over-the-top fights we tend to associate with a martial arts filled film and The Equalizer 3 for example manages to balance both the grounded and stylized violence that should be associated with a real-world assassin. Straying farther towards the more realistic end of the spectrum of action however are the true brawl-based fights and this year we got plenty of those from films like the French vehicular actioner Lost Bullet 2 and even a short yet surprisingly engaging indoor tussel in the time-traveling slasher parody Totally Killer. Speaking of the word "killer" in the title, 2023's best brawl goes to another movie containing the word "killer" which stands in a long line of other action greats including last year's The Killer: A Girl Who Deserves to Die and John Woo's The Killer decades earlier. Woo himself made a triumphant return to Hollywood recently with the Joel Kinnamon starring Silent Night which itself has its own well choreographed brawl to bring some variation to the film's stellar shootouts.
Beating out all the other brawls however is one from a sort of unexpected source made by a very sophisticated artistic director. That source being Netflix's The Killer by David Fincher, a directorial genius known for psychological thrillers with a dark twisted sense of humor like Seven, Panic Room, Zodiac, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and House of Cards, lighter-hearted but oddball movies such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and films with more mainstream dramatic appeal like The Social Network. And although his few attempts at the action market have been mostly polarizing, namely Alien 3, the mode of action he does bring is nevertheless quite original. The fact that he's the executive producer and co-creator of Netflix's adult animated anthology Love, Death, and Robots, one of my personal favorites, should tell you enough about what he's capable of. The Killer is adapted from French graphic novels developed in 2007 that were already planned to be made into a film with David Fincher immediately assigned for directorial duties. The titular professional killer is played by Michael Fassbender who, after a slightly humorously botched assassination, finds his girlfriend hospitalized by unknown assailants that were meant to kill him for his failure setting our hitman protagonist on a vengeful mission to seek out his would-be assassins. The trail leads him to a man with a limp where our technical brawl takes place. Fassbender's possibly aging assassin so far has been funnily played up as a suddenly unlucky contract killer whose otherwise quasi-Bourne-like analysis of his targets have resulted in, to understate, mild miscalculations, causing him to underestimate his kills. One of which is the guard dog of his current target that he failed to sedate forcing him to cross fists with the dog's owner. One of his attempted killers known only as "The Brute" played by 6'2" New Zealand stuntman Sala Baker who you may know as Sauron in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
After you get over the Magneto vs. Sauron joke that might've popped up in your head, you might take the time to respect how exciting a cinematic brawl can be as "The Brute" uses his namesake brute strength to plow through every object in the household, not to mention the household itself, that Fassbender throws at him. Fight coordinator Dave Macomber is the craftsman behind this gritty excellence who was also involved in the action design for the MCU Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, South Indian fantasy epic Bahubali 2, G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra, and Banshee, the visceral crime drama that best prepared him for our fight scene of choice in The Killer. Dave Macomber was given some truly talented individuals to work with as he not only got the underappreciated stunt performer Sala Baker but also one of this era's most skilled actors Michael Fassbender whose accolades include Oscar, Golden Globe, and BAFTA nominations. Fassbender is no stranger to more action-heavy roles having donned the red cape of a Spartan in 300 and let's not forget his most iconic character Magneto in the X-Men films before Disney's acquisition of Fox. He based his depiction of the character in The Killer after the main hitman in the 60s' French-Italian film Le Samouraï and tried to maintain such a cold assassin-like demeanor that he allegedly did not blink once during shoots. Undergoing 10 weeks of fitness training, attaining the ability to effortlessly assemble a sniper rifle, and having researched actual hitmen, there's no wonder that this mid-movie melee was made so meaningful in terms of its narrative and physical authenticity.
Fassbender's self-narrating title character is very much like those in hard-boiled detective stories made more so by the moody neo-noir vibe characteristic of many of David Fincher's thrillers. The narrator protagonist is especially effective at taking satirical stabs at how perfect most movie assassins normally are amplifying the comedic shock of moments when the protagonist's kills go horribly wrong. The Killer is meant to be a throwback to olden-day 70s' B movies and given how non-technical the domestic duel between "the killer" and "the brute" was, it wouldn't be too hard to imagine a similar brawl, albeit with a more retro sound style, having been created some time in 1970 when stylish martial arts weren't as commonplace in American cinema. Alas, Fassbender and Sala Baker would not have been so perfectly picked were it not for David Fincher who precisely chooses his actors for their particular part as a crucial element of his incredibly extensive research process. A process sometimes demanding 50-100 takes to finalize a single scene. The best actors of course are nothing without the best filming methods. And for this we have Fincher's cinematographic mastery assisted by the film's actual cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt.
Fincher prefers using a stationary camera preferably on a tripod, favoring natural lighting over flashy artificial effects. The camera is choreographed to the titular killer's mental state remaining steady when calm and collected but erratic when in panic. The camerawork also meticulously establishes the geography of the house for the fight to tell its own logical story. The result is an amalgam of visual aspects that create a closer reflection of reality that fits the realistic tone of the fight scene yet also conveys a subjective psychological quality. Reinforcing the visual narrative is the semi-surreal soundscape backed up by horror-esque background music emphasizing every brutal bodily impact of bone on flesh, smashed furniture, busted walls, and the heavy thud of every frantic footstep. Netflix has pulled in some highly acclaimed auteurs into its platform the past decade and few other directors represent the pinnacle of perfectionism as does David Fincher. His Gen-X consumer culture satire Fight Club all those years ago was just a preview of the body-busting brawler he could put together he put his mind to it and when warranted by the weight of the narrative.
#11. Creed III
(only some of the final moments of the fight scene discussed below are shown as the entire sequence is over 10 minutes long and is too heaivly copyright protected to be completely uploadable on YouTube)
The majority or at least upper half of these annual lists are normally comprised of non-American films yet the 2020s' have not disappointed when it comes to the choreographic quality of Hollywood acton sequences. The infamously delayed Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom brought back the visually stunning long takes. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was a surprise success not only in its fantasy adventure comedy subversions but also in its well designed and filmed action. Knights of the Zodiac adapted yet another older Shonen franchise to live action with a bit of Hong Kong flair. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning - Part One rode on its reputation of handing out some high-quality hand-to-hand fights since Fallout while also being one of a series of stunt spectacles spanning multiple decades. 2023 brought back some good ol' reliable Jason Statham ass-kicking in both Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre and Expend4bles. As thrilling as these blockbuster beatdowns can be, sometimes all it takes is a simpler sports combat drama to quench your thirst for fight scenes. And what simpler sports combat is there but boxing? Netflix's Bloodhounds took Korean cinematic fighting and focused almost exclusively on the boxing over what would otherwise have been the traditional Taekwondo or all-around martial arts style of most of the country's film fights. But when it comes to a boxing-based fight, you can't get any better than one from the combat sport's most famous franchise, Creed III.
Creed III is Michael B. Jordan's directorial debut and has sold more tickets than every prior Creed film solidifying its status as being able to stand on its own despite Sylvester Stallone not returning for his role as Rocky. Adonis Creed, played by Michael B. Jordan, illegitimate son of Apollo Creed, famous rival of Rocky Balboa, has now hit retirement. But a long forgotten friend from his youth, Damian Anderson, played by Jonathan Majors, re-emerges from the past finally having finished his prison sentence seeking the fame that was stolen from him all those decades before. Coming to claim the title as world champion and the life he sacrificed by covering a crime committed by Creed in their childhood, Damian Anderson is able to face off against Creed's successor, played by real life WBA weltereight champ Jose Benavidez Jr., by hiring a fellow inmate to injure Benaidez's opponent Viktor Drago (Ivan Drago's son) outside the ring prompting Creed to choose Damian as the only worthy competitor. After defeating Benavidez with dishonorable techniques and publicly insulting Creed, Adonis decides to throw back on his gloves and re-enter the ring to put an end to Damian's underserved title as world champ. Creed III's fist-fighting finale is a brotherly boxing battle and ring-side reunion between the two embittered apex athletes made all the more visually striking and choreographically intriguing by their distinctly contrasting boxing styles.
Adonis Creed's initial boxing style at the start of the Creed series relied on an orthodox stance like his father Apollo. But unlike Apollo Creed's obvious Muhammad Ali long-range fast-footed approach, Adonis is made to be a more unpolished unprofessionally trained fighter making him a half-way point between Apollo Creed and the Bronx brawling of Rocky Balboa. A boxing form Adonis adopted after being taken under the Italian Stallion's wing allowing him the capacity to take powerful punches when necessary. Though by Creed III Adonis has perfected his punching prowess into a more crisp and clean balance of offensive and defensive boxing modeled after real light heavyweight world champion Timothy Bradley. On the other hand, or glove that is, Damian Anderson's style reflects his older age and lack of extensive pro training: a very tight defense through a tense philly shell relying on subtle body movements to roll punches off his shoulders and an unorthodox horizontal arm block. Much less agile than Adonis, Damian utilizes more static blocks and smaller torso twists in contrast to Adonis' more traditional and athletic head movement, footwork, and hands up blocking/parrying techniques. Prior to the film's climactic showdown, Damian had been dependant on dirty boxing tactics to reach the top from a downward punch to the shoulder, elbow to the face, and even a knee strike. However, in his final match he boxes as fairly as possible perhaps to prove himself as a peak pugilisitic powerhouse that should have had the world-class prestige that Adonis Creed had achieved in his absence. Lined up next to every fictional boxer that has stepped into the theatrical ring in the Rocky/Creed series, Damian Anderson is undobutedly the most stylistically standout opponent. Jonathan Majors seems to have personalized his very own movement language that emobies his very character from his gait to his combat. Even Damian's entrance walk in the final bout conveys a career crushed by a single crime. He carries an almost urban swagger side-leaning and constantly pulling up his shorts.
The pugilistic personification of Andonis Creed and Damian Anderson don't just stop at the surface level of mere boxing styles as Michael B. Jordan stated that the boxing bouts take direct inspiration from anime, a medium he is unabashedly an avid fan of, whether it be shonen action classics like Dragon Ball Z and Naruto to more boxing-centric series like Hajime No Ippo and Megalobox. That cross-face punch moment for example is taken straight from the fateful rematch between Naruto and Sasuke towards the end of Naruto: Shippuden evoking the conflicted brotherhood mutually shared by Adonis Creed and Damian Anderson as well as their anime counterparts. Adonis and Damian's cinematic relationship goes beyond Naruto having been influenced by anime's most famed rivalries from Goku and Vegeta in DBZ to more recent frienemies like Bakugo and Midoriya in My Hero Academia. These friend/foe dynamics are central to countless anime and helped form the emotional core for Creed III's final fight. Besides the narrative essence of anime laying the foundation of the fight, more technical aspects of film-making themselves also applied anime artistry. Michael B. Jordan wanted to recreate the parallax cinematography in a live action format often used in anime where the foreground and backgound move at differing speeds to generate a more kinetic feel. Not to mention the inclusion of that slow-mo gut punch followed up with a saliva and sweat-spraying reaction that has been shown in so many anime it's practically a genre convention.
Going back to the emotive features of the fight, the so-called "void", a metaphorical mental plane that Creed and Damian enter in the final moments representing their complete concetration on their boxing match where the audience fades out of existence is also anime-influenced. The two perceive each other in their adolescent years symbolizing their lifelong feelings of betrayal and guilt. The ring ropes briefly transform into prison bars as though Damian is fighting to escape his former life behind bars. Michael B. Jordan almost placed subtitles to communicate the internal dialogue between the characters but decided against it so as to be more accessible to non-anime fans. Anime as an art form is more poplar than ever before and it's inspiration can be seen in nearly every frame throughout the final act of Creed III. Michael B. Jordan couldn't help but to inject his own longstanding love of the animation form as in an early scene from the film, the young Adonis Creed is shown to be an anime aficionado himself having posters covering the walls of his room. Michael B. Jordan worked closely with director of photography Kramer Morgenthau to achieve this anime action aesthetic. As a highly experienced DP, Morgenthau considers lighting as essential to presenting the characters' motivations and personalities to fully immerse the viewer in the fight. A bright royal red for Creed's prestiguous persona and an enigmatic dimly lit green for Damian's darker and more dangerous presence. Morgenthau and Jordan together created a subjective in-ring perspective called "Adonis Vision" seen as a hyperrealistic close-up face shot of Creed when mentally developing a strategy for each round mirroring the super-personal zoom-in of facial expressions seen in anime. This required a widened aspect ratio and special high frame rate cameras to capture Adonis' cognitive process. Dynamic camerawork has always been key to the Creed series ever since the famous long take in the first film and this thrid installment maintains a similar sense of perspective by employing over-the-shoulder vantage points and a steady circular swing around the opponents to give a more subjective in-ring view.
With Michael B. Jordan directing the film overall and Kramer Morgenthau directing the photography, you need someone directing the action specifically. And that person is none other than Mark R. Miscione, fight choreographer of low-budget sci-fi actioner Agent Revelation, assistant fight coordinator of Netflix's assassin flick The Gray Man, and stunt coordinator of many other bigger Hollywood action films and major video game franchises before he had delved into fight design in particular. His choreographic craftsmanship would not be as high-calibre as it is were it not for supervising stunt coordinator and second unit director Clayon J. Barber, a former US Olympic Taekwondo champion, director of Indie action legend Eric Jacobus' Blindsided, action designer of Gareth Evans' brutal British crime thriller Gangs of London, and fight choreographer of Blade II. Clayton J. Barber had already worked with Michael B. Jordan before in the first Creed film as well as Black Panther as fight coordinator of both movies and so was intimately familiar with Jordan's immense physical devotion to the craft making their collaboration that much more effortless. Adding to the trio of action designers is assistant stunt coordinator Eric Brown, fight coordinator of the Jaime Foxx led vampire action movie Day Shift, the Halle Berry-starring MMA drama Bruised, the S.W.A.T. TV series, and fight choreographer of semi-futuristic one-building actioner Hotel Artemis.
The three action coordinators probably had an easier time developing the boxing sequences considering the sheer dedication put in by the two ringside combatants. Under the careful supervision of fitness trainer Corey Calliet, Michael B. Jordan used full-body workouts along with his regular boxing regimen drawing on his over decade-long Creed series exercise routine to build a mix of mobility and musculature. His co-star, rising leading man Jonathan Majors, sparred with pro boxers two hours a day for six months to prep for his role as Damian. Suffice it to say that Majors' dramatic skill and pure physicality is precisely what's needed for a sympathizable antagonist and that same moral complexity is what will hopefully make his part as Kang and all his variants an even more compelling big bad than Thanos in the MCU providing him the acting and film fighting versatility to conquer the next saga of the cinematic universe. (note: I wrote this before Jonathan Majors was fired by Disney for domestic abuse allegations) You might not have known that Creed III originally planned to have WBC multi-year heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder as the son of Mr. T.'s Clubber Lang appearing as Adonis' main adversary. While that plotline could be saved for Creed IV, Jonathan Majors' Damian Anderson might just be the most intriguing rival to be introduced in the trilogy so far. Telling a non-verbal story by expressing each character's personalities and past history by way of poetically choreographed punches on an anime canvas, Michael B. Jordan successfully innovated cinematic boxing trascending the limitations inherent to an otherwise creatively constraining combat art. The Creed series started off as merely a spin-off but is now a modern sports combat classic which may be destined to one day even surpass its Rocky origins.
#10. Warrior Season 3
And now it's time for our television/streaming entry for this year. Competing for this category we have a couple Disney+ series mainly The Mandalorian spin-off Ahsoka and fantasy teen drama American Born Chinese. Coming from Netflix we got Korean boxing thriller Bloodhounds, Danish paranormal noir Copenhagen Cowboy, ghostbusting detective series Lockwood & Co., an appropriately hyped live action adaptation of One Piece (and Yu Yu Hakusho a little later), and Henry Cavill's final season of The Witcher. Finally there's Amazon Prime's The Continental: From the World of John Wick, a 70s' side prequel to one of the 21st century's most masterful action film series. Honestly if I had more time to compile these lists, I'd probably make entirely separate articles exclusively for the world of TV/streaming services. But I'm sure those honorable mentions will do for now. It was a tough selection to pick from but in the end I went with season 3 of Warrior.
Andrew Koji stars as Ah Sam, a martial arts expert that has immigrated from China to late 1800s' San Francisco in search of his sister setting the two on opposite sides of the Tong Wars. Warrior began as a Cinemax original which was later moved to HBO Max (still not used to the name "Max") then very recently (as of mid-December of this year) acquired by Netflix and is basically an elaboration on a TV series treatment based on a martial arts western written by Bruce Lee whose work allegedly was repurposed for the series Kung Fu starring David Carradine. Executively produced by Bruce Lee's daughter Shannon Lee and Justin Lin, a director whose filmography includes the Fast & Furious franchise, and overseen by showrunner Jonathan Tropper of Cinemax crime thriller Banshee, every season of Warrior is packed with a fistful of fights and this latest one is no exception. Some of these fights stand out more than others of course like the East vs. West sword duel between Lai and Strickland, O'Leary's brutal bar brawl, and a tragic fight to the death between Yi Long and Kong Pak, the latter of which is played by the always underrated Mark Dacascos. Narrowing down even that collection of fight scenes within a single series, what remained was the season 3 finale. The best for last as the old cliched saying goes. In this final episode, Ah Sam is torn between the filial piety of saving his sister and the loyal brotherhood he has established with his own Tong, the Hop Wei. Ah Sam hesitantly takes on all a whole gang of Hop Wei members in a one vs. many axe gang fight echoing the axe gang trope of numerous Hong Kong martial arts movies of the past.
But unlike the Hong Kong flavor of action however is the more gritty arhythmic flow of the fight that doesn't look like the dance-like choreography of stereotypical HK fight sequences. It's more akin to Bruce Lee's style particularly the later films he himself directed like Way of the Dragon and Game of Death albeit more modernized dynamic camerawork especially evident in the tight hallway spaces of the season 3 finale. Makes sense as Ah Sam is meant to be the character Bruce Lee imagined and so not only does his character make subtle nods to Bruce's cinematic persona like his beckoning hand gestures, thumb-to-nose flicks, the long-awaited one-inch punch, and the iconic dual-wielded nunchuks, but also his martial arts style itself. A style predicated on quick combinations and single practical techniques rather than extended intricate movements. Rooted in deadly efficiency, Ah Sam normally retracts his limbs instead of leaving them out like in traditional Asian martial arts to leave himself less open for counterattacks. It's the closest thing to Jeet Kune Do without being Jeet Kune Do as Ah Sam's actor Andrew Koji has never trained in Bruce Lee's postmodernist martial art but is instead primarily a Taekwondo stylist with some Shaolin Kung Fu training thrown in.
For Warrior, Koji perfected his kicking power by receiving training by 2 world-class Korean TKD masters who have both taught their leg-based martial science to special forces teams in several countries around the globe. Adding that arsenal to Koji's gifted acrobatics and we get Ah Sam; a flashy yet economical fighter. Even Andrew Koji's ethnic roots are a perfect match for the character who is intended to be partially European fitting for Andrew Koji, A British actor of Japanese and English descent. This multiracial background is a lesser known tribute to Bruce Lee himself who was in fact a quarter Caucasian through his grandfather. Warrior was definitely a career breakthrough for Andrew Koji as smaller roles like Storm Shadow in the underwhelming G.I. Joe Origins: Snake Eyes and his bir part alongside Hiroyuki Sanada in David Leitch's Brad Pitt-starring Bullet Train have not given him the actin superstardom he so rightfully deserves. Martial arts actors are few and far between nowadays as the dramatic peformances are ordinarily left to non-martial actors while the film fighting is more often than not left to stunt performers.
Andrew Koji isn't the only martial actor deserving of praise as the one against all fight becomes a two-on-one when Hop Wei leader Young Jun and his other right hand man and super-likable guy Hong realize they must reluctantly face off against Ah Sam themselves. As was the previous entry on this list from Creed III, this fight sequence underscores the brutality through a battle of betrayal and the breaking of brotherly bonds. Fellow Englishman Jason Tobin plays Young Jun and had to undergo intense physical training for his role with ATP Fitness especially after discovering he was a prediabetic during filming of the first season of Warrior. Tobin holds Bruce Lee in the highest esteem and is the only actor in this fight scene who has formally studied actual Jeet Kune Do at the world-renowned Insanto Academy. He began his martial arts journey at a young age from Judo to Taekwondo (like Andrew Koji) and has an absolutely shredded phsyique basing his body off of Bruce Lee's almost zero-fat muscle tone which we unfortunately don't get to appreciate in his buttoned down suit-wearing ganglord moments in Warrior. Sadly, Jason Tobin's JKD is not displayed as noticeably since Tobin's character is more a knife fighter. The knife moves are however based on a myriad of martial forms he had learned before and during his time on the set of Warrior ranging from those directly teaching knife combat like Silat to creative applications of non-knife based arts like Western Boxing and even Wing Chun.
Next to Jason Tobin is American actor Chen Tang who plays Hong, also a huge admirer of Bruce Lee, who expanded upon his limited prior martial arts experience after landing his role for Warrior back in season 2 training six hours daily from stuntwork to basic fitness. Chen Tang was given creative freedom to detail his character's fighting methodology relying on more defensive maneuvers to protect his thinner frame. His character Hong uses a beaded necklage much like a chain whip, a Wushu weapon which he trained to use under a Chinese master as well as applying his knowledge of a similar Japanese weapon called the manriki-kusari under yet another sensei to mold his own customized martial tool of choice.
Masterminding this martial mayhem is fight coordinator Brett Chan who served as second unit director of the first season and before being handed choregraphic reigns for Warrior, was the fight choreographer of Netflix series like historical drama Marco Polo and Marvel's Iron Fist, anti-trafficking action flick Darc, and stunt coordinator of too many major movies and TV series to name. Without Brett Chan and the dramatically and choreographically competent cast he coodinated, Warrior's fight sequences would seriously lack what Bruce Lee called "emotional content" and the stylized grit that is so unique to the series. By the third season's final act, it has become more and more an undisputed statement to say that Warrior is the truest expression of Bruce's unactualized vision that was shot down by what may have been culturally short-sighted television execs almost half a century ago. HBO Max officially cancelled the series this past month so it's all up to the viewership stats on Netflix that will determine whether or not we get a season 4......
#9. The Fist of the Condor
(whole film free on YouTube at the time of writing but not necessarily while you're reading this; specific fight scene discussed below at 1:06:04)
The Spanish-language movie industry has never quite entered the conversation when it comes to global action cinema. The sci-fi psychokinetic thriller Awareness is one example of a moderately well-made attempt at that endeavor. Yet it's almost always the usual suspects that are ever mentioned and in this case we're talking director Ernesto Díaz Espinoza who is behind a slew of Marko Zaror led films including Kiltro, Mirageman, Mandrill, and perhaps Zaror's greatest starring role to date, Redeemer. This actor-director duo's latest project is The Fist of the Condor which is basically a Chilean kung fu flick complete with unconventional training montages and a revenge driven plotline centered around a book containing knowledge of the eponymous ancient esoteric Incan martial art, The Fist of the Condor. The elderly woman who passes on the Condor Fist teachings herself is an homage to similarly white-haired masters from retro kung fu movies and is in fact played by Marko Zaror's real mother Gina Aguad who happens to be the first female Karate black belt in Chile. Zaror plays both twin brothers taught the ways of the Condor Fist, and as is typically the deal with twins, one turns to the dark side so to speak murdering the wife and child of the other. Originally intended as a series but reformatted into the first part of a hopefully two-part movie duology, The Fist of the Condor was released as a Hi-Yah! original and is very much as we all wanted, a Marko Zaror fight fest.
Indie martial arts action extraordinaire Jose Manuel acts as the first of several fighters featured capping off a film filled with a slow but soothingly quiet and almost meditative atmosphere often without background music softened further by the less impactful sound design characteristic of Ernesto Díaz Espinoza's past martial arts movie Redeemer all of which generates an almost mystical martial movie experience. The fight of focus for this list is the final one where a fellow Condor Fist disciple is sent by Zaror's "evil twin" to retrieve the martial manual from "good Zaror". Marko Zaror is still one of the most underrated cinematic martial artists out there having landed a minor breakout role as Dolor in Undisputed 3 and in The Fist of the Condor he once again brings his eclectic martial form combining Kickboxing, Shotokan Karate, Judo, Aikido, and of course, the two best represented styles in this film, Taekwondo and Wing Chun. The movie is a personal deep dive into Marko Zaror's own martial arts philosophy even applying his carnivore diet and particular training methods primarily revolving around mobility and the notion of "voltage" that bears resemblance to the eastern concepts of qi, ki, or chakra. Marko Zaror's Condor cohort and the man responsible for the death of Zaror's character's other master (portrayed by Hapkido expert Man Soo Yoon) is played by Chilean actor and martial artist Eyal Meyer. A physically versatile performer gifted in theater, dance, singing, and of special interest to those of you reading this article, martial arts. Meyer's main background is in the Indian martial art of Kalaripayattu regarded by many as one of the world's oldest combat systems, an art that Meyer still teaches in Chile's Manuna Kalari, the country's first Kalaripayattu school. Kalari is rarely ever showcased in film and Eyal Meyer makes for an exotic addition to The Fist of the Condor's multicultural martial exhibition.
Both Marko Zaror and Eyal Meyer's characters are meant to be proponents of the fictional Fist of the Condor, the bird itself actually being the flag-bearing national animal mascot of Chile, yet they each adopt unique variations of it. Zaror's martial arts style resembles the actual Condor itself with arms extended backwards and fingers straightened much like a bird while Eyal Meyer presents a leg crossing, crouching forward claw stance. An obvious tribute to classic kung fu cinema where made-up martial arts and animal-centric shapes reigned supreme. Zaror's stance resembles Eagle Claw Kung Fu whereas Meyer's is pretty much Tiger Kung Fu. Marko Zaror (though not very condor-like) even runs towards his opponent on all fours. The last fight scene of the film is especially an ode to the old school starting off with extended warm-up routines referencing the timeless fight sequence between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon, followed up by the two leaping at each other and landing matching blows in mid-air shot and edited the same way as in 70s' kung fu films. That's only one of many old-fashioned martial movie moments as the fight includes fantastical fighting techniques like Eyal Meyer's jumping downward kick driving Zaror's head into the dirt turning his Condor style into an...Ostrich style? Even Eyal Meyer's secret weapon is revealed as a blinding chest-strapped mirror taking advantage of Zaror's photophobia (subverted homage to Kareem Abdul Jabar's albino character in Game of Death maybe?) prompting Marko Zaror to rely on the tried and true semi-movie kung fu convention of blindfolded Wing Chun perception based around a wooden dummy customized by Zaror himself that was modified for modernized martial arts methodology. And let's not forget his final full-body charged head-exploding punch utilizing the built-up rage he had accumulated in the events leading up to that one-on-one.
Though not credited on IMDb, Marko Zaror confirmed in interviews that he was indeed the fight choreographer creatively collaborating with his on-screen co-stars as he had in previous films helmed by Ernesto Díaz Espinoza. Admittedly, the film's climax is kinda anticlimactic. Maybe because it's Marko Zaror and because I was expecting this to be his best cinematic martial arts performance thus far but it was honestly a little lacking particularly after all the fight scenes throughout the film that lead up to it. Zaror is nonetheless in top form after all these years and the distinct martial aesthetic that he and Eyal Meyer bring to the fateful finale is enough to make it one of Zaror's top film fights. The Fist of the Condor is truly Marko Zaror's ultimate expression of martial arts much like Bruce Lee's was the unfinished Game of Death. We get all the usual Zaror stylings like his swift Latin legs and his signature corkscrew kick while adding a new avian action aesthetic coupled with a certain South Asian martial art brought by a lesser known hand-to-hand hombre all culminating into a worthy Latin American love letter to the martial arts genre. If the movie gets enough attention we may just be rewarded with a sequel ideally throwing in the anticipated doppelganger duel between both of Mark Zaror's characters akin to Jet Li's multiversal martial melee in The One which might be the definitive Marko Zaror fight scene that could've been the one I talked about here. Only time will tell, and by time I partly mean watchtime for the film on Hi-Yah! So please do try to watch it on that streaming service and if you've got the cash, buy it!
#8. Fog Hill of Five Elements Season 2
(only small segment of entire fight scene discussed below)
The worldwide appeal of anime has never been greater so much so that, as mentioned before, even works entirely unrelated to anime like Creed III are taking notes for their action design. And then there are the live action adaptations that have become so surprisingly successful in recent years that, together with live action adaptations of other originally non-live action media, have made themselves into their very own market surpassing the somewhat stale superhero industry as of late. Overlooked Japanese movie martial artist Mackenyu Arata, son of the legendary Sonny Chiba, appeard in two of these: Netflix's passionately faithful One Piece and an all Japanese adaptation of Yu Yu Hakusho as well as the Saint Seiya film Knights of the Zodiac. Japan isn't the only nation whose animation has produced some amazing action sequences however as the western hemisphere has upped their animated game this year with DC's Legion of Super-Heroes, the Spider-Verse-art-style Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, another adult MK animated feature in Mortal Kombat Legends: Cage Match, some savory cinematic sequences from 2023's two MK games Mortal Kombat: Onslaught and Mortal Kombat 1 both of which were choreographed by Emmanuel Manzanares and his indie action bretheren from the always awesome lbpstuntschicago YouTube channel, Netflix's animated cast reunion in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off and a new chapter in the vampiric video game-based saga in Castlevania Nocturne, as well as the emotionally satisfying spin-off special Invincible: Atom Eve.
In the end, you can't go wrong with actual anime itself and this year Netflix adapted the Onimusha game series into its own cel-shaded anime-tion. Boruto still got fans divided but the one-on-one between Momoshiki and Kawaki is exceptionally choreographed. A new contender in the world of animated action has arrived in the last decade though. Chinese anime or what is defined by the technical term "donghua" standing for all Chinese animation, has taken its Japanese animated inspiration and made it it's own unique brand. Netflix's Scissor Seven is one such example but if you're looking for elaborate melee martial arts then look no further than Blades of the Guardians. But even that is not the winner of this year. Just like the television/streaming series category, the animated spot could easily garner its own separate list. That only further shows how high of an honor it is for the actual taker of this position, Fog Hill of Five Elements.
Not based on any Chinese manhua but an entirely novel narrative, Fog Hill of Five Elements loosely borrows from an ancient Chinese text called Classic of Mountains and Seas, a compendium of mythological creatures and geographical locations composed before the Qin dynasty. The story follows Wenren Yixuan, a former Envoy possessing the power of the fire element and once a protector of the human residents of a mystical mountainous region known as the Fog Hill. After defying his superiors and opening a gate between the mortal and demonic plane to heal his dying mother, Wenren Yixuan must recapture and return the escaped son of a dragon-like demonic deity called Qilin in order to be given back his mother and sister now held captive in the demon realm whilst battling the otherworldly forces that have broken through the metaphysical barrier separating the two worlds. Having
only 4 episodes in the second season, you'd think there wouldn't be much time to pack in a whole lot of action but each and every episode squeezes in at least one phenomenally animated fight that build up to one god-tier season finale. Because Wenren Yixuan lost his position as the Fire Envoy after the events of the 1st episode, his younger brother Wenren Jingxuan was granted the title of new Fire Envoy. The two must now set aside their past grievances and reunite to defeat Shan Zhu, a demon sent by the Three Venerable Beasts to retrieve Qilin's child (what's up with all the brothers being featured on this list?).
This last episode of season two contains 2 back-to-back fights. First off featuring local village warriors from nearby the outside of Fog Hill hunting down Qilin's son for its magical scales, coincidentally also two brothers, where the younger of the two has a full body metal form while the older is more agile and wields a guan dao. After a dazzlingly detailed martial maelstrom, the two brothers are overpowered by Shan Zhu. When finally faced against the Wenren siblings, Shan Zhu enters his final form switching from his more beastly appearance to a more humanoid mainfestation. The Wenren brothers battle Shan Zhu in a multi-colored elemental earth-shattering duel. Wenren Yixuan's flaming ribbons and array of fiery weapons combined with Jingxuan's green fire blasts burn brilliantly upon Shan Zhu's unbreakable crystalline constructs. Wenren Yixuan is initially limited by a parasitic demon inhibiting his divine state until the sight of Jingxuan's battered bloodied body sends Yixuan into an infernal fury. Although their most formiddable foe yet, ultimately, the pyrokinetic prodigies prevail.
Fog Hill of Five Elements is every bit as fatanstically fluid and ultrakinetic as its Japanese counterparts yet dialed up to 11 crafted in a rough sketchy hand-drawn manner. Simple yet stunning, this Chinese animated series creates spectacle through its simplicity. The final moments of the finale's action sequence is animated in a mostly monochromatic black-and-white aesthetic referencing Chinese art's centuries-old ink painting methods. Created by Lin Hun, the actual series was preceded by a 5-minute YouTube short used as a conceptual teaser and after hurdling multiple production delays, has somehow stood pumping out its latest season despite its development team Samsara Animation Studio only consisting of 6 members. Such a small studio might explain its less glossy and lower production quality compared to your typical sensory overload-type action anime but the quickly-animated feel may be key to its ability to focus on the magnificently meticulous fight design that exemplifies the best of Chinese martial arts and wuxia cinema. Samsara Studio is certainly not alone in this venture thnakfully as Fog Hill of Five Elements was co-produced by Nice Boat Animation (cool name) who were behind the also amazingly animated weapon work of White Cat Legend. Whether you call it donghua, Chinese anime, or even chanime, this new cultural animated movement is here to stay. China's cultural capital has gradually grown and in a global market where Japanese anime has risen to the top of the animation heirarchy, Chinese animators might have slowly proved themselves as worthy challengers in an ever-changing multi-cultural industry. Let's hope we don't have to wait too long for season 3 of Fog Hill of Five Elements regardless of how few episodes it might be.
#7. Blue Eye Samurai
You might be wondering why I never mentioned Netflix's Blue Eye Samurai in the last entry on the list. And that's because, surprise, this year there's gonna be 2 animated fight scenes just to shake things up a bit! The western adult animated art form has more or less entered its golden age having come a long way in the last 10 years in a subgenre dominated by comedies. But the animated medium can be just as dramatic and violent as its live action counterpart and not solely in the realm of anime. Blue Eye Samurai continues that historic trend brought to us by creator-writer married couple Michael Green and Amber Noizumi. Before Blue Eye Samurai, Michael Green's filmographic work has been in screenplay for movies like the DC animated anthology Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, the Wolverine neo-western Logan, sci-fi sequel Blade Runner 2049, and the pulpy whodunit Murder on the Orient Express. With his screenwriting name on Marvels' upcoming Blade reboot and film adaptation of dystopian video game classic Bio Shock, Michael Green carries no doubt in his ability to weave together an engaging action-centric narrative.
Blue Eye Samurai tells the tale of Mizu, the eponymous blue-eyed samurai who is on a mission to find four white men that hold powerful positions within the Tokugawa Shogunate of Edo period Japan that may be responsible for her mother's murder. Some episodes are all story and no action but when the action kicks in, it kicks in hard. Dental destruction at a dojo, cliffside carnage, and a climactic castle battle are some of the best action sequences among them. But beating them all to the blade is episode 5's 2-in-1 flashback fight. Mizu and her now ex-husband spar in a marital martial melee tragically ending their marriage once Mizu's obvious superiority undermines her husband's fragile sense of masculinity. The fight flashes forward to the present where Mizu is ambushed by members of the Thousand Claw Gang pinning her down underneath a wooden door. Interwoven with backstory told through a form of Japanese puppet theater called bunraku, this fight sequence artistically blends in a binary of beauty and brutality, romance and revenge, as Mizu's otherwise cliched ronin revenge story is subverted by the revelation that her idyllic maiden's life came crashing down all because of a world woeful of warrior women and a society unable to accept anyone that isn't of pure blood or gender. It was a monstrous cultural climate that made her into a so-called "monster" and a monster is what she chose to embrace to achieve her ultimate objective.
As is her meteorite-fashioned blade, Mizu herself is metaphorically "made of mixed metal" and so too is the choreographic content of her fight sequences. A happy medium between the martial minimalism of traditional samurai cinema and the stylized swordplay of the live action Rurouni Kenshin films. Even more particularly unique is the elegant yet not overly extravagant use of the naginata, a weapon that is a rarity in more intricately choreographed action. These two flashback-to-flashback fights convey the origin of Mizu's wielding of the naginata itself in a creative slow-motion sequence in which she assembles her sword into a new improvised naginata. An uncommon weapon for an uncommon fighting style spending half of the fight on her back which is very unorthodox compared to other samurai that keep upright and even more unconventional than the already atypical crouching combat of the aforementioned Rurouni Kenshin films.
Blue Eye Samurai was artfully animated by Blue Spirit, a studio that has up until now mainly produced family friendly animated features making this Netflix series their first full foray into true adult territory. 3D animation is a fast and cheap substitution for conventional 2D frames, an animation method that Netflix especially tends to heavily rely on. But Blue Eye Samurai makes up for it by crafting it in a way that the animators called a "moving painting" imbuing each scene in fine digital brushstrokes lending the series a distinct cel-shaded look. The intention was to literally make "every frame a painting". This artistic backdrop is heightened further by an innovative process of designing the action utilizing a live-action pre-viz for the animators to storyboard off of. Behind the scenes footage shows that the animated final product is pretty much an identical shot-for-shot recreation of its live-action basis. The pre-viz designer of which is Sunny Sun, a Kung Fu practitioner since the age of 10 known for his fight coordination in 2020's Mulan, Deadpool 2, and Extraction 2 (more on that later) backed up by action consultant Kaiser Tin-u who worked as assistant fight coordinator on, once again Extraction 2. These choreographic creators themselves are assisted by pre-viz supervisor Earl A. Hibbert, lead pre-viz animator Nicole Herr, and pre-viz artist Jessica Abigail Adams. All of which are working to achieve the digitally rendered dream envisioned by animation director Michael Greenholt and series producer Jane Wu, a multi-disciplinary artist trained in Wushu and a writer who specialized in action scenes for the MCU, the Game of Thrones pre-spin-off House of the Dragon, and like her pre-viz fight choreographers, the 2020 live action Mulan. Guided by such action authorship, how could Blue Eye Samurai not turn into the streaming spectacle that it is?
I usually don't mention the verbal performers of the animated characters but Blue Eye Samurai's dialogue demands that they be given their due credit. Mizu is voiced by American actress Maya Eskrine who matchers her character by also being of Japanese and European descent. An actress that has delved into every genre of film and television but only recently dove into action-oriented roles like the Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries and the soon-to-be-released Mr. & Mrs. Smith reboot series. Maya Eskrine is at once suave and steely but also expresses a vulnerability to her vengefulness rounding out her emotionally complex character. Mizu herself is the most modern incarnation of a legacy of similarly stoic lone wolves modeled after fictional Japanese blind swordsman Zatoichi, Clint Eastwood's spaghetti western gunfighter "The Man With No Name", and the masterfully made volume of works by filmmaker Akira Kurosawa which also supplied inspiration for the Blue Eye Samurai series as a whole. The second season has been officially greenlit by Netflix only weeks after the first season's release with the creators planning on up to 4 seasons and a potential spin-off. It's quite clear that this blue-eyed samurai isn't wrapping up its revenge any time soon and we're all 100% in for the journey and all the future feudal fights to come.
*I wrote this entry last as I was hoping that Tiger Shroff's dystopian MMA actioner Ganapath would've been out on Netflix now. The last couple of years I was able to slide in one action film to represent India and Ganapath looked to be the one as the only other ones coming in even close was the Sharuk Khan-led espionage action flick Pathaan, the kung fu vigilante drama Lakadbaggha, and the British-Indian comedy Polite Society. Entertainingly made martial arts or semi-martial action for sure but not as eye-pooping as last year's revolutionary RRR or the prior year's Vidyut Jamwal starring If-Jackie-Chan-were-in-Die-Hard-at-a-hospital Sanak. I've been told that, depending on its wider release beyond film festivals, a certain movie called KILL could revolutionize Indian action cinema all over again, merging Raid-like gory grit with the brutal groundedness of Korean film fighting all in a confined lego-like modifiable train setpiece. But in the meanwhile, I guess India's gonna have to wait until next time.
#6. Kill Boksoon
(first scene in compilation contains most of the specific fight scene dsciussed below)
Korean pop culture has become a central element of global pop culture and nowhere is that more apparent than in their action film industry. From the very first year I started these annual lists one slot has always been left open for a Korean fight scene whether in film or episodic format. 2023's lineup gave us the MMA drama Brave Citizen, the Rurouni Kenshin-esque swordplay of Slate, and Hi-Yah's original period sword flick Night of the Assassin. And as we've seen on prior entries, Netflix brought its fair share of action once again and that of course goes for the Korean department with the boxing beat 'em up series Bloodhounds, femme fatale thriller Ballerina (no relation to the upcoming John Wick spin-off), and sci-fi robo actioner Jung_E. Topping all of these is Kill Boksoon, one more movie you can add to you list of martial milfs (yes, I actually wrote that). Jeon Do-Yeon stars as the titular Boksoon, one of the top assassins in her contract company who must juggle her secretive job with her domestic duties as a mother of a moody adolescent daughter. It's over 2-hour runtime is paced with a peppering of proficiently designed fight sequences from the darkly comedic opening duel against a yakuza member which features Boksoon's signature axe-flipping move, a training exhibition where a new recruit shows off her own variation of Boksoon's personal technique, a single take massacre of Russian black market dealers by Boksoon's boss, and a final confrontation with that same boss mentally visualized in a multi-scenario juxtaposed slow-mo 360 shot.
Perhaps breaking the age-old aphorism, the best is not necessarily saved for last as the most intriguing fight scene lies right in the middle of the movie. Boksoon finds herself in an unexpected ambush by a group of her own close friends working for competing companies including one who happens to be a co-worker and friend with benefits. All of Boksoon's killer cohorts are backstabbingly offered a reasonably high position within Boksoon's company by the director's younger sister who has always held Boksoon in jealous disregard. Each hired killer brings their own skillset from the garrote-armed amputee chef to an unfeeling large heavyweight Korean man. Boksoon holds off all 4 of them on her own until her protege from the earlier training demonstration decides to ignore orders and assist Boksoon in surviving the attack. This is when the movie's cinematographic stylizations come in as a continuously spinning camera a la Bad Boys II pans over from one side of a garage door to another as Boksoon and her trainee take on the remaining assailants. Maintaining its macabre martial humor set since the start of the film, this is the least technical fight sequence in the film as kitchen appliances are thrown, slow-motion splinters are scattered into the air, and both Boksoon and her intern are slammed into every wall, floor, and furniture piece.
Boksoon herself is played by Canne Film festival winner Jeon Do-Yeonin. An actress whose worked primarily in more dramatic films. Kill Boksoon forced the 50-year old to adapt to her most intensive action role yet having rigorously trained for 4 months. Lee Yeon plays Boksoon's intern, another mostly dramatic actress whose own action clearly required more athleticism than Jeon Do-Yeonin portraying a much younger and nimble contract killer. Regardless of whether she was stunt doubled for her more acrobatic maneuevers or not director Byung Sung-Hyun mentioned that the entire cast was intent on exeucuting their action as much on their own as possible which means up-and-coming actress Lee Yeon likely went through equal if not more physical prep for her role as her castmate Jeon Do-Yeonin.
Koo Kyo-Hwan plays Boksoon's fellow employee as well as her non-romantic sexual partner, an actor whose got more cinematic action experience than his aforementioned co-stars having appeared in war thriller Escape from Mogadishu along with Peninsula, the sequel to Korean zombie hit Train to Busan. The supporting cast of characters in the restaurant brawl must have undergone similar pressure for their performance and together they all definitely made one grounded yet twistedly fun fight.
I couldn't find any info on the fight choreographer but it's safe to say the action craftsmanship can be credited to a close collaboration between director Byung Sung-Hyun, cinematographer Hyung Rae Cho, and editor Kim Sang-Beom whose editing credits include the wirework zombie period actioner Rampant, action thriller classic The Man From Nowhere, and Oedipal masterpiece Oldboy. A trifecta of Korean action masters if I ever saw one. It might not be hard to miss that the movie's title is a play on Kill Bill but the real narrative substance lies in how Kill Boksoon is much an tribute to assassin cinema as it is a commentary on the moral amibiguities of Korean capitalism. A message which happens to be told under the lense of some very lethal hand-to-hand hitwomen. Director Byung Sung-Hyun said to his DOP that this might be his last action movie. A statement prompted by seeing the degree of difficulty experienced by his cast when performing the fights and stunts. The restaurant fight sequence selected for this ranking on the list alone took an entire month to shoot, a generous time allowance that might have become less and less rare in the action film-making process, an optimistic view of the future of film fighting. If this really is to be the first and final foray into action by Byung Sung-Hyun then what a stylish swan song of an action thriller it is.
#5. Extraction 2
(only partial clips from the entire 20-minute scene available on YouTube)
The bloated budgets of big screen blockbusters always get audiences all around talking. most of all when it comes to the action genre. But let's take a moment to appreciate some more films that are inexpensive enough to only see small screen streaming success. This smaller scale list includes Eurasian samurai comedy Once Upon a Time in Ukraine, Jesse V. Johnson's Brittanian historical epic Boudica: Queen of War, Byron Mann's sci-fi thriller Dark Asset, the Chris Mark-starring crime actioner Escalation, an assassin's battle royale featuring Frank Grillo and Alain Moussi in King of Killers, Jon-Foo in Last Resort, Michael Jai White's satirical western Outlaw Johnny Black and his VOD action film The Island, Chris Evans and Ana De Armas' action rom-com Ghosted, Netflix's spandex special anniversary Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always, Zack Snyder's Star Wars reimagining Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire, and an oh-so-fun Jackie Chan-John Cena duo in Hidden Strike. Some say Netflix has run dry on quality content in the past couple years but I respectfully disagree. As one of the most anticipated action sequels whether in streaming or silver screen, Extraction 2 is the epitome of action film-making in the world of digital platform distribution. The first film was based on the graphic novel Ciudad and the second installment takes the story further with Sam Hargrave returning as director and Chris Hemsworth reprising his role as the grizzled mercenary who appears to have survived and is recovering from his near-death injuries in the prior film. To no one's surprise, he is persuaded out of his secluded solace and sent on one more mission to save the sister of his ex-wife and their two kids from the leader of a Georgian criminal organization.
Extraction 2 has only 3 major action sequences but they satisfyingly complete each act within the film ranging from shootouts and close quarters combat across two skyscrapers as well as a somewhat restrained climactic church battle that unfortunately wasted a potentially great fight between Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Bernhardt. Again like the last entry, the best is not saved for last but the exact opposite. That best being the very first action setpiece. 2020's Extraction was to be an ambiguously ended one-off film which would've made its 10-minute extended cut action sequence a one take wonder. But studio execs and action-hungry fans won and we were blessed with another Extraction and another one take twice the length of the previous installment. Bigger and bolder than its predecessor, this pyrotechnic, gun grappling, logistical masterclass of stuntwork is a smooth flow of sequential sets where the most obvious stitches only apparent between each of the 3 main segments of the greater continuous shot. Beginning in a prison riot opening in a series of hallway brawls and ending in a gruesome hand-tearing death of the violently possessive husband, the oner transitions into an outdoor courtyard fight where the eponymous extractor and extractee fight for their goddamn lives past a swarm of hundreds of extras. At one point Chris Hemsworth is forced to finally take out his firearms against the bloodthirsty prisoners picking up a riot shield and flaming fists along the way while his extraction asset assists by shovel bashing anyone who gets in their path. The brutal escape is followed up with some mega-octane vehicular combat in a forest until the survivors make their way onto their last stop in this exhilarating yet exhausting continuous shot, an armored train. Hemsworth and his two mercenary team mates played by Golshifteh Farahani and Adam Bessa stave off specially equipped soldiers and helicopters with heavy machine guns, knives, and bare hands. Farahani especially gets to display some unrestrained animalistic CQC skills whose melee was otherwise very limited in the first film.
Extraction 2 is exemplary in its more tactical and realistic gun-fu in contrast to John Wick going even more grounded than the original movie particularly in this one take where more intricately choreographed movements would be more difficult to pull off. A feature that is not at all at the expense of but rather enhances its raw realism and immersion. It's also less over-the-top and better CGI'd than a similar train sequence in Carter and far more technically ambitious than this year's competing Mission Impossible train scene. Fun fact, that was a very real and not computer-generated helicopter that landed on top of a moving train. And crazily enough, just like the first Extraction film's uncut action scene, the entire thing was filmed by director Sam Hargrave himself who was nearly taken off the train itself from the sheer force of air rushing past his body. Hargrave said that he only operated the camera himself so that no one else would be put under the risk of serious injury or death. Allegedly totaling 7-8 takes and 49 hidden cuts to film the entire extended shot, some segments were filmed on actual sets and mobile vehicles while others inside static staged sets. Needing around 4-5 months for location scouting and rehearsal and about 1 month to film, this one take takes the choreographic cake outdoing the also masterfully made other oner of 2023 from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
And what ridiculous energy this required for not only the technical crew but also the cast themselves. Chris Hemsworth had to slim down his Norse god-bod from the Thor films to a more mortal musculature to fit his ex-military character and ease the agility required for his physical performance in Extraction 2. Hemsworth had to specialize in stamina over size and strength sticking to straight MMA-type routines primarily revolving around Boxing and Muay Thai also sprinkling in some grappling arts like Wrestling and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu per fundamental MMA training which suits the all-around combat system demonstrated by his character. For the grounded gunplay Hemsworth, Farahani, and Bessa all engaged in real-world military ops training. Every one of them were insistent on not being doubled and only stopped from doing so unless of course the particular stunt was too dangerous or insurance-liable. You just don't get such dedicated physicality from your everyday actor and the final product is perfect proof of that. And as we know, actors can only act out the action so far without the action architects themselves. In this case fight choreographer Travis Gomez (fight coordinator of cosmic horror series Lovecraft Country), fight coordinator Sunny Sun (fight choreographer of 2020's live action Mulan, Deadpool 2, and Blue Eye Samurai), assistant fight coordinator Kaiser Tin-u (action consultant of Netflix's Blue Eye Samurai), and lastly, HEMA-based indie action master Adam Lytle as member of the action design team and one of Chris Hemsworth's stunt doubles. Oh, and he was also the fight coordinator of MCU Disney+ series Hawkeye and Netflix's Charlize Theron immortal action flick Old Guard.
Laying out the basic blueprint for this grand action architecture is, you already know, director Sam Hargrave, who began as a stuntman stunt doubling high profile actors like Chris Evans as Captain America before climbing up the film ladder to stunt coordinator and fight choreographer of major action film franchises like the MCU, Hunger Games, spectacularly successful sequels like Deadpool 2 and Wu Jing’s military thriller Wolf Warrior 2, as well as stand-alone movies like the Ben Affleck-led The Accountant, and Chad Stahelski’s Atomic Blonde, eventually promoted to second unit director for many of those same films not to mention the second season of The Mandalorian. Then one fateful day he made his directorial debut with Extraction also cameo-ing as a mercenary sniper. In spite of his incredible rise to the top, the Extraction series is a a testament to Sam Hargrave's still undying spirit as a stuntman doing what no other director would want to or could do with the same sense of skill and safety. Financially backing his spectacular stunts are producers Joe and Anthony Russo, frequent collaborators of Sam Hargrave and directors of some of the best MCU films during its Golden Age: Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame (all 3 of which Sam Hargrave was a stunt coordinator of). The
Russo Brothers are hoping for a cinematic universe with a prequel spin-off centered around Randeep Hooda’s character in the original film. We might also get a film for Idris Elba’s character? Who knows? Extraction 3 is already in the making and we can only pray that, though their cause was justified for the betterment of the industry as a whole, the writer’s and actor strikes haven’t halted production too much.
Oners have been taking the action film world by storm lately with the choreographic Korean chaos of Carter on Netflix last year along with Scott Adkins’ spec ops actioner One Shot 2 years ago. Extraction 2's seamless single scene stunt spectacle sets the expectation to yet another insane level for all future oner-oriented actioners. What do you think they'll do for the next one? Maybe double the size of Extraction 3's obligatory one take to 40 minutes or even into the entire film? Can that full-length film one-take action format get any more revolutionary than its film forefathers like Hardcore Henry, Carter, and One Shot? Only time will tell. And preferably not much more time.
#4. Furies
(only final segment of fight scene discussed below available on YouTube)
Southeast Asia is one cultural corner of the world that I try to explore in every annual best-of list and in 2023 we got Malaysia's Deleted and Thailand's Kitty the Killer. Where is Indonesia you ask? Well, the past year not much came out of the country that pumped out visceral action classics like the Raid series. In it's place there was the Captain Marvel -looking Legend of Gatotkaca. That's it. As for the nation's most internationally reocgnizable talents, Yayan Ruhian made a quick appearance in the 6th episode of Netflix's Who is Erin Carter? and Iko Uwais flipped the script as one of the primary antagonists in Expend4bles. But I have to turn your attention to another Southeast Asian territory that has also made occasional martial arts hits here and there before disppearing for a few years. That territory is Vietnam and in 2023 they popped out a few noteworthy fight scene-filled films like the sci-fi semi-superhero flick Head Rush and the Peter Pham-led The Foggy Mountain. None of those are the film of choice here though as the current entry goes to Netflix's Furies.
Furies marks the directorial debut of Veronica Ngo who also produced and co-starred in it standing as a prequel to 2019’s Furie which Ngo also starred in albeit as an entirely different character. Furies' original release was in 2022 but only in Vietnam before being made streamable worldwide on Netflix in 2023 so it'll count for this year's ranking due to sake of availability. Dong Anh Quynh plays a young girl who, after nearly being raped and her mother killed by the rapist, joins a vigilante team of vengeful vixens lead by Veronica Ngo called “The Wild Daisies” that target female traffickers. The Wild Daisies attack various traffickers in several fight sequences scattered about the movie's run one of which is a wild one take motorcycle chase. Tragically, one of the Wild Daisies played by Rima Thanh Vy is killed mid-movie in an attempt to take down the local trafficking headquarters. Veronica Ngo, the two surviving Wild Daisies played by Dong Anh Quynh and Toc Tien as well as a few trafficking defectors launch a final attack against the gang's compound.
Furies packs in more gun-fu than in the first film and amps up the shooting methods switching from POV back to a third person view. The fists, feet, and firearms are all frenetically filmed zooming in and out and dashing from one point of focus to another following each and every one of the protagonists' movements. The situation becomes dire when Toc Tien is mortally wounded after which Dong Anh Quynh cracks out the karambits and takes on an insane martial meth head type guy armed with a syringe of all weapons played by...is that the guy from the indie action YouTube channel "Action C"?!? The segment cuts back and forth from this fight to the one between Veronica Ngo's character's lover and ally played by Song Luan who brawls out against the trafficking gang's main enforcer played by Phan Thanh Hien.
After killing the gang's leader, it turns out Veronica Ngo, in a sorta shocking plot twist, was only using The Wild Daisies to avenge her dead husband who was killed by the rival trafficking group. Her hidden agenda was to absorb the gang’s share of the trafficking network herself. She orders Toc Tien to shoot Dong Anh Quynh but Toc Tien refuses attempting to quickly turn the gun on Veronica Ngo but is shot herself. A bare-fisted fight ensues. Having taught Dong Anh Quynh everything she knows, Veronica Ngo calmly counterattacks all of Quynh's highly predictable moves. Though Dong Anh Quynh discovers a weakness in Veronica Ngo's right side repeatedly targeting it until Ngo grabs hold of a gun laying on the floor. This is when the camera really kicks into high gear swooping around every conceivable view of the two gun grappling femme fatales as if it were its own character and even slowing to a single bullet-time moment as if it were filmed by an intelligent fly or humming bird strapped to a small camera.
All 3 of the actresses portraying the Wild Daisies were required to complete a grueling year-long martial arts bootcamp under Vietnamese martial artist Hong Anh and Karate master Ngo Thanh Van. Dong Anh Quynh only has two other acting credits to her name and if Furies isn't the breakout performance she needs to conquer the Vietnamese film industry, then I don't know what will be. Applause should also be awarded to her co-star, singer and former teen idol Toc Tien who's loyalty and savageness complement that of Dong Anh Quynh's. And, although not featured in this final fight, there's also actress-model Rima Thanh Vy whose perky charm is the exact character death necessary to fuel the hand-to-hand hatred for our heroines in the movie's climax. Clearly, the biggest name on this cast list is Veronica Ngo who reportedly only spends half a year at most before action-intensive roles but only because of her extensive prior martial arts background. Dong Anh Quynh and her fellow female fighters are ferociously impressive in their own regard but Veronica Ngo still sort of steals the spotlight with her non-acrobatic variant of the Vietnamese martial art Vovinam.
A more polished form of it is used in this film to demonstrate her character's greater combat prowess compared to the intentionally more messy martial aesthetic in the 2019 film where she played a less trained street survivalist type villager. Veronica Ngo made major success in the Vietnamee music market before entering the acting business and won the Best Actress Award at the 15th Vietnam Film Festival for her first serious action film Rebel also co-starring overlooked martial arts actor Johnny Tri Nguyen. The film fighting duo would co-star together again in 2009's Clash and thereafter Veronica Ngo would go on to appear in the Netflix produced sequel to Ang Lee's world-class wuxia masterpiece Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny until breaking into Hollywood in a small role as a rebel pilot in the Star Wars film The Last Jedi and an android in 2023's sci-fi A.I. action thriller The Creator. It seems Ngo has since stuck to streaming hits in the time being like Netflix's Da 5 Bloods, as an immortal warrior woman in The Old Guard, and Hulu's medieval backwards Raid film The Princess.
Every great action actor/director needs their action designer. And for Furies there is action director Kefi Abrikh re-assuming his role from the previous installment. Kefi Abrikh has choreographed other film fighting females like the reverse-Raid The Princess also co-starring Veronica Ngo and came in as fight coordinator for other smaller budget international action films as well as stunt coordinator for many more. I myself first discovered him in a dual role depicting Dante and designing the action for a fan-made Devil May Cry Resident Evil crossover called Resident Evil: The Nightmare of Dante. Look it up on YouTube if it you in anyway are intriguied by that premise. Standing beside Abrikh is assistant fight choreographer Yannick Ben, fight sequencer of many Indian action flicks. Under the direction of a martial arts action veteran like Veronica Ngo, Kefi Abrikh and Yannick Ben make for one killer choreographic coupling redefining how a fight scene can be filmed culminating in a final few minutes captured in the most hyperdynamic camera movement I have honestly ever seen.
For all the loving appraisal we can give to Furies, Veronica Ngo was not too enamored by her first try at completing the film as she believed the CGI and special effects were so subpar that post production had to be extended. In all honesty, even the finished product is a little underwhelming at times (that long take motorbike sequence comes to mind) but Vietnam's tech budget isn't fairly comparable to that of richer countries so it's effective enough for what it is. The computer-generated flaws can be forgiven as the John Wick influenced neon color palette that gave its 2019 predecessor more aesthetic life makes a comeback. Set to some super catchy 90s' V-Pop music, the visual and sonic style gives the gritty tone a brighter moderately campier energy. And if you're wondering how the connection between Furie and Furies, a rather cynical ending does reveal the character that Dong Anh Quynh would transform into by the events of the first film. A 3-hour long version of the movie was filmed but ultimately rduced by about an hour of content. Who knows how much action might have been left out if at all. An hour less of action or not, Furies is a visually vibrant and viscerally violent vovinam vendetta from Veronica Ngo and her vengeful Vietamese vixen vigilantes. Sorry, I'm obsessed with alliterations so I had to try that one out. Take that V for Vendetta!
#3. Bad City
(specific fight scene discussed below at 4:03)
Korea's conquest of the international cinematic scene is perhaps the most noticeable in all of Asia. But what of Japan? Besides their mixed bag of anime adaptations like Kingdom 3 or importing of their own younger stars like Mackenyu Arata in Knights of the Zodiac, Japan's action films are a little scattered. 2023 has brought a few more of these unknown projects some more obscure than others like Koichi Sakamoto's Ninja vs. Shark and Neon Genesis Evangelion's creator Hideaki Anno's dark reboot Shin Kamen Rider. But if you know anything about Japanese action cinema then you'd know that one of its top dogs, Kensuke Sonomura, always makes it onto these annual rankings ever since I started them a few years back. Baby Assassins 2 was a close second for the 3rd best fight scene of 2023 but in the end there can only be one. And that one is Bad City. It's film festival release may have been in 2022 but a limited theatrical and wider online release in 2023 qualifies it for this year's countdown. Kensuke Sonomura directs both the action and the film as a whole in his second directorial project since Hydra, a man whose action artistry includes video game adaptations like Resident Evil: Vendetta and Tekken: Blood Vengeance, anime films like the live action and CGI Gantz movies, martial arts cut classics such as Bushido Man, and his most regular recent work, the Baby Assassins cinematic universe. Bad City follows Hitoshi Ozawa as an ex-cop serving a sentence for homicide who is released in exchange for leading an elite police team tasked with detaining a crime lord trying to win the mayoral election and using his newfound political power to eliminate a competing yakuza organization.
Bad City is a 2-hour film with sparsely distributed action and only one fight scene for each of the 3 acts of the film. A loud speaker balcony brawl in the first act, an indoor skirmish in the middle act, and a final gang fight in the last act, the last of which will be the fight sequence of choice for this film. Hitoshi Ozawa and his two task force members played by Masanori Mimoto and Akane Sakanoue form a temporary alliance with the aspiring mayor's rival yakuza in a climactic confrontation in an abandoned mall. When considering the best brawls of 2023, Bad City's finale brings out a higher grade of grounded fight choreography. It's an all-out baton and baseball bat bashing beatdown where proper technique is thrown out the window. Bodies pile up one top of one another as the main characters aren't given the luxury of their attackers taking turns coming in one at a time but rush each protagonist all at once grabbing and throwing them down to the ground stomping the shit out of them every opportunity they can get. I haven't seen this kind of realism where enemies surround and simultaneously strike this often since the famous Oldboy one take hallway fight. The presence of friendly yakuzas assisting in the fight would make you think the primary protagonists would be given a break and take on just one or two opponents at most but they tend to get completely overwhelmed as they would in a real gang battle. All they can do is desperately wack one guy while stand-up grappling another and trying their best to stay off the floor so they won't get pig-piled.
Kensuke Sonomura is known for a unique choreographic construct where characters commit to a weird mid-air standing pile-up in the Baby Assassins universe. Bad City takes the strange human-tree-like pile-up mechanics and grounds it in some ways quite literally to 3-4 performers criss-crossing bodies one atop the other that can be appreciated in a few aesthetically pleasing piled up top-down shots. Even a beast of a brawler like Hitoshi Ozawa's character is not enough to bulldoze his way past the crime boss's henchmen. His two baton-armed crime-fighting companions can't just flail their weapons at their targets to take them down either. Frantically fought but not necessarily frantically filmed, a slight hand-held camera shake is applied for extra grittiness sometimes quickly swaying left or right to capture the character's occasional sudden dashing movements. Eventually Hitoshi Ozawa manages to break free from the grip of the relentless gang members and gives chase to the crime lord's second-in-command played by Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi who watches from the upper balcony. In his pursuit, Hitoshi Ozawa is caught in a stairwell against a few men before being helped out by Masanori Mimoto and Akane Sakanoue who attempt keeping the staircase door closed shut until they're inevitably overrun by a flood of fist fighting gangsters.
Ozawa briefly engages in an open-handed one-on-one against a knife-wielding Tak Sakaguchi who plays the crime lord's main assassin. In a fairly realistic unarmed approach to fighting off a knifeman, Hitoshi Ozawa evasively maneuvers around Tak Sakaguchi's lightning fast knife thrusts dodging, parrying, counter-punching, and grappling whenever possible. Tak Sakaguchi's non-verbal right-hand killer character has got to be referencing Wu Jing's role in SPL, from the length of the knife to even the flavor of the fight itself staged in a long narrow space like the famous alleyway duel between Donnie Yen and Wu Jing. Tak Sakaguchi brings his own personal combat language to the fight however, featuring his signature bent-over right-to-left-hand striking combinations leaning from one side of his body to the other in a sideways shoulder-rolling wave-like motion. He's not as psychotically sadistic as SPL's Wu Jing instead maintaining the silently stoic yet strange savantism of his Re:Born persona. Kensuke Sonomura stunt doubled Tak Sakaguchi in 2005's Shinobi: Heart Under Blade after which the two collaborated on a number of later movies including the as-of-yet unreleased (outside film festival screenings) One Percenter.
As a result, Sonomura is deeply familiarized in the film fighting flavorings of Tak. Kensuke Sonomura and Tak Sakaguchi are in fact so in-tune with one another's choreographic thought process that, kind of keeping to the spirit of SPL, they made up half of Tak's action on the spot. The multi-talented multi-martial mastery of Tak Sakaguchi covers many disciplines and out of the Boxing, Kickboxing, Shorinji Kempo, Bajiquan, and Zero Range Combat, he takes the most relevant aspects of each of the arts along with his real-world street fighting experience to fit into the the more down-to-earth reality of Bad City. An intriguing stylistic contrast to veteran actor-director Hitoshi Ozawa's steam-rolling style who has to tone down his heavy-hitting hand-to-hand to a more patient and tactical approach to face Tak Sakaguchi. The fight turns into a two-on-one once Hitoshi Ozawa slow-mo disarms Tak right when Masanori Mimoto and Akane Sakanoue arrive letting Hitoshi Ozawa to leave the rest to his squad members so he can meet Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi fist-to-fist on the next floor.
The film jumps to and from the last two sub-fights of this fighting frenzy of a finale so let's discuss the 2-on-1 first. Tak Sakaguchi is obviously the most technical fighter in the movie and those aware of his relatively unsung martial arts action filmography would expect such. But he still tones down his normally near-superhuman martial artist moves to a more realistic level. The least skilled combatant played by Akane Sakanoue is comedically left trying her hardest to restrain Tak only to end up being tossed away and repeatedly kicked into a wall while Masanori Mimoto acts as the more difficult contender for Tak. A rematch between the two as Masanori Mimoto's first encounter with Tak was in essentially a homage to the SPL Donnie Yen vs. Wu Jing knife vs. baton duel. Masanori Mimoto uses similar strategies as did Hitoshi Ozawa against Tak Sakaguchi in a series of feints followed by flurries of fists. Akane Sakanoue's gymnastics background is removed for the grittier style of Bad City whose action experience is otherwise only based in a couple entries in the Ultraman franchise, entirely different from any physical performance she's ever worked on. Masanori Mimoto is perhaps one of the most underseen martial arts specializing actors even within the Japanese movie industry. A frequent collaborator on a multitude of Kensuke Sonomura's most major movies, Mimoto can conform to choreographically conventional styles like in Bushido Man and Ninja Hunter or the chaotically controlled style of Hydra and Baby Assassins.
Jumping to the other sub-fight is Hitoshi Ozawa's face-off against Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi. This fight sequence is the latest phase in developing the realistically raw cinematic MMA first pioneered by Donnie Yen in SPL and arguably perfected in Flash Point. Kensuke Sonomura's Bad City is to his prior mixed martial fight films what Donnie Yen's Special ID is to Flash Point and SPL. Special ID was more realistic than Yen's preceding MMA stylizations and in Bad City Kensuke Sonomura realizes a rawer form of fighting than Hydra and Baby Assassins. Sonomura did work under Donnie Yen in 2014's Iceman as head of the film's Japanese action unit further exposing him to Yen's martial mindset to better his own action craft. The bob and weave boxing, punching combinations flying over the opponent's heads, and sloppy but smart ground fighting are all familiar facets of his film fighting flavor. For Bad City, Kensuke Sonomura adds some new vocabulary to his distinct martial aesthetic. And the performer that expresses this new vocabulary is mainly Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi who reaches out and sometimes outright taps Hitoshi Ozawa to gauge distance like they were in an actual MMA ring. Yamaguchi's specific dialect of combat also incorporates a nuanced form of feinting where he chambers and even winds ups punches that are never actually thrown. All details of which that personalizes his character's fighting style. In the over 100 in-person and voice acting credits he has had, Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi's most extensive action experience is in the Kamen Rider series. Much like Akane Sakanoue, he is also a Tokusatsu actor who had to totally rethink his screen fighting methods for Bad City.
The gritty grounded grammar of combat, messy martial mechanics, and stylized subtlety of Bad City is what makes Kensuke Sonomura's action brand such a fascinating fight formula.
Hitoshi Ozawa himself actually penned the film's script and initially invited Kensuke Sonomura to coordinate the action but soon gave him complete control of the project as director. Anime and its live action translations are Japanese action's most mainstream assets but it's hidden gems like Bad City buried under a mountain of mediocrity that can elevate the nation of the rising sun's place within the international market and who better to do so than an action auteur like Kensuke Sonomura?
#2. Sakra
(only first half of the fight scene discussed below available on YouTube)
Hong Kong was once the choreographic capital of the world but that era has come and gone to make room for other regions to take its place. Even then, every year there are a few notable action titles whether from Hong Kong itself or the greater mainland. 2023 came to a close with Tse Mui's MMA-influenced crime actioner Fight Against Evil 2, Wang Bangqiang's MMA drama Never Say Never, the rather self-explanatory Mutant Ghost Wargirl, The Legend and Hag of Shaolin which seems like a remake of Jet Li's The New Legend of Shaolin, and Kung Fu folk hero flick Young Heroes of Chaotic Time. Hong Kong martial arts action juggernaut Jackie Chan came out with two films this year in Netflix's John Cena action comedy Hidden Strike and a nostalgic tribute to Hong Kong stuntmen in Ride On. But in 2023, the Hong Kong/Chinese category lies in something more fantastical. From large-scale epics such as Creation of the Gods to the steampunk Song of the Assassins and the smaller scale Thief Heroine, many of these movies are made stream-ready on Hi-Yah yet there's one cinematic work of fantasy fiction in particular that claims the spot this year. Sakra. A film with Donnie Yen co-producing and in the director's chair who has not directed a film since 2004's Protege de la Rose Noire. Before then Yen had only directed a handful of other movies most of them more impressionistic action flicks in the 90s' like Asian Cop: High Voltage, Legend of the Wolf, and Ballistic Kiss. The only exception being the relatively conventional action style of Shanghai Affairs.
Adapted from a seminal series of wuxia novels Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, Sakra consists of a convoluted plot common to many wuxia stories with twists and turns centered around Donnie Yen's character struggling to unravel the enigmatic heritage that has forced him into a quest as a fugitive. Sakra is 130 minutes and really only has 3 big action setpieces. Though there's more narrative substance in the 2nd and last fights, a one vs. many montage of moments from Donnie Yen's past martial arts hits, and a rematch between Yen and Wu Yue since their style-on-style battle in Ip Man 4, I just wanted to pick the fight sequence that most entertained me and also happened to introduce us to the masterful martial artistry of Donnie Yen's character. Just being honest here. In the film's first real opening sequence aside from the expositional background segment, the leader of a band of martial monks played by elderly Hong Kong actor/fight choreographer Tsui Siu-Ming holds an innocent man captive as a human sacrifice before Donnie Yen, sitting in the same inn nearby, questions Tsui Siu-Ming's Buddhist principles.
After a supernaturally charged chopstick contest, their civil discussion, unfortunately for them but fortunate for us fight-loving fans, ends unproductively giving an excuse for Donnie Yen to do what he does best holding down the unholy underlings of the unethical monk with his so-called "dragon claw hand" all while in a seated position. Then the weapons finally come out letting Donnie Yen whip out his metallic mace/short staff making short work of the main monk's minions with elegant Wushu techniques and one unexpected batter-up homerun hit. Watching in disappointment, Tsui Siu-Ming decides to step in armed with a crescent bladed polearm. Tsui Siu-Ming is one of those Hong Kong jack-of-all trades that have gone unnoticed even among those well acquainted with Hong Kong action culture. He's skirted in the shadows of the industry as a director and writer of kung fu classics like The Buddhist Fist and The Holy Robe of the Shaolin Temple, historical action flicks like Mirage, and martial arts tournament films like Champions. You might not have known that he was also the action designer of many more movies working with the industry's best like Jet Li in Born to Defence and Jackie Chan in Twin Dragons. Unable to defeat Donnie with his longer and heavier weapon, Tsui Siu-Ming unleashes a pair of pyrotechnic palms hurling fire balls and streams of flame until they're extinguished by Donnie Yen's 18 Dragon-Subduing Palms. A fictional fantasy-based martial art that only exists in the world of wuxia but was also used by Yen in the Chinese super hero manhwa adaptation Dragon Tiger Gate all the way back in 2006.
Sakra is the hardest hitting wuxia for what has felt like forever. There's actual weight behind the wire-fu unlike all the recent CGI float fests out there including last year's New Kung Fu Cult Master. The latter was also a Donnie Yen led film and it's almost as if Sakra is the old-school choreographically complex fantasy fight film that New Kung Fu Cult Master should've been. Heads and torsos are satisfyingly slammed into splintering wood in delicious practical effects backed by impactful sound design that emphasizes the power behind each punch, kick, and their respective collision onto human bodies. Sakra's action in some small ways even reinvented wirework allowing Yen to zip across the floor and adjacent columns in opposite directions with expert grace. The movie isn't purely practical in its special effects however as there's still some CGI and I'm not just referring to the flaming palms. Maybe due to the film's possible lack of a bigger budget for physical props, little time to construct a fully destructible environment, or because it ultimately falls prey to the computer-generated conventions of contemporary wuxia cinema? Nevertheless, the inert martial content of other modern wuxias still can't hold much of a choreographic candle to Sakra. Aside from helming the film, Donnie Yen also wore the hand-to-hand hat as action director alongside his long-time collaborative creative Kenji Tanigaki as well as action choreographers Hua Yan and Kang Yu who have been members of Donnie Yen's core choreographic team for decades. Close-up semi-shaky views for the more intricate fight details are supplemented by widened out rotating camerawork for grander sweeping sequences. Those that have been exposed to Kenji Tanigaki's work would find this way of filming the action quite familiar. Fans would also notice some similarities to the less over-the-top wire wizardry witnessed in the live action Rurouni Kenshin series. Sakra is what that wire-oriented action looks like when exaggerated one step higher and put in the super-powered realm of a wuxia.
Sakra is a project of pure passion from Donnie Yen and it's no wonder considering how he said that he actually identifies more with his character in Sakra than more globally recognizable theatrical roles like the household hero of Chinese martial arts Ip Man. All forthcoming wuxia films should model themselves around Sakra, a movie that holds the impact, both physically and cinematically, for Hong Kong and Chinese martial arts action to maybe, just maybe, reclaim its former glory.
#1. John Wick: Chapter 4
WARNING: my most self-indulgingly, pretentiously, needlessly extravagant analysis on a single entry yet
Aging action actors and middle-aged martial masters is, as of late, an undying trend in the movie market and the John Wick series' unstoppable reputation as a pop culture cornerstone has possibly reignited other dormant franchises exemplified by this year's The Equalizer 3. While Denzel Washington's stop-watched precision pounding of Sicilian mafia was a welcome return for the kind-hearted killer, the #1 fight scene of 2023 cannot be anything but something related to John Wick. Peacock/Amazon Prime's The Continental: From the World of John Wick was an unhinged extravaganza of pistols and punches but there's nothing better than the mainline movie itself John Wick: Chapter 4. Assembling an extraordinary ensemble of cinematic martial arts icons rivaling that of Triple Threat about a decade ago and overwhelmingly outdoing 2023's Expend4bles, the grandmaster of all gigachads, Chad Stahelski, directs and produces his magnum opus. A seismically super-sized stunt-slaying cinematic event that took titanic ticket sales making the most money out of an already financially flawless franchise. This is the peak of the evolution of theatrical gunplay that originated in the gilded hands of the godfather of gun-fu John Woo. An evolutionary origin that came back full circle in his 2023 Hoyllwood comeback Silent Night right at the completion of the John Wick tetralogy. Picking up right after the prior film where John Wick was betrayed and left for dead by the New York Contiental's owner played by Ian McShane, Wick continues to be hunted down by the High Table's worldwide network of assassins in an operation lead by a member of the organization known as the Marquis portrayed by Bill Skarsgard. How does one choose only one out of a buffet of balletic bullet battles? There's the Berlin brawl against a fat-suited SPL Sammo Hung styled Scott Adkins and his axe-wielding guards. Then there's the movie's most inventive stunt sequence in a Arc De Triomphe circling gas-pedaling gun grind-up. There's also the top-down retro video game-esque dragon's breath firefight (emphasis on the fire). And the film's penultimate showdown, a metaphorical and literal stairway to heaven.
At first I was going to go with the stairway sequence but I said screw it and went with the movie's first big action scene in the Osaka Continental. This hitman haven becomes a ballistic battleground as the hotel's owner played by Hiroyuki Sanada defends his territory and his honorable guest John Wick against the Marquis' forces. In classic Film Fight Fanatic fashion, I'm cheating on my own fight scene classification rules by counting this entire segment as one gigantic gun-jutsu fight. Unique to this setpiece's action aesthetic is the Osaka guards' use of traditional Japanese weaponry comprised primarily of bows and blades over the bullets of most of John Wick's assassins. Amongst them is even a geisha-like femme fatale armed with a bladed fan and, jumbling in even more Japanese-ness, two big-armed semi-bulletproof sumos. The most stunning of Osaka's warriors is of course, none other than Hiroyuki Sanada, who almost played Mark Dacascos' character in John Wick 3 but left the project to make an unfortunately brief appearance in Avengers: Endgame.
It may have been a semi-advantageous trade-off in the end as his name added one more martial megastar to an already A-list action entourage. A man of both dramatic and physical expertise, Hiroyuki Sanada's famed filmography stretches across samurai period films/television whether from Japan or Hollywood like The Last Samurai, American/Asian action comedies like Rush Hour 3, genre-defining horror like Ju-On known in the west as The Ring, and sci-fi thrillers such as Sunshine. His film fighting and screen stunt skillset started all the way in his younger years in movies like the kung fu cult classic Ninja in the Dragon's Den and crime comedy Hoero! Tekken. Carrying a lifetime's worth of wisdom in the Japanese martial arts of Shorinji Kempo and Kyokushin Karate, Sanada ascended to the status of successor to Japanese martial arts movie legend Sonny Chiba. Previously teaming up with Keanu Reeves in the far east feudal fantasy 47 Ronin, Hiroyuki Sanada was quite comfortable around Keanu by the time John Wick 4's development came around. Sanada's role was written specifically for him and him alone personally requested by Chad Stahelski. For JW 4, Hiroyuki Sanada put on his tried-and-truest go-to-samurai guy persona. Yet another chapter in his recent re-rise to international star status hot off his casting as Scorpion in 2021's Mortal Kombat and a minor role in David Leitch's Bullet Train.
Sharing a short exchange of fists and firearms with Sanada is a far less celebrated film fighter, Marko Zaror, who plays the Marquis' right hand man executing some basic gunplay melding it with his mix of more modern and old-fashioned martial arts. You know he's the head hitman when he blocks an arrow with his frikkin' forearm. Zaror was intended to have a minimal amount of action in early stages of the film's making until Chad Stahelski decided to expand upon his fight sequences. Marko Zaror has mentioned that his character's fighting style evokes his ever-evolving emotional state throughout the film. Remaining calm, confident, perhaps a bit cocky even taking his time with his hand-to-hand gunplay in the Osaka scene. But as John Wick becomes more and more difficult to kill made all the harder by having to competing against Donnie Yen's character Caine for Wick's bounty, Zaror's character becomes an increasingly frustrated and frantic fighter firing up the ferocity and speed of his movements later on. Fans would notice that in John Wick 4, Marko Zaror has a more acrobatically restrained role restricted from his iconic aerial kicks to better blend into the more believable universe of John Wick. That doesn't make him any less physically imposing however as the Osaka raid makes it clear that he is nowhere near an easy headshot for Wick. Everyone wants to start a cinematic universe but making a stand-alone origin story for Marko Zaror would be a good enough excuse to get the Latin Dragon the global recognition he has always deserved. Fist of the Condor is his personal ode to martial arts cinema but the John Wick series could be a perfectly paved path to international superstardom.
Somewhat overshadowed by the movie's larger-than-life legends is Japanese-British music artist and first-time actress Rina Sawayama who plays the daughter of Hiroyuki Sanada's character and Osaka Continental's concierge. Rina reigns down arrows on the hotel invaders pinning them onto walls and grappling them with her bow. Chosen by Chad Stahelski for her acting and choreographically kinetic talents after displaying her dancing ability in music videos like XS and screen fighting in Bad Friend, Rina Sawayama endured 5 weeks of constant morning-to-night training and rehearsal in stunts, bare-handed combat, knives, and archery for John Wick 4. She was almost cast for the 4th Matrix film but instead finally got her big break in the 4th John Wick making up for her lost opportunity to act alongside Keanu Reeves by battling next to him as a bow-wielding badass.
On a lower level of the hotel is a combative kitchen clash where Donnie Yen's character Caine (because he's a blind dude using a cane, get it?) first shows of his martial prowess. Utilizing doorbell-dinging motion detectors to locate the Osaka guards and knocking them out with quick taps of his cane, you know Yen needs no introduction when he gets to incorporate his two signature techniques, the chain combo and the wind-up punch. Integrating some storytelling significance into the fight is how Caine only fires at and kills his targets when absolutely necessary out of respect for Hiroyuki Sanada's character. Caine was only pulled out of retirement by the Marquis under the threat of his daughter's life and so his lethality is limited by his own sense of honor and misfortune. The character of Caine was inspired by other blind cinematic swordsman the most famous of which is Zatoichi which Chad Stahelski wanted to work into the story somehow as a tribute. Donnie Yen definitely channelled some of Chirrut Imwe from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story but snuck in some more style. Yen asked to change his name from a Chinese one to the English "Caine" and gave himself a snazzy suit instead of what might've been a more culturally stereotypical Chinese outfit. This along with modifying his movements to the sound-oriented tactile tactics of Caine refined his sightless sword master personality for JW 4 fulfilling his wish to be the coolest character in the movie. The momentary yet glorious gun-fu in Triple X: The Return of Xander Cage was but a preview of the breathtaking ballistics to come in John Wick 4. Stacked on top of Sakra, 2023 has definitely shaped up to be The Year of the Yen.
But what's a John Wick film without John Wick at the center of it all? That's where the glass-shattering museum melee comes in as Wick takes on waves of the Marquis' massive men and fully armored High Table soldiers. Out of all of his former foes, these are undeiably John Wick's toughest enemies yet. Among them are hordes of hulking hand-gunning hand-to-hand hitmen all fitted with bullet-blocking vests similar to Wick's. It's like they must've purposedly hired the tallest and heaviest stunt men to play these guys making it all the more reasonable to hire the 6'2" Marko Zaror as their head of command. The High Table's smaller all-around-armored assassins aren't necessarily easier as they're suggestably of either a higher class or at least derived of a more Japanese artistry than those in John Wick 3 given their armor is adorned in demonic masks and battle skirts. By now John Wick has the experience to more easily dispatch the High Table soldiers by firing off successive rounds as blunt-force distractions to close the distance and open up unarmored areas for the finishing shot, each group of opponents coming in squads of about 3.
Keanu Reeves is a lifelong martial artist not of the same calibre as his other film fighting co-stars but a late bloomer beginning in his time on the set of The Matrix trilogy. The John Wick films advanced his martial journey into studying Judo, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Aiki-Jitsu, Silat, and a whole host of other combat disciplines combining it with tactical firearms lessons and speed shooting drills to assemble the amalgamated action aesthetic coined by Chad Stahelski as "Gun-Jutsu". For this 4th chapter he had to learn a new weapon art by bringing out the nunchaku implementing what he knew from his belt pelting fight scene in JW 3 and merging it into his multi-martial move set to create a novel scenario-specific style. Some criticize JW 4's fight scenes for being overlong and drawn out and much of it might be aimed at this part in particular. But for me, if any fight scene is excessive, it best be a John Wick one. Funnily enough, John Wick drops in exhaustion at the end of it almost as a meta-moment winking at the audience sharing in their collective fight fatigue.
Unfortunately there's little time for rest as we are treated to the highly anticipated face-off between Keanu Reeves and Donnie Yen which is, for narrative purposes, interrupted by the lever-action rifle shots of another contract killer out for Wick's head played by Shamier Anderson. But what a face-off it is anyway! The pure star power emanating from these two action giants is palpable. Donnie Yen was reportedly so frenetically fast that Keanu Reeves wanted to alter their entire encounter to convey John Wick's caution towards Caine's seemingly superhuman speed by having Wick approach him in a more careful cover-based manner. Each armed with a pistol and a sword, Keanu and Donnie duel in a bullet-blade battle proving the screen fighting potential present among two colleagues of choreographed combat. Although Marko Zaror shows off his superiority in striking speed against John Wick in later scenes, Donnie Yen seems to slow down to Wick's trademark tempo matching his more choregraphically comprehensible movements. To some, a disappointing rhythmic choice but maybe it can be explaned away by Caine slightly holding back because of his camaraderie with Wick? I'll let you interpret that yourself.
The Osaka arc ends in a tragic duel between Donnie Yen and Hiroyuki Sanada out on a beautifully lit outdoor patio. The senior sword masters meet metal to metal. Sanada's katana and Donnie Yen's jian. This is just one of several but the most significant of the film's first ever film fights among incredibly celebrated cinematic martial artists. Donnie Yen regretably kills the already crippled Sanada symbolizing the friendships, alliances, and lives lost due to John Wick's unending crusade against the entire assassin underworld. In fact, in Japan the film was given the narratively appropriate alternative title John Wick: Consequences. Not to mention to continue the tradition of including a subtitle under the main title like JW 3's "Parabellum" John Wick 4 was initially given the title of "Hagakure", named after a Japanese handbook containing the principles for a warrior's way of life. Had that subtitle been used, it would've been an even more story-drivenly solemn yet honorable send-off for Hiroyuki Sanada's character. Eloquent title or not, Sanada goes out like the true samurai he is and there could be no other way to do so than at the steel edge of another of Asia's acclaimed action actors. If you think this mournful martial melee was poetically produced, then consider it a sample of the samurai cinema soon to be served by Chad Stahelski's directorial adaptation of the video game Ghosts of Tsushima.
Speaking of Stahelski, performers are after all only part of the equation. It's Chad Stahelski's vision demanding a wide steady framing of fight scenes and neon-noir visual vibrancy covering every color in the light spectrum that makes John Wick: Chapter 4 and especially the Osaka act, a cinematographic centerfold in the grand gallery of gun-fu and non-gun-centric action films alike. Amplifying JW 4's audiosvisual intensity is the electronic pulse-pounding ballistic beats composed by musical masters from the world of cinematic scores and EDM like Le Castle Vania. The only exceptions being Donnie Yen's duels with Keanu Reeves and Hiroyuki Sanada almost to elevate dramatic tension and the sonic landscape that Caine lives in. Every one of these element converge into Chapter 4, a cinematic centerpiece of sight and sound. Again, all at the courtesy of stuntman-turned director Chad Stahelski. Having stunt doubled for Keanu Reeves and standing in as martial arts stunt coordinator in The Matrix series under Yuen Woo-Ping as well as experience in stunt coordination for a long list of other big-name action-heavy films, his intimate knowledge of action cinema and martial arts moviemaking has granted him the tools to devise an infallible formula for a film fighting feast of a franchise founded on a Hong Kong Hollywood hybrid style of action. Holding such deep insight into the secrets of action movie-making we can only wonder whether he can ressurect the in-hibernation Highlander series as its currently attached director.
As the overseer of all things John Wick 4, Stahelski still needs his specialized action designers. Enter fight coordinator Jeremy Marinas, tricking prodigy and veteran of Stahelski's 87Eleven action company. Marinas coordinated fights for both Hollywood hits and misfires like Fast X, Gemini Man, Triple XXX: The Return of Xander Cage, episodic series like See (gaving him familiarity on how to formulate a blind man's fighting form helping to flesh out Donnie Yen's choreographic style), and Netflix's Altered Carbon. A little trivia for you, he actually makes a funny cameo in JW 4 as a French hitman mauled by a dog. A martial arts prodigy, Jeremy Marinas is adept both in front of and behind the camera, examples of which are his fight scene against Tiger Chen in Man of Tai Chi starring and directed by Keanu Reeves as well as a one-on-one with Scott Adkins in Close Range which Marinas also choreographed. He's recently ranked up to second unit director for the upcoming Jason Statham actioner The Beekeeper and his role as gun-fu guru of John Wick 4 was more than just a huge stepping stone towards that career breakthrough but honestly his mightiest achievement in action creation so far. Completing the trio of choreographic combat creators is fight choreographer Laurent Demianoff (choreographer of Gunpowder Milkshake and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, stunt coordinator of a multitude of French films) and fight choreographer Koji Kawamoto (action coordinator of Kingdom, assisted in action design for Hydra). This triple team lead by Chad Stahelski spent a month-long marathon of filming for the Osaka setpeice alone. Time damn well spent as this 4th chapter is even more ground-breaking in its grounded gunplay.
To bust your brain more than it is, it's worth noting that these new gods of gun-fu originally tried to have John Wick: Chapter 4 and 5 shot back-to-back and released one year after another with Chapter 4 to be given a theatrical opening on the same day as The Matrix Resurrections. Several production delays Covid and non-Covid related caused Chad Stahelski's decision to mark the 4th John Wick as the finale so that his cast and crew would not suffer the painful pressures of producing two consecutive films non-stop. Both the action and the narrative was trimmed down as a result, the almost 4-hour long film downsized to a still epicly lengthy nearly 3-hour run-time. A sacrifice many a director must make for a more feasible theatrical release as we say with Veronica Ngo's 3-hour Furies shortened to about 2 hours. This balletic bullet-blasting behemoth of a movie's exclusions may be evident in certain scenes that made and didn't make the final cut: the abbreviated opening desert horseback gun fight, a deleted fight scene with underappreciated movie martial artist and choreographer Brahim Chab, and possibly an explanation for the simplified duel between Hiyouki Sanada and Donnie Yen. Though the latter might've been more choreographically concise on purpose, as is the entirety of the film, to not send moviegoers into a slumber. Nonetheless, even in the absence of concrete action sequences that were filmed but kept out for practical reasons, there's likely enough excess plot details not present in the final cut at the very least to help lay the groundwork for feature films focusing on any one of the major members of the cast in their own stand-alone installments.
A solo film with Caine whether a prequel or sequel following the ambiguous post-credit scene involving Rina Sawayama which Donnie Yen himself expressed interest in is one possibility. And though I don't like to preach about Asian representation in film, Donnie Yen's sidelined stint as supporting actor needs to stop so he can lead his own Hollywood action film rather than remaining only the main man in Asian productions. Same with Hiroyuki Sanada also opening up the opportunity for Rina Sawayama in her own spin-off. But for now we have Ballerina starring Ana De Armas set in the middle of JW 3 and 4. It might just be a contender fight scene of the year in 2024. But going back to the main topic, John Wick, kinda like his actor Keanu Reeves, is virtually immortal so the planned 5th film might mean that gravestone was merely meant to provide insurance for a long but ultimately temporary vacation. For the sake of our entertainment, John Wick should never know the sweet salvation of death in exchange for more gun-fu greatness even if Keanu will be pushin' past his 60s' soon. An unused ending that didn't receive the kindest test audience reception had John Wick standing over his own gravesite so it's clear the man wasn't always supposed to stay dead. Keanu Reeves himself is downright down for as many Wick flicks as us gun-jutsu geeks want in spite of his initial agreement with Chad Stahelski that Wick's final fate was sealed. That can only mean that if I was to answer your hypothetical question "Do we really need another John Wick movie?", my answer to you would be a seriously stoic "Yeah".
I can already tell I'm getting a little rusty when it comes to writing these articles. The next one won't be a while because my burnout coping mechanism has been to seek out the movies listed on the Imdb profiles of martial arts actors that I probably won't write about for who knows how many years. So until then all I got is this. And if you actually read through this entire article then all I can say is wow, you are definitely my most dedicated fan.