Martial Arts Cinema

From Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan to Crouching Tiger to The Raid. The films that turned combat choreography into an authorial form.

Martial arts cinema is one of the most-internationally-influential film traditions of the past sixty years. The Hong Kong action industry of the 1970s through the 1990s — particularly the Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest production companies — produced a tradition of fight choreography that has shaped almost every subsequent action film globally. The Matrix's fight choreography is Yuen Woo-ping's. Kill Bill's choreography is Yuen Woo-ping's. The Lord of the Rings' fight sequences were choreographed in part by Wushu specialists.

The Bruce Lee era

  • Fist of Fury (1972) — Lo Wei. Bruce Lee's breakthrough role.
  • Way of the Dragon (1972) — Bruce Lee (directing). The Colosseum fight with Chuck Norris.
  • Enter the Dragon (1973) — Robert Clouse. Lee's final completed film before his death at 32.

The Jackie Chan tradition

  • Drunken Master (1978) — Yuen Woo-ping. Chan's breakthrough.
  • Police Story (1985) — Chan (directing). The shopping-mall finale is one of the great action sequences.
  • Drunken Master II (1994) — Lau Kar-leung. Chan at his late peak.

The wuxia revival

  • Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) — Ang Lee. Four Oscars including Best Foreign Language Film.
  • Hero (2002) — Zhang Yimou. Visually one of the most-ambitious martial arts films ever made.
  • House of Flying Daggers (2004) — Zhang Yimou again.
  • The Grandmaster (2013) — Wong Kar-wai. The Ip Man biographical drama.

The Ip Man and Indonesian extensions

  • Ip Man (2008) — Wilson Yip. Donnie Yen. The franchise that established the contemporary biographical kung-fu tradition.
  • The Raid: Redemption (2011) — Gareth Evans. The Indonesian apartment-building extraction film. The most-influential action film of the 2010s.
  • The Raid 2 (2014) — Evans again. Extended scope.
  • Ong-Bak (2003) — Prachya Pinkaew. Tony Jaa's breakthrough. Muay Thai cinema.

The American absorption

Kill Bill (2003-04), The Matrix (1999), the John Wick films (2014-), Mission: Impossible films (the 2018-2023 instalments in particular) all operate in the visual vocabulary that Hong Kong action choreographers established. Yuen Woo-ping's work as fight choreographer on The Matrix, Kill Bill, and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is, in some sense, the foundational shift that brought Hong Kong-style choreography into mainstream Hollywood action cinema.

For more on the contemporary martial-arts-influenced action film, see our John Wick review and our list of best superhero movies (where the Hong Kong choreography legacy is most-visible in fight sequences).

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