Most Epic Movie Fights Of The 21st Century

The 21st century has been a pretty amazing era for action cinema, which means moviegoers have been treated some pretty fantastic fight scenes. We've seen sword duels, gun-fu battles, and larger-than-life superhero showdowns. We've even witnessed a boxing match take place in somebody's subconscious. And with so many crazy melees to choose from, it's time to pick your weapon and stand your ground as we look at the most epic movie fights of the 21st century.

When it comes to hallway fights, Matt Murdock's got nothing on Oh Dae-su. The "hero" (and we're using that term pretty loosely) of Oldboy, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is a drunken, chubby businessman who finds himself imprisoned in an apartment-like cell. He spends the next 15 years in isolation, never knowing who locked him up or why, so when he's released one day—thinner, tougher, and way angrier—he decides to get a little revenge.

Oh Dae-su's quest for vengeance soon leads him to a violent showdown with his old captors, the guards who kept him locked up for nearly two decades. Yeah, he's massively outnumbered, but Oh Dae-su is a man on a mission. Plus, the guy has a hammer. Filmed like a side-scrolling video game, the camera follows Oh Dae-su as he brutally beats his way down a hallway, pummeling every goon who steps in his path. There's no slick Yuen Woo-ping choreography here. It's messy, ugly, and feels like a real fight. People slip, miss punches, and use each other as shields. But you can't get that kind of chaos without a whole lot of craftsmanship.

Director Park Chan-wook shot the scene 17 times over three days, and the only CGI in the entire sequence is the knife in Oh Dae-su's back. The whole fight plays out in one long shot, and while Daredevil clearly took a page from the South Korean playbook, we've got to give it to Oldboy for the best hallway fight of all-time.

You can't talk about epic movie fights and not mention Jason Bourne. He stabbed someone with a pen in Identity, whacked a guy with a magazine in Supremacy, and in the fifth film, he dropped a dude cold with just one punch. However, if we're talking pure martial arts prowess, it's hard to beat Bourne vs. Desh from The Bourne Ultimatum.

Played by Joey Ansah, Desh Bouksani is a Blackbriar assassin who's set his sights on Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), but before he can pull the trigger, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) literally crashes the party. The two then go mano y mano in the best fight of the franchise, using—according to fight coordinator Jeff Imada—"Filipino kali, with a little bit of Bruce Lee stuff tied in." In addition to the lightning fast hand fighting, we get to see razor versus rag, book versus candlestick, and a lot of the damage that Desh takes is real.

As Ansah explained to DIY, he told Matt Damon to actually hit him in the throat with that book, and as a result, he lost his voice for a week. Ansah even "took a full-on punch to the head," and that realism really shows up on-screen, resulting in a knockdown, drag-out death match for the ages.

Directed by Gareth Evans, The Raid: Redemption is basically one long fight scene full of shoot-outs, machete duels, and some of the craziest choreography of the 21st century. The movie follows a SWAT team that's determined to take out a notorious Jakarta crime lord (Ray Sahetapy). The only problem is this guy is holed up in a fortified apartment full of psycho killers ready to ambush the cops. The titular raid does not go according to plan and soon the SWAT officers are fighting for their lives. This film is packed with incredible fight scenes, but if we could only choose one to make our list, we'd have to pick the epic three-way throwdown between Mad Dog and the brothers.

The film's hero Rama (Iko Uwais) has an ulterior motive for raiding the tower. His brother Andi (Donny Alamsyah) works for the drug lord and Rama plans to bring him back home. When the crime lord's right-hand man, Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian), discovers the nature of their relationship, he begins torturing Andi...until Rama shows up, ready for a fistfight that runs over five minutes long.

At first, the brothers are no match for Mad Dog. This guy is clearly the superior fighter, spending the early minutes of the fight flipping his foes, throwing nasty elbows and vicious knees, and making these guys look like amateurs. But after Andi plunges a shard of glass into Mad Dog's neck, the brothers get the upper hand, kicking and punching their way to victory before slitting the mobster's throat.

Thanks to the brilliant stunt work and cinematography, the punches here look like they're actually landing, and the scene gets so brutal that it almost feels like we're getting kneed in the gut or slammed against a wall ourselves. That's probably because Uwais and Ruhian are martial arts experts, both trained in the Indonesian style of pencak silat. The two also served as fight choreographers, and as a result, the Mad Dog-brothers beat down is possibly the best action scene to ever come out of Indonesia.

Generally speaking, epic movie fights usually end with the good guys winning...but that's not the case for The Dark Knight Rises. Returning from an eight-year retirement, Batman (Christian Bale) finds himself going up against Bane (Tom Hardy), a mask-wearing zealot who's got the cunning of the Joker, the conviction of Ra's al Ghul, and the core strength of Brock Lesnar.

In other words, out-of-shape Batman is a little overmatched, and when the two first meet in the sewers of Gotham, Bane is impervious to Bruce Wayne's blows. After shrugging off his shots, Bane goes to work on Batman, absolutely clobbering him with fists straight from hell. The Caped Crusader takes a royal beating, giving Bane plenty of time to monologue before he breaks the Bat's back. Fortunately for Gotham, Bruce Wayne rises up for a rematch and takes Bane to town at the end of the film, giving us yet another epic showdown.

These scenes were orchestrated by fight coordinator Buster Reeves, who decided to change up Batman's fighting style a bit, mixing in "a bit of Jeet Kune Do, some Silat [an Indonesian martial art], a bit of Thai boxing." As he explained to The Guardian, both he and Christopher Nolan made the changes because, "Bane's a big brute, and it takes about 15 shots to deliver what he can do in one blow so Batman had to be less aggressive, more clever." Or to put it in boxing terms, Reeves wanted it to be like "Mike Tyson versus Floyd Mayweather," brute force versus evasive skill, only amped up to superhero proportions.

In Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer, Captain America trades his star-studded shield for a blood-soaked ax, and instead of bashing robots or battling aliens, he's violently hacking dudes to pieces as he battle his way through a train car. The role of Curtis was a pretty startling departure for Chris Evans, but it gave him the opportunity to add another fantastic movie fight to his rough-and-tumble resume.

Set during a wintry apocalypse, the film takes place aboard a train that's perpetually chugging around the Earth. The cars are divided by class, with the bourgeoisie partying in the front and the proletariat struggling in the back. The poor are treated like slaves, and naturally, this doesn't sit well with Curtis, who leads his comrades in revolution. But as the impoverished army makes its way toward the engine, it runs into a gang of masked men carrying some scary looking hatchets. There's no way around, so Curtis and his crew are forced to fight at close quarters as Tilda Swinton's psychotic politician watches on with glee.

Often playing in slow motion—which is incredibly effective here—we watch as the fight breaks down into a series of gory sequences. There's the bizarre opening where the hatchet men perform a ritual involving a dead fish. There's a scene where everybody stops the slaughter long enough to wish each other a happy New Year. Then there's the terrifying moment where the cabin goes dark, and the villains pull out their night vision goggles, followed by a breathtaking sequence where Curtis and company fight against the modern-day tech with the most ancient weapon of all: fire. As Bong Joon-ho describes it, this incredible ax battle is "earthy," "real," and "primitive," and really, it's just one masterful set piece in a film filled with incredible life-or-death showdowns.

For a long time, From Russia with Love held the number one spot when it came to James Bond fistfights...and then Spectre showed up. Sure, the movie wasn't as good as Skyfall and Casino Royale, but the brawl between Craig-Bond and Mr. Hinx just might steal the top spot from Connery-Bond and Red Grant.

The fight takes place on a train traveling through Morocco, and all Bond wants to do is spend an evening with his latest ladylove (Léa Seydoux). Unfortunately, the fine dining is interrupted when all 289 pounds of Dave Bautista shows up, ready to rumble. What follows is nearly three minutes of absolute savagery, a fight so intense that both stars suffered nasty injuries.

Craig was the first to go down after suffering a knee injury. The Brit had to take two weeks off from filming in order to get surgery, but just a few days after the accident, he was back and ready for business. And when Craig returned, he got a little revenge on Bautista. As the wrestler-turned-actor told Entertainment Weekly, "There's one part where Daniel lands a punch, and you just heard it. My nose just spattered blood."

Unlike almost every other Marvel film, Logan is a movie with actual gore. Sure, we've seen Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) stab people plenty of times, but we've never seen the geysers of blood before. It brings a whole new level of realism to superhero fight scenes, and it gets even grislier thanks to Laura (Dafne Keen), an adorable little monster skilled at beheading bad guys.

The duo proves especially effective when they finally face off against the Reavers, evil goons trying to murder mutant children, and their final showdown in the woods pits modern-day weapons against animal instinct. The two heroes go into full-on berserker mode, and after handily dispatching their human foes, they turn their attention to X-24, the younger, stronger version of Logan.

Of course, fight scenes are old hat for Jackman, but Keen needed a bit of coaching. To prepare, she held actual claws and would shred up sheets of paper to get a feel for the weight of her new weapons. Plus, remember Laura's foot claw? Well, that was a real blade inserted into her shoe, and having a real-life foot claw means that Dafne Keen is the coolest kid to ever play in a superhero movie.

For being the most technologically advanced nation on Earth, Wakanda has an old-fashioned way of choosing its leaders — trial by combat! Hey, it's simpler than the Electoral College. Early in Black Panther, King T'Challa successfully defends his throne against M'Baku. He isn't so fortunate against his cousin, Erik Killmonger. In this showdown, director Ryan Coogler (no stranger to fight scenes, having directed Creed) and cinematographer Rachel Morrison evoke a sense of darkness and desperation, filming with hand-held cams and bringing in fabric structures to block out the hot Atlanta sun. "We envisioned a look of when the sun breaks out after a storm," as Morrison put it. 

But it wasn't just the cinematography. It was the fight choreography, brought to bone-breaking life by Matt Emig. This wasn't fancy wirework or CGI magic but a process known as "tricking," a close cousin to capoeira and freerunning. Tricking isn't meant for real-life combat but cinematic fight scenes. It incorporates martial arts, gymnastics, and even breakdancing in a Cirque du Soleil-style, acrobatic ass-kicking you'd never bust out in a bar fight, but it looks pretty cool on the big screen.

The Mission: Impossible franchise is chock-full of fisticuffs, but no fight scene was as instantly iconic (and imminently GIF-able) as this bathroom brawl scene. All due respect to Tom Cruise, but the main reason this scene rocks is the muscle-bound, mustachioed Henry Cavill as Ethan Hunt's fellow secret agent (and soon-to-be archenemy) Walker, who "cocks" his fists as if his biceps were two double-barreled shotguns about to unload a beatdown.

According to Collider, the scene was put together by Wade Eastwood of Eastwood Action Stunts. Cavill said he and Cruise actually trained separately with each other's respective doubles until the fight choreography was "drilled into [their] muscle memory." The bathroom fight ultimately took four weeks to shoot, and on the last day, Cavill and Cruise admitted they were both in considerable pain. We appreciate Cavill and Cruise suffering for their art, and moviegoers did, too. Fallout received the best reviews of the series and the best box office, $220 million domestically and $787 million worldwide.