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The 100 Fights That Shaped Action Cinema
Whether the scenes featured fists, firearms or blades, the result was always the same: The crowd was pleased.
In his chef d’oeuvre, A Touch of Zen, Hu stages a transcendent sword fight in a foggy bamboo forest — this iconic face-off between fugitive noblewoman Yang Hui-zhen (Hsu Feng) and her swordsmen and the bodyguards of the evil eunuch Mun Ta would be paid homage by a number of contemporary martial-arts movies like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But in Blade Runner, Deckard shooting to kill the replicants is treated with a little bit of shame, a sign of his inability to hold his own against the “more human than human.” Pris’s seizurelike death scene is an agonizing, drawn-out affair, but her unnerving athleticism and disarming sexuality have birthed cinematic daughters like the horny-for-death Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye and slinky badass Mystique in the first X-Men films; she helped make the thigh-crush the staple finishing move it is now for female action stars. Tom Hardy (whose insanely jacked physique allowed him to segue seamlessly from Warrior to his turn as Bane in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises) plays Tommy Riordan, a haunted and deeply messed-up former Marine who returns home to Pittsburgh and starts training in the sport he abandoned years ago alongside his estranged alcoholic father (Nick Nolte).
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