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Watch Out for the Killer Gams
Leg crush. Flying scissor. Whatever you call it, the move has become an inescapable part of action heroine fights.
Sometimes she climbs her foe like a jungle gym, à la Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust in the Mission: Impossible s. Occasionally, circumstances demand that she linger in place in order to choke a guy out or snap a neck, the way a chained-up Harley Quinn (as played by Margot Robbie) does in Suicide Squad. While instances of killer gams have been around for decades — Bridgette Wilson-Sampras does a game-inspired version in Mortal Kombat(1995), and Charlize Theron performs a brusque take early on in Æon Flux(2005) — you can trace the emergence of the move as a flashy go-to in women’s combat choreography by looking at Mystique in the X-Men movies. Lena Olin’s femme fatale laughs with a borderline erotic delight when strangling Gary Oldman between her legs from the backset in Romeo Is Bleeding in 1993, while two years later, Xenia Onatopp, the paraphiliac henchwoman played by Famke Janssen in the Bond film GoldenEye, would be even more direct, gasping orgasmically while asphyxiating men between her thighs.
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