Fight Club: The Movie with the Best Fights

No, it's not the sweeping, epic battle scenes of Lord of the Rings. Nor is it the highly stylized violence of the Matrix, that one duel in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, anything from Bourne or Bond. It's not even the hour long fight scene at the end of Advent Children (the only reason to watch that movie).

It's this movie, with these guys. The Seven Samurai, a movie some considered to be the first in the action genre, as opposed to the wars, westerns, and detective movies that happened to have gunfights in them. In Seven Samurai, it's about the action, and even films decades later steal shots from the film. And swords are cooler than guns*.

Now as a movie it has its flaws. It's in Japanese, it's black and white, it's three hours long, and it starts off slowly. Perhaps the worst part is how often you're forced to stare at the bare asses of the guys in the film, but I digress. The film's flaws aren't the reason it's great. It's the action.

The fight scenes of Seven Samurai are brutal, messy, chaotic affairs; no one looks particularly cool during them. And it's not that the characters are incompetent, either (maybe the farmers, but what can you expect?); there's a couple scenes  of individual duels or skirmishes where you can see these guys are expert swordsmen. But that doesn't matter: fighting is a messy affair. People trip, they scramble, they get tunnel vision, they keep stabbing someone long after he's dead.

And the film doesn't try to showcase the chaos and desperation of battle by splattering everything with blood and guts, nor does it employ shaky cam to trick you into thinking something's chaotic (more on this topic later). By avoiding making the characters look cool, Seven Samurai creates some hella cool battles and skirmishes of samurai against bandits.


*As a connoisseur of fictional violence, I prefer swords, fists, and other melee weapons (not nunchaku, those things look dumb) to guns as a general rule. Why? Because you can block attacks from swords with a parry or by moving; you really can't avoid bullets coming at you unless you're Neo or you're running past an iron railing that mysteriously attracts all incoming projectiles. The best way to avoid getting shot is to shoot the other guy, which leads to a short, often unsatisfying fight (unless Indiana Jones does it), or you cower behind something that can stop a bullet, such as cars, corners, and struggling hostages.