The 10 Best Martial Arts Movie Fight Scenes of All Time, Ranked
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You can be a fan of action movies without necessarily dipping into the martial arts genre specifically, if you really want to. You might well even get by on the likes of Die Hard, the better Mission: Impossible movies, and some of John Woo’s masterpieces for a while, especially since a few of those do have impressive hand-to-hand fights, often alongside shootouts and other action sequences.
But if you want a couple of guys, or maybe a few more guys, or some girls fighting either one-on-one or within some kind of broader brawl, the martial arts genre has you covered. In particular, these fight scenes are among the best in martial arts history, with great choreography and stunt-work leading to undeniable spectacle, and sometimes even the feeling that you're actually watching two people genuinely fighting to the death.
10 'The Matrix Reloaded' (2003)
The Château Fight
Yes, The Matrix is a classic, and maybe even the only classic of the series it ultimately kicked off. But The Matrix Reloaded is great in some ways, just not all the ways, inevitably not really being a masterpiece, but perhaps improving upon the original as far as action is concerned. The story and just the overall impact of The Matrix (1999) make it better overall, but The Matrix Reloaded does go bigger and wilder with a lot of its action.
And so it’s a fight in The Matrix Reloaded that feels like the best one in the series, for as strange as such a claim might sound. The château fight is incredible, and the highlight of the movie, though the freeway chase is also great, and yeah, people criticize the scene that’s come to be known as the Burly Brawl, but sorry, the Burly Brawl is awesome, too.
9 'Oldboy' (2003)
The Hallway Fight
Park Chan-wook makes a lot of unusual stuff, and it’s hard to mistake his style with that of just about any other filmmaker, though he doesn’t tend to make films that can be called action movies in the traditional sense. Even Oldboy is a bit of an arthouse action film, with more of a focus on mystery and drama/thriller elements, because it’s all about a man trying to learn the truth about why he was locked up by a shadowy individual or group for 15 years of his life.
The main character fights a bunch of people in a hallway, and it’s done in one take, not to mention with an emphasis on how such a fight might actually play out if it were to happen in real life.
There are bursts of intense action in Oldboy, though, and the most iconic scene in the film makes it feel worthy of being called a martial arts movie of sorts. The main character fights a bunch of people in a hallway, and it’s done in one take, not to mention with an emphasis on how such a fight might actually play out if it were to happen in real life. There are plenty of other great things about Oldboy, but it’s understandable why this particular scene is so often seen as a highlight.
8 'Kill Bill Vol. 1' (2003)
The Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 never really stops or slows down, but its relentlessness is a large factor in why it works so well as an action movie. It’s also a martial arts, yakuza, and samurai film all at once, or at least a throwback to older films that belong to those respective genres, with this being the first volume in a duology about revenge having more of a focus on action than the second volume, which is admittedly also great, but for slightly different reasons.
Well, the second half is also the kind of thing that pays homage to classic martial arts movies, but with more of a focus on training than fighting. If you want carnage, you've got that in the final act of Kill Bill: Vol. 1, in spades. It's cheating a bit to put the entire House of Blue Leaves sequence here, since it involves The Bride fighting the Crazy 88 in a few different scenes, and then taking on O-Ren Ishii, but it plays out as one massive sequence, so here it is as merely "one" huge scene.
7 'The Way of the Dragon' (1972)
Bruce Lee vs. Chuck Norris
With the other fight scenes here, it feels a little more proper to refer to the fighters by the names of the characters, rather than the names of the actors, but with the big fight in The Way of the Dragon… come on. You can be the biggest The Way of the Dragon fan in the world, and know the characters’ names, and you're still going to refer to this fight as the one that involves “Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris.”
What else needs to be said? Nothing. No, two of the most famous action movie stars of all time are not literally fighting to the death here, because their characters are, but the sheer novelty of the scene existing, all the while being as great as it is… that’s what really matters. And they fight at the Colosseum, of all places. Absolute cinema, as the kids these days like to say.
6 'The Raid' (2011)
Rama and Andi vs. Mad Dog
As far as the plot of The Raid is concerned, there are a bunch of police officers who go into an apartment building to take down a crime lord, but that crime lord finds out before they can seize him, so he announces to all the other criminals living there that they’ll be rewarded if they can take out the officers. That leads to the police having to battle their way out of the building, with most of them being taken out almost instantly, and the main character having to go down more or less level by level.
It’s almost like a video game movie, but not based on an actual video game, and like a game, it saves the toughest fight for the end. But you're watching it, not playing it, and so that final fight in The Raid is the best from a viewer’s perspective. It’s just a two-on-one fight, and in a very uninteresting location, but the fight choreography and the editing here prove perfect, making it easily one of the best fight sequences in relatively recent memory.
5 'The Raid 2' (2014)
The Kitchen Fight
Action movies don’t get a whole lot more brutal than The Raid 2, the sequel to the already-great previously mentioned action movie. That first movie is fantastic with how it confines all its action to a single location and presents a simple fight for survival, while The Raid 2 increases the scope significantly and becomes something of an epic gangster movie while still having the feel of a martial arts film.
It’s hard to highlight just one great action sequence from The Raid 2, but the one-on-one fight near the film’s end between protagonist Rama and a man known only as “The Assassin” inside a kitchen is probably the most remarkable. It’s nearly seven minutes long, every hit looks convincing, it escalates into a total bloodbath, and is just perfectly put together as far as editing and fight choreography go. Plenty of other action scenes from The Raid 2 are exceptional, too, but they do indeed save the best for last here, much as was also the case in The Raid (2011).
4 'Drunken Master II' (1994)
The Restaurant Battle
There’s going to be one other Jackie Chan movie here, but he earns the right to be mentioned more than once when you're talking about incredible scenes from martial arts films, a little like how The Raid and The Raid 2 both justifiably snuck on here. With Drunken Master II, you do get a straightforward – or classic-feeling – martial arts romp, in contrast with the other more modern Jackie Chan film that’ll be mentioned in a bit (something about the police, and some kind of story or something).
Also, this fight isn't even the climax of Drunken Master II, which is also phenomenal, but this particular fight is the biggest in the movie, and that’s worth something. It’s relentless and has some great usage of props, all the while also featuring the inside of a restaurant getting pretty much decimated simply because the fighting taking place within it is just that intense and destructive.
Yu Shu Lien vs. Jen Yu
The best action sequence in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon starts out as a sword fight and then becomes something more as it goes along, given it takes place in a building that houses many other weapons. As for the movie itself, it's largely about a famed sword, and various people trying to attain it, but this particular fight involves a younger warrior wielding that sword, and an older/more experienced fighter having to go through multiple weapons during their showdown.
It's a great scene on a technical front, for how it’s filmed and choreographed, but it also occurs during a particularly heightened part of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, meaning there’s quite a lot the scene does dramatically in the context of the overall film. So, it’s perhaps the best part of the movie on two fronts, and while it’s far from the only great action scene in the film, it’s probably the most memorable, and a big reason why Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is easy to consider an all-timer of a martial arts film.
2 'The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter' (1984)
The Climactic Battle
The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter ends with a massive sequence that involves a ton of people losing countless teeth. There’s more to it than that, of course, but that is what sticks in one’s mind, because the final showdown in this revenge-fueled kung fu movie has a bunch of Buddhist monks who've all been trained to de-fang their usual “opponents” (wolves) rather than kill them, and so they use this approach when taking on human opponents, too.
It ends up being one of the most wince-inducing fights in martial arts cinema history, but also very spectacular in its own way, so long as you're not too squeamish. Elsewhere, The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter satisfies as a very engaging martial arts movie all-around, but the climax is the part that does really need to be seen to be believed, standing as the absolute highlight of the entire movie, and also as one of the best executed fight sequences of all time.
1 'Police Story' (1985)
The Shopping Mall Fight
Jackie Chan has been in so many great movies that more than a few have gone under the radar and feel, in a sense, underrated, especially among English-speaking audiences who know him mainly from his American films. Those Hollywood movies can be solidly entertaining, sure, but the films he made when he was younger and based in Hong Kong showcase Jackie Chan at his best. Of those, Police Story is rightly considered one of his greatest, and is well-known enough now that it can’t really be counted among his more underrated efforts, especially since it's more well-known than the previously mentioned Drunken Master II.
It's perhaps the perfect film to showcase Jackie Chan’s stunt-work and action sensibilities, with a handful of great sequences throughout… though it’s a film that saves the best for last. Police Story’s climax takes place in a shopping mall and is just spectacularly done in every conceivable way, with convincingly hard-hitting fight choreography, more smashed glass than perhaps any other film in existence, and all capped off with one of Jackie Chan’s most iconic and jaw-dropping stunts: the slide down a pole through various electric lights that ranks among the most death-defying in cinema history.
Police Story
- Release Date
- December 14, 1985
- Runtime
- 99 minutes
- Director
- Jackie Chan
- Writers
- Edward Tang
-
Jackie Chan
Sergeant 'Kevin' Chan Ka-Kui
-
Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia
Salina Fong
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