In real life, violence is never the answer. In the movies, though, it’s very often the solution – and done right, it can be seriously awesome. Whole careers, and even entire film genres, are built off hand-to-hand combat. Think the balletic brutality of Bruce Lee, or Jackie Chan’s blur of motion. But the best movie fights truly run the gamut. Sure, some are so graceful and bloodless they almost count as dancing. Others are as sloppy and ugly as a bar brawl. Both have their place, and both can get audiences leaping out of their seats, for entirely different reasons.
On this list of the greatest movie scenes ever filmed, we celebrate them all – with a few caveats. First off, no gunplay allowed, at least not where a firearm is the primary weapon; well-orchestrated shootouts are a whole other category, and probably deserve a list of their own. For similar reasons, we’ve also omitted boxing matches, wrestling bouts or MMA fights, though we did allow an underground kumite tournament to make the cut. Even with those restrictions, though, this list is absolutely bursting with hard-hitting dust-ups, elegant martial arts mastery and the occasional goofy grapple that puts the slap in ‘slapstick’.
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