We’re going to try and find some top 5’s and top 10’s for your Saturday morning weekend reading. This one comes from Luke Ryan and our friends at TheVine. Enjoy.
For an otherwise pretty placid and calm-natured guy, I do get an awful amount of enjoyment from watching humans punch the living Jesus out of one another. But the internet is already filled with lists of the best, or the worst, or the most impressive fight scenes, so I thought I’d go a bit different and bring together some of the most ridiculous instead. From short folk to double amputees, from low-grade slaughterfests to high concept fights that stretch the capacity of the human brain to comprehend what on Earth is going on, these are ten of the most out and out absurd moments in the glorious history of over-the-top cinematic violence.
10. Face Off
The final fight scene in this spectacularly over-conceived John Woo blockbuster (“Alright, so, we’ll call the movie Face Off and there’s going to be lots of face-offs and the two main characters will literally swap faces so that their faces are, in fact, off” “Brilliance. John, you’ve done it again. Have some money.”) is appropriately enough, spectacularly over-conceived. Half of it happens on a speedboat and features Nicolas Cage water-skiing on his feet alone, before settling into some more nitty gritty punching in a boatyard replete with nutshot, harpooning and Cage going absolutely wild man. Exhilarating.
9. Bruce Lee kicks the shit out of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Bruce Lee acts out the fantasies of diminutive humans everywhere by beating up a 7-foot behemoth. Also, those shorts are far too short for a man of his stature. Also, nice sunnies.
8. The Tea House fight in Drunken Master 2
Now you wouldn’t expect an unarmed Jackie Chan and an elderly Chinese man to be able to fight off a few hundred hatchet wielding maniacs, but that’s where you’d be wrong. The tea room/bar room brawl is a bit of a classic in martial arts cinema, but rarely has it been cast on such a rigorously absurd scale as it is here. Looking a bit like a two man rendition of the Battle of Helm’s Deep, Jackie Chan and his compatriot (Lau Kar Leung) manage to repel wave after wave of the descriptively named ‘Axe Gang’ using naught but a haphazard combination of tables, stools and bamboo shafts. The resulting carnage, whilst spectacular, almost certainly put that poor tea house out of business… I’m not sure how good property insurance was back in Feudal China.
7. Hot Shots 2
Yes, I am quite aware this scene is supposed to be ridiculous, but can I just say that after watching this film as an 8 year old, I was both massively and profoundly confused as to the exact nature of testicles until I hit high school.
6. District B13
Just to prove that Chinese men and Uma Thurman aren’t the only ones that can wipe out a room’s worth of malicious goons without breaking a sweat, this extract from Luc Besson’s action extravaganza District B13 is true testament to the cinematic truth that crime bosses really, really need to introduce a straight-shooting test before hiring their henchmen.
5. Undefeatable
Calling a move “Undefeatable” would seem to give away the ending somewhat, as well as severely challenging the conceptual limits of the English language, but fortunately this film makes up for it by being a well-acted, subtle exercise in high-grade martial arts. A must for fans of the words “hnnnngh” and “heeeeeuarrrrr”. Not for fans of eyeballs staying in sockets.
4. Code of the Dragon
The first 17 seconds of this clip seem normal enough, if not a little artlessly put together. And for some reason dubbed in German. But then Henry Smalls arrives and begins to tear the place apart. Which is really quite remarkable considering his… uh… um… his… uh… thing.
3. Riki-Oh
After watching this fight, the phrase “You’ve got a lot of guts” will never seem quite the same again. Not for the squeamish.
2. Weng Weng
I love this video more than words can properly describe, but suffice to say if you enjoy 2 foot 9 inch Filipino dudes wailing on gangsters and getting tremendous amounts of lady action, then Weng Weng is the secret agent for you.
1. Uma Thurman vs The Crazy 88s
This is pretty much the above scene from Drunken Master 2 but without the elderly Chinese man and with a whole lot more killing. And blood. So very much blood. Any scene in which one person annihilates an entire room of heavily armed men is going to be by its very nature ridiculous, but splice in a Boer War amount of amputation and grisliness and you have a recipe for something truly special. A perfect mixture of impossibility, high concept and martial arts brilliance.
