Original Coverage & Source Attribution: collider.com
I know a martial arts movie has got me when I stop admiring the technique and start worrying about the person using it. That shift is everything. A kick can be beautiful, a sword exchange can be technically flawless, and a stunt can make your jaw hit the floor, but if I do not care who gets back up, the whole thing eventually turns into choreography homework.
These six never have that problem. I do not just want you to see how good the fighting is. I want you to understand why the fighting had to happen at all. And if I wasn’t gracious enough, these 6 martial arts films would’ve been from 4 franchises total instead of 5.
6
‘Ong-Bak: The Muay Thai Warrior’ (2003)
Ong-Bak: The Muay Thai Warrior follows Ting (Tony Jaa), a gifted fighter from a rural Thai village who travels to Bangkok after thieves steal the head of the village’s sacred Buddha statue. Ting has been taught Muay Thai but warned against using it recklessly, which becomes increasingly difficult once he enters a city full of criminals, underground fights, and people very interested in testing exactly what he can do.
This is the movie I show people when they have forgotten how exciting real physical ability can be. Tony Jaa vaulting over obstacles, dropping elbows from impossible angles, and folding opponents with knees does not feel like digital spectacle. It feels dangerous because it visibly required a human body to do it. Prachya Pinkaew directed the film, and his smartest choice was often simply letting Jaa move without burying him under frantic editing. The story is uncomplicated, almost proudly so, because the attraction is Ting walking into increasingly ridiculous situations and solving them with a level of athleticism that still looks unreal.
5
‘Kill Bill: Vol. 1’ (2003)
I would’ve easily added Vol. 2 in this same list because this franchise is just that brilliant. But here we go. The Bride (Uma Thurman) wakes from a coma after surviving an attack that destroyed her wedding rehearsal and nearly killed her unborn child. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 sends her after the assassins responsible, with her pursuit eventually leading to Tokyo and O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), now a powerful yakuza boss surrounded by an army of killers.
The film comes from Quentin Tarantino and he treats martial arts cinema here as if it was something he had been dying to talk about for his entire life. The House of Blue Leaves fight is outrageous. What makes it work for me is the emotion underneath all that style. The Bride is not fighting because combat is fun. She has carried these names with her through years of unconsciousness. Then O-Ren steps into the snow, the noise disappears, and the movie suddenly becomes quiet enough for two women with enormous histories to look directly at each other. That shift from carnage to control is beautiful. The film knows exactly when excess is thrilling and when restraint hurts more.
4
‘The Night Comes for Us’ (2018)
Ito (Joe Taslim) is an elite Triad enforcer who turns against his own organization after refusing to murder a young girl during a massacre. Protecting her means returning to Jakarta, where practically everybody capable of violence is sent after him. Worse, one of those people is Arian (Iko Uwais), an old friend whose own ambitions have placed him on the opposite side. Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us is amazing.
I still cannot believe how hard this movie goes. People do not merely get punched. They get broken against furniture, cut with whatever object happens to be nearby, and dragged through fights that seem determined to continue long after normal human beings would be unconscious. The whole filmography pushes the brutality right to the edge, but the reason I remember the movie is Ito and Arian. Their final confrontation feels bitter because neither man is facing a stranger. You can feel the old friendship underneath every attempt to destroy the other. That emotional history gives all the blood an actual purpose.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz
What Action Series Would You Thrive In?
Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
Wick
Fast
Mission
Die Hard
FIND YOUR FRANCHISE →
01
How does a room know you’ve walked into it?
Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
ASomeone recognises me, and the temperature in the room drops without a single word being said.
BLoudly and warmly. I arrive with my people, and we’re already laughing about something.
CI’m the one who told everybody where to stand. I walked this room twice before anyone else arrived.
DBy accident. I wasn’t supposed to be here, and now I’m the only one who can do anything about it.
NEXT QUESTION →
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like?
Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
AEconomical and devastating. Trained technique, no wasted motion, finished before most people notice it started.
BLoud, heavy and weirdly joyful. I’m not elegant, I hit like a truck, and I always have backup.
CTo plan, until the plan breaks. Then I improvise at full sprint and refuse to stop moving.
DBadly, honestly, and with a lot of swearing. I take more damage than I deal and I still don’t go down.
NEXT QUESTION →
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts?
Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
ANobody. I have contacts, favours and people who owe me, but when it begins I work alone.
BEveryone. My people are the entire point, and I’d trade the whole mission for any one of them.
CA small hand-picked team I trust completely, and I’d still take the worst part of the job myself.
DA voice on the other end of a radio and a building full of people who don’t know I exist.
NEXT QUESTION →
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright?
Act two exists to find out what you’re actually made of.
AFocus, commitment and sheer will. Grief is fuel if you point it in the right direction.
BThe people counting on me. I don’t appear to have a limit when it’s family on the line.
CRefusing to accept the odds. Somebody has to do the impossible part, and it’s going to be me.
DSpite, mostly. And a growing sense that these people picked the wrong building.
NEXT QUESTION →
05
There’s a vehicle. What are you driving, and how?
No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
AA black muscle car I am unreasonably attached to, and I will dismantle an entire empire over it.
BSomething impossibly modified, at impossible speed, off an impossible ramp. Physics is a suggestion.
CA motorbike at full throttle through a city I memorised last night. And then off a cliff.
DA borrowed car, badly, while somebody in the passenger seat politely asks me to slow down.
NEXT QUESTION →
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders?
There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
AThere are rules and I respect them absolutely, right up until somebody breaks one against me.
BI don’t take orders. I take care of people, and everything else tends to sort itself out.
CI serve the mission, not the memo. If my people are in danger, the orders come second.
DThey’re in a van outside telling me what I’m doing wrong while I’m the one bleeding on broken glass.
NEXT QUESTION →
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for?
The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
ASomething was taken from me that can’t be replaced, and I’ve been settling that account ever since.
BBelonging. I built a family out of people who had nowhere else, and I’ll defend it with everything.
CThe conviction that if I stop, people die. I don’t know how to hand that to anyone else.
DI just wanted to get through the holidays with my family. Everything after that was self-defence.
NEXT QUESTION →
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you?
Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
AThat I was a myth people warned each other about in whispers, and that they were right to.
BThat I never left anyone behind, the door was always open, and there was always a place at the table.
CThat I did the impossible part myself, every single time, and never asked anyone to risk it for me.
DThat I was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, who turned out to be very hard to kill.
REVEAL MY FRANCHISE →
Casting Has Been Completed
Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick · Chapters 1–4 · 2014–2023
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.
- The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him. - You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it. - Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise. - People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.
The Fast and the Furious · Fast X · 2001–2023
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
- This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to. - You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason. - You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics. - The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible · The Final Reckoning · 1996–2025
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
- This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left. - You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error. - You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door. - Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard · A Good Day to Die Hard · 1988–2013
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
- Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely funny about it. - You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable. - You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway. - You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ
3
‘Rurouni Kenshin: The Final’ (2021)
Image via Netflix
Rurouni Kenshin: The Final confronts former assassin Kenshin Himura (Takeru Satoh) with Yukishiro Enishi (Mackenyu), a man who blames Kenshin for the death of his sister Tomoe and has spent years preparing revenge. Kenshin now lives by a vow never to kill again, carrying a reverse-blade sword and trying to build a life around atonement. Enishi has absolutely no interest in allowing him that peace.
What I love is that the movie never lets technical skill become the whole argument. Kenshin may be faster, more experienced, and astonishingly precise, but he cannot defeat the fact that Enishi has legitimate pain attached to him. Keishi Ōtomo helmed the film, and the fighting keeps returning to that moral imbalance. Kenshin is trying to protect people without becoming the man he used to be. Enishi wants him to feel the cost of the life he once lived. Satoh’s movement is breathtaking, Mackenyu attacks with furious intensity, and their clash lands because one man is fighting for a future while the other is still trapped inside the past.
2
‘The Raid’ (2011)
A police team enters a high-rise apartment block in Jakarta intending to arrest crime lord Tama Riyadi (Ray Sahetapy). Once the building is locked down and the officers are exposed, every floor becomes hostile territory. The Raid follows rookie cop Rama (Iko Uwais) as the mission collapses around him and survival becomes the only objective that still makes sense.
I remember the first time Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian) decides that using a gun would be less satisfying than fighting somebody properly. That tells you everything about the movie’s worldview. Gareth Evans directed it with extraordinary clarity, and even when the action becomes frantic, you almost always understand where everybody is and what each person is trying to do. Rama’s later fight alongside his brother Andi (Doni Alamsyah) against Mad Dog is still one of the most exhausting pieces of physical acting I have seen. By the end, nobody looks cool anymore. They look ruined. That is exactly why the fight feels so good.
1
‘The Raid 2’ (2014)
Gareth Evans returned to direct The Raid 2 but instead of repeating the stripped-down pressure of the original, he gives himself more room and gets dangerously creative with it. The film picks up almost immediately after the first film and throws Rama into a much larger nightmare. To expose corruption inside the police and criminal underworld, he goes undercover in prison, earns the trust of Uco (Arifin Putra), and infiltrates a powerful crime family. The story expands from one apartment block into gang politics, betrayal, assassins, and an entire city threatening to erupt. And somehow the action gets better.
The prison-yard fight in the mud is filthy and desperate. Hammer Girl (Julie Estelle) and Baseball Bat Man (Very Tri Yulisman) are instantly iconic. The car chase is completely unhinged. Then Rama reaches the kitchen and faces the Assassin (Cecep Arif Rahman), and the movie strips everything back down to two men who are simply too skilled to get rid of each other quickly. That fight is what I show people when I want to explain why martial arts cinema can be as dramatic as anything else. Every adjustment matters. Every mistake hurts.
The Raid 2
- Release Date
-
March 28, 2014
- Runtime
-
150 minutes
- Director
-
Gareth Evans
- Writers
-
Gareth Evans
