NOTE: I’m offering a short essay on action films here, and I’m also hoping readers will take a look at my goofball spoof / remix of STREET FIGHTER 2, which mocks the cinematic heroic super-macho character, but also shows shows some appreciation for that type of character. I like action films. I like tough-guy cinema. Sonny Chiba is cool. But why not have some fun by spoofing STREET FIGHTER 2? The film is in public domain, so I recut it and added goofy subtitles. That plus a short introductory biography of Chiba can be viewed on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gz1uJqGTFo
HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT IN ACTION FILMS
Action films put a heroic figure in danger as he or she tries to achieve a worthwhile goal. Combat in action films ranges from hand-to-hand fighting to sword play to knife fighting to gun play to the use of explosives, robots, drones, jets, and tanks. The more technology employed, the less personal the fighting becomes.
The ultimate in personal fighting that really shows the protagonist at risk is hand-to-hand combat. However, sword fighting has long been popular in film for the same reason, as has the classic western one-to-one duel in an open street. Knife fights might be viewed as sword fights with a small sword which results in closer proximity of the fighters and thus more roughness to the fight and less grace. Sword fighting is often quite graceful. Gun duels produce extended scenes of dramatic tension. Hand-to-hand combat can be graceful like sword fighting (depending on the fighting style), and involve a lot of dramatic tension, like Western-film duels.
James Bond employed Asian martial arts to survive in hand-to-hand combat, but it was the actor and martial arts expert, Bruce Lee, who made Asian hand-to-hand combat widely popular in the 1970s.
BELOW: Bruce Lee made Asian martial arts hugely popular in film.
James Bond had dominated the action-film market in the sixties with rugged Sean Connery as Bond, but he became overly refined in the seventies with Roger Moore as Bond. Meanwhile, a few Bruce Lee films made in the early seventies were blockbuster hits not only in Hong Kong, where they were made, but around the world.
ABOVE: Sean Connery as James Bond using martial arts skills to defend himself.
Lee died in 1973, just when the demand for cool Asian martial arts films was enormous as a result of his films. There was a need for new Asian action stars. The Japanese star, Sonny Chiba, an expert at Japanese martial arts, and Jackie Chan, in Hong Kong, helped provide audiences with heroes adept at Asian martial arts.
BELOW – Sonny Chiba uses Japanese martial arts expertly, having studied and trained extensively.
Hong Kong super star Jackie Chan, below, added wild stunts to his action films, plus comedy.
In the eighties and nineties there was a trend in Hollywood films toward heavily muscled action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Sheer brute strength was implied by the bulging muscles. Ah-nold in the Terminator films, and films like COMMANDO, was a one-man army, almost someone out of of a comic book. He wasn’t known for hand-to-hand combat but preferred to use a variety of military weaponry to defeat opponents.
BELOW: Ah-nold says in COMMANDO, “Ah you feeling lucky, punk?” (Not an actual line from the movie.) Big muscles and big military weapons were popular in the 80s and 90s action films.
In the Rambo films, the Die Hard films, the Dirty Harry films, the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones films, the Road Warrior films, and the Lethal Weapon films, extended hand-to-hand combat was not foregrounded as a big part of how the hero survived. There were hand guns, military weapons, light sabers, and so on, at the action star’s disposal.
THE BOURNE IDENTITY, 2002, was a game changer for action films. Sure, Jason Bourne knows how to use a wide range of hand guns and military weapons, and he’s pretty heavily muscled so he has some brute force potential, but a large element of the Bourne films is hand-to-hand combat.
In every film, Bourne displays a high level of expertise at close hand-to-hand combat against highly trained opponents. But Bourne wins because he has mastered Bruce Lee’s fighting styles: Wing Chun and Jeet Kune Do (Lee’s Cantonese “The Way of the Intercepting Fist” style). And he is adept at Krav Maga, an Israeli Defense Forces fighting technique which is focused on efficiency and combines Judo, Karate, Aikido, boxing, and wrestling. He also knows Filipino Kali.
After the success of the Bourne films, hand-to-hand combat became a big element of action films. The Taken series starring Liam Neeson, the Equalizer series starring Denzel Washington, and the newer James Bond films all have prominent displays of hand-to-hand combat. Sometimes there is a mixture of hand-to-hand fighting and the use of hand guns or other weapons.
The John Wick series, particularly the second and third films in the series, seem like one very long fight scene with some interludes to break up the action and add some information to the story. The third film in particular seems like one enormous and endless hand-to-hand battle composed of smaller battles, to the point of total ridiculousness. We know from watching a boxing match that a big part of winning is physical endurance. Wearing out your opponent was a key element of Muhammad Ali’s strategy. He let brute-force fighters like Sonny Liston (one of the greatest boxers ever, and super intimidating) exhaust themselves while he held back and preserved his strength. He did the same thing with his rope-a-dope strategy against George Foreman. When his opponents were exhausted, he lashed out and finished them off. In comic-book style, Wick is like the Energizer Bunny; he can have one exhausting fight after another over many hours, yet keep going. Sure, he staggers along at times or limps, but he can keep fighting fights that, for even professional fighters, would be exhausting after just one of them. In contrast, Bourne shows his physical exhaustion, so the Bourne films tend to be more realistic.
Hand-to-hand combat may not always seem realistic, especially when employed by professional assassins who one would think would employ a wide range of weapons and a careful methodology and lots of planning when carrying out attacks rather than jumping someone in a hotel room and duking it out. However, close combat makes action films far more dramatic than films where a sweaty guy with bulging muscles fires a huge, cannon-like military weapon and wipes out 100 attackers. It will be interesting to see where a series like the John Wick films can go with hand-to-hand combat, and whether the popularity of this kind of fighting will become a source of parody.
Parody often signals the end of a life cycle for something that has been very popular — a film genre or genre in literature. I offer such a parody of the macho, furiously fighting tough guy martial arts expert in my spoof of STREET FIGHTER 2. (SEE LINK ABOVE.) But, even though it’s getting ridiculous in the Wick films, hand-to-hand will continue to be popular in action films because it adds so much drama to the story.
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