I’m posting in c/movies but including tv shows, anime, comics, manga, etc.
Personally I think the final war rig sequence in Mad Max: Fury Road is the most impressive live-action fight I’ve ever seen. The practical effects and choreographing are incredible and the fight keeps moving along by having the stakes raised and characters dying, it doesn’t meander.
In animation it’s harder to say. Attack on Titan had a lot of really well animated action (it used be so good, goddammit). The battle in Shiganshina in season 3 is the best, the narrative weight is so strong, the characters all have really good moments, the stakes are really high and the production is incredible, animation, soundtrack, sound design, voice acting etc.
Mob Psycho has the most consistently incredible animation of anything I’ve ever seen, I think the group fight against the teleporting psychic in season 2 is my personal favourite, even if it’s not the flashiest, it’s really well directed and just such a cool fight, even though it’s not that long.
The ChainsawMan manga has a lot of good fights, the Falling Devil arc is like my favourite arc of anything ever, but that’s mainly because of the characters. The art is stunning, Fujimoto at his absolute peak, but the action is pretty straightforward. I mainly love it because it’s Asa at her best as a character, and Asa is my favourite character of anything ever.
Wow it was way easier for me to choose a live action sequence than animated. Honestly there’s so much lazy action in superhero slop that Mad Max stands out so, so much.
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Without reviewing hundreds of movies the Subway Fight in The Matrix is my choice.
Alternately, the fight in Seven Samurai where the sword master is introduced.
Animated? The fight between Motoko and the puppet terrorist stands out, as it emphasizes a lot of the themes of the story; Invisible, super strong, and super-capable, Motoko completely and effortlessly defeats the puppet terrorist despite his installed martial arts abilities. He simply cannot meaningfully fight her, and when the fight is over she looks on with something like alien pity.
Oh that fight when Algren groks his sword training in The Last Samurai and defeats like four guys in the dark is really cool.
Oh, the fight in Pirates of the Carribean where Jack manipulate’s Legolas’ academic but inexperienced fencing to get to the other side of the room in an attempt to leave without hurting him. it says so much about who the characters really are. You get an early hint that Jack is much smarter, more capable, and more aware than his goofy persona suggests, and also of his weird humanism; He’s no one’s enemy, he just wants to go his own way. Plus that line “People arent’ cargo, mate” is a great encapsulation of humanist philosophy, and you can extend it to anti-capitalism if you want.
the Subway Fight in The Matrix is my choice.
Was going to mention the lobby shootout from Matrix 1 but I felt Jackie Chan and his stunts are still superior since it’s all him.
Word. I don’t think the Matrix would have happened without Jackie and other Hong Kong movie martial arts pioneers.
The hospital shootout in Hard Boiled fucking rules. There are probably a bunch of John Woo scenes I could mention though, like the shootout at the beginning of The Killer that sets the whole story into motion, which has incredible choreography and emotional impact.
@[email protected] already mentioned Police Story, so I’ll just second it.
Kind of primitive by today’s standards, but the duel that introduces Kyuzo in Seven Samurai is cool as hell (for some reason I can’t find it unedited on youtube, so just watch the movie).
Car Chase scene in The French Connection- William Friedkin was firing on all cylinders.
Not really a single scene, but I love John McTiernan’s very slick and interesting way of directing action in the 80s, with Die Hard and Predator. His action scenes are tense and almost like horror scenes, particularly in Predator.
There are lots of James Cameron action scenes I could list, so I’ll just say the police station shootout in Terminator, and Ripley fighting the Alien Queen.
I’m also personally fond of the final sword fight in Rob Roy.
In animation, I think I’ve got to mention the fight between Aang and Katara versus Azula and Zuko in ATLA, for the animation quality, creative choreography, and story impact. As a kid I loved how it ended the second season on this massive defeat and tragedy, which reminded me of Empire Strikes Back. I could mention a ton of scenes across all of Avatar but that’s my favorite.
Kind of primitive by today’s standards, but the duel that introduces Kyuzo in Seven Samurai is cool as hell (for some reason I can’t find it unedited on youtube, so just watch the movie).
Book recommendation - The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt (which is actually connected to this movie, and is obsessed with this scene, and has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie that came out later)
For my favorite samurai action scene (other than this one) I’ll vote for the end of The Sword of Doom, or the hilltop duel in Harakiri.
The Rob Roy fight is a great one. Tim Roth is such a fucking asshole in that movie and the way his character arc ends is extremely satisfying.
Yeah, he’s a complex but deeply hateable villain. Great character, great performance, underrated movie.
He definitely stole scenery. Great pick btw.
I saw hard boiled for the first time this year and hooooooooly shit.
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When I defeated Toad at the Statue of Liberty.
well I came in here to say “basically all of Fury Road” so looks like my work is done
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The rainy courtyard scene from Hero is a favorite of mine, tied with the very famous dojo scene from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.
Much sillier and artsy fartsy compared to a lot of the stuff in this thread so far but I can’t help but love how perfectly constructed they are.
Crouching tiger hidden dragon really elevated the choreography part of “fight choreography”. It’s just like watching a beautiful and dangerous dance. I don’t think they’re any sillier than say, watching ballet or some kind of theater performance. You’re not there for realism per se, but for artistry.
I love it so much. I think you can’t ever really convey what a fight is like in a movie by trying for realism and 1:1 representation. You’ll never get there. So when crouching tiger uses their fight choreo to tell us about the characters, who they are, what they believe, what they value, it’s making very good and proper use of fighting in the visual art form of movies. Each fight has a purpose beyond tittilating violence.
Oh hero has so many good scenes! Have you ever come across Chinese discussion of the film? I read it as a message calling for national unity and emphasizing the importance of finding a cause beyond your own individual desires and I’d love to know how it’s viewed in china.
That’s definitely a big part of the movie, and I imagine it has a lot of significance for the genre as a sort of deconstruction and examination of its own tropes. Wuxia stuff is usually about individualistic renegades who shirk unjust laws, and I remember a bunch of american reviews of Hero claiming that the movie was authoritarian (of course) since the brave lone warriors were depicted as being immature for wanting to keep a finished war alive for the sake of their pride.
(Warning very uncool Hero rant incoming)
That might be true, I can’t read Zhang Yimou’s mind, but that always seemed like a pretty shallow read of a movie with a lot of depth. Like any good work of art it’s full of ambivalence, and is not didactic. There are tons of scenes showcasing the dichotomy of self and group (it’s called Hero after all) and the last few lines really seem important to whatever is being explored. The emperor, having convinced the protag and others that he is enlightened, seems like a benevolent dictator, right? A justified emperor who will bring peace with force. But while he might have become enlightened regarding the wielding of power, and wants to spare Jet Li in spite of his assassination attempt, the state and power structures he has constructed around himself, embodied by his court eunuchs who loudly shout the emperor’s own laws back at him, is forced to do something he feels is wrong by having the hero executed. Whatever the emperor’s feelings were, this is the world his power built, and he finds it to be out of his control–his individual will has shaped his world, and it was the will of a man who was himself immature and unenlightened, but there’s no going back now.
Like a lot of grand Chinese epics, there’s a theme of how the structures we build become decrepit and fall apart to be replaced after what is sometimes a terrible struggle (it’s the first few lines of the romance of the three kingdoms after all, which is technically the narrative in which Hero is set). It’s bigger than “unity through force,” I think it’s a story that is trying to figure out what heroes really are, and taking such questions more seriously than a lot of schlock is willing to.
Awesome analysis! Are you familiar with the King Arthur romances, especially how his decision on how to react to Guinevere’s “treason” in having an affair with Lancelot? That seems like a similar situation where a benevolent king finds himself trapped by the ideal kingdom he has built around himself. Do you see use comparison between the two?
There are definitely similarities, which makes sense since they are both essentially kings. But I would say the biggest difference is the presence or absence of something like chivalry here. I think in many ways Arthur and the knights run against the inherent contradictions of chivalry, while the wuxia heroes are typically not guided by that sort of code. They are just individuals who have cultivated the power to uphold or skip past the laws that would bind them, the opposite of the emperor whose power is the font from which law springs. The emperor sits at the top of a distinct hierarchy, which is fine for him since he’s so enlightened and all, but when Nameless spares him and decides not to kill him, Nameless is proved to be his equal, which for an emperor cannot be allowed. It questions something that Arthurian legend does not imo, the very position of emperor and/or king.
I was going to say Hero, since every fight scene in that genuinely beats everything anime or western posted here. Or the Bamboo scene in Crouching Tiger, both are just so fucking good.
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The hallway fight scene in Old Boy is my kneejerk reaction, but the hospital fight in Hard Boiled and the stairwell fight in The Raid is pretty good. Assault on Precinct 13 as a whole is pretty close to one long action sequence.
The lead up to the hospital fight is so brutally tense. It just keeps escalating and escalating.
RRR Tiger fight
flcl has great action animation
I guess heat. I rewatched it recently and both heists are incredible.
The shootout in true detective season one with clan in da front playing in the background.
As for anime ones, luffy throwing crocodile into the sky while Dvorak’s new world plays.
I watched heat for the first time a few years ago, and there was something about the heists that made them weird. Not bad, they just felt very different, like something didn’t fit. Then I realized that the takes were so much longer than they would’ve been with most action movies nowadays. Heat as a whole has some really long shots, but even the more action-y bits are paced really slowly, compared to now. It makes the movie breathe better, and build up tension before releasing satisfactorily
Nah that’s what made them good though, as it goes on it made skin crawl. And also the guns sound real good. Heat feels great to watch.
I think I’ve heard the gun sounds were “real”. They were firing off blanks from the guns and the gunfire sounds you hear are those sounds being recorded.
It sounds less video gamey. Also very loud. The second heist was hectic cause of the sound.
Yeah what I meant is that longer, slower paced action scenes are not something you see nowadays, and that heat is all the better for having them.
Heat is often used as a showcase for how you’re supposed to use an ar in urban combat. Val Kilmer did not need to go that hard and yet he did.
Val kilmer is so hot in that movie.
Ichigo vs Byakuya on the cliff over Soul Society from Bleach is my formative hype anime fight.
For live action, it’s gotta be the opening of Ninja 3: The Domination, where a ninja kills like two dozen cops in a row.
I love bleach. And yeah that arc rules.
For live action, it’s gotta be the opening of Ninja 3: The Domination, where a ninja kills like two dozen cops in a row.
Took all that gunfire like a champ then hid with a smoke bomb. RIP piggies.
It’s a major point of the movie’s fiction that only a ninja can truly kill a ninja
That’s like saying it’s a major point of the movie’s fiction that there’s a force of mutual attraction between objects with mass. Gravity exists irl and it’s true outside of the movie thst only a ninja can truly kill a ninja, that’s basic science, not some plot contrivance.
Because it’s impossible to know where a ninja is and where he is going at the same time ninja/ninja violence is often used in particle physics research, such as at the dark smoke dragon infinity collider in Beverly Hills, California
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Roddy Piper and Keith David fighting in an alleyway for like 15 minutes straight in They Live
Wait no I change my answer to literally any action sequence from Big Trouble in Little China
Oh yeah that is an amazing fight.
Omg that was so terrible
That’s the bit
Yesss big time
#1 is two scenes, but blues brothers car chase into huphuphup
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2quc-iQ96R0
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8VFIPCpocLk
#2 is the toilet fight in breaking bad because it’s funny
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The Katara/Zuko/Azula showdown is pretty bloody good
Old boy. Fight in the elevator/hallway
