Image via Golden Harvest
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Jeremy Urquhart
Published 1 minute ago
Jeremy has more than 2100 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He is also currently in the process of trying to become a Stephen King expert by reading all 2397 novels written by the author.
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The martial arts genre is a broad one, considering how many types of martial arts there are out there. An introduction that merely mentions them all would still go on for a little too long, but martial arts movies are best defined as action films that feature one or more of the many types of martial arts in their action sequences.
Below, things are going to be broad, so even samurai movies are being counted as martial arts films, as are some hand-to-hand-heavy martial arts movies that also feature a bit by way of firearm-related action. And there is a need to go broad in order to find some truly perfect martial arts movies; not just great or mostly great ones. There will be notes here, in a sense, since a bit of commentary is needed, but no negative notes when it comes to these classics. They all really excel, and go above and beyond the vast majority of martial arts movies out there.
10 'Drunken Master II' (1994)
Image via Golden Harvest
Drunken Master II refuses to let up, and it has a real go-for-broke energy that results in a film with lots of action, and the quality of that action is also immense. It’s a highlight of Jackie Chan’s filmography, and one of his last truly old-school martial arts movies made before he himself started to get older, and also before he started focusing on Hollywood movies for a while.
The plot here is a bit whatever, being about artefacts that people are trying to steal from China, and a complicated conflict that unfolds when certain people in China want to prevent that. It’s all an excuse for there to be sometimes decent comedy, but mostly fantastic action, and you're overwhelmed in the best of ways by the latter, making Drunken Master II a breathless and endlessly entertaining watch.
9 'The Matrix' (1999)
Image via Warner Bros.
Taking martial arts action and combining it with some very forward-thinking and memorable sci-fi ideas, The Matrix is the kind of thing that can be taken for granted a bit now, seeing as it’s grown into a franchise and has become so ingrained in pop culture. It’s just there, and it’s The Matrix, but it was radical and mind-blowing for its time, digging into what it did and having all sorts of different types of action thrown in.
Calling it all ambitious would be a huge understatement, and movies that focus on action and sci-fi are still catching up to The Matrix more than a quarter of a century on from its release. It’s not hard to find faults in the sequels, but when it comes to the original, this one unfolds seamlessly, expertly, and consistently thrillingly, and truly is great stuff all around.
8 'The Raid 2' (2014)
Image via Sony Pictures Classics
Honorable mention to 2011’s The Raid, which is a near-perfect linear action movie about a fight for survival inside one cramped setting, but The Raid 2 is more bombastic and satisfying as an action epic of sorts. It has the same sort of impactful combat that was featured in the first movie, but there are a greater number of places where fight sequences take place, rather than just inside one apartment complex.
Granted, there are still action scenes here that feel claustrophobic, especially some hand-to-hand fighting that takes place inside a vehicle caught up in a car chase, and then some of the early action is also brutal and done in tight areas. The variety of the fighting is the main thing, with The Raid 2, and there aren’t many other action movies that deliver such constant action of such quality and variety throughout… and throughout a long, but never boring, runtime that itself hovers around 2.5 hours all up.
7 'A Touch of Zen' (1971)
A shot of Hsu Feng holding a sword in A Touch of Zen.Image via Union Film
Moving at a different speed from most martial arts movies, A Touch of Zen doesn’t even have a ton of action for a good chunk of its lengthy three-hour runtime. There’s a young woman on the run, she goes into hiding, meets some people, and then her pursuers catch up with her, so she – and some of the people she’s met – have to make their stand and fight off those pursuers.
A Touch of Zen is also about atmosphere and certain philosophical things on top of telling a story and featuring some fighting.
It’s a simple story when you break it down like that, and doesn’t technically need such an epic runtime, but A Touch of Zen is also about atmosphere and certain philosophical things on top of telling a story and featuring some fighting. It glides between all the different things it wants to do in an effortless and always compelling way, and it truly is one of the most beautiful-looking films made on such a scale, and with such a runtime, too.
6 'Harakiri' (1962)
Image via Shochiku
There’s a bit of samurai action in Harakiri, though it is admittedly mostly a drama… and something of a mystery film, too, owing to the way it plays out with a series of flashbacks. There’s a despondent man who tells a samurai clan that he wants to outline his tragic past and then take his life in a suicide ritual, but then things get complicated the more he shares.
It’s a samurai movie with some brief, impactful action, and that does mean putting Harakiri here could be a stretch, but also, the film is amazing and genuinely hard to fault. It’s an anti-samurai movie, maybe; that could be the best way to describe it. It’s slow-paced but always engrossing, and it’s not lacking when it comes to a dark and memorable payoff at the end of it all, either.
5 'Enter the Dragon' (1973)
Bruce Lee as Lee in Enter the DragonImage via Warner Bros.
Standing as the last film Bruce Lee ever completed (though some scenes featuring him were in 1978’s Game of Death), Enter the Dragon also stands as the best of all the Bruce Lee movies. There were, regrettably, not that many of them, but he made a monumental mark on the martial arts genre regardless, and Enter the Dragon, being his best film, is the ideal one to watch if you want to understand what all the hype was about.
It's also something of a sports film and even a bit of a spy movie all at once, with some interesting side characters – plus Lee’s protagonist – all having different reasons for taking part in some kind of strange fighting tournament on a wealthy criminal’s island. It’s very 1970s in its look and style, but Enter the Dragon is timeless when it comes to action and showcasing Lee’s charisma, with it holding up as very entertaining all these decades on from its initial release.
4 'Kill Bill: Vol. 1' (2003) & 'Kill Bill: Vol. 2' (2004)
Now that The Whole Bloody Affair is getting a wider re-release, it feels okay to count Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 as one movie, and it also means freeing up a slot so another great martial arts movie can be featured. One might argue that only the first volume of Kill Bill is a full-on action movie, but then Vol. 2 does have a lot of martial arts-related stuff in it, owing to the extended training flashback.
Also, there’s still some fighting in Vol. 2, though you get all the particularly wild stuff in Vol. 1, especially in the climax. Taken together, though, the two-part Kill Bill is about as good as action movies about revenge get, and the duology does feel like a sincere and visually daring tribute to all sorts of old-school movies, including yakuza films, samurai flicks, and martial arts romps, plus who knows how many other things Quentin Tarantino might have wanted to have given shout-outs here.
3 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' (2000)
Yu Shu Lien brandishes her jian swordImage via Sony Pictures Classics
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of those rare martial arts movies that gets talked about as a classic so much that you might be sick of hearing about it at this point, but nah, it is just awesome. It’s worth talking about. Between The Matrix and both volumes of Kill Bill, it proved just as significant in this new wave of martial arts cinema; the whole string of these films made martial arts cool again.
Or, at least cooler than it had been in a while. Also, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon scratches the same somewhat fantastical itch as A Touch of Zen, but with a bit of a snappier pace and some action that can be floaty, but often feels more visceral and emotionally intense. It’s a crowd-pleaser of a martial arts movie, and thereby one of the rare ones you could show just about anyone (even someone who’s never seen a martial arts movie before) and have them likely like what they see.
2 'Police Story' (1985)
Image via Golden Harvest
About a decade before Drunken Master II, Jackie Chan also starred in Police Story, which is perhaps his single greatest film. It sees him doing a lot of hand-to-hand fighting, but there are also some gunfights and car chases, as well as an emphasis on Chan doing a particularly large number of daring stunts, the biggest of which is seen at the film’s climax (a few different times, and from multiple angles).
The story is a bit whatever, because there are criminals, and they're bad, and Chan’s character has to protect a witness who might testify against them from the nefarious individuals who might want her taken out. Like a good many martial arts movies, it’s an excuse to string together tons of great action set pieces, and they’re all so remarkable here that Police Story, in essence, basically feels as perfect as the action genre can possibly get.
1 'Seven Samurai' (1954)
A man holds a long staff over his shoulder and looks ahead in Seven Samurai.Image via Toho
Okay, okay, it’s like Harakiri again, and you might be raising your eyebrow at a samurai movie like Seven Samurai being here, but there is at least a great quantity of action here compared to Harakiri. Structurally, though, it’s a bit more comparable to A Touch of Zen, in that there’s an opening act without much action, then a few scenes spent preparing for battle, and then almost all the action is left to the final act.
And both movies are long, so that means you get about an hour of action-focused stuff at the end of each. With Seven Samurai, what it all builds to is still surprisingly thrilling, exciting, and epic in scope. It tells a now-popular sort of story with class and a certain effortlessness. The structure here is exactly what it needs to be, the characters are all great, you understand the space the battle will be fought in, and you come to terms with who might be lost, and what those losses could mean. And, all the while, Seven Samurai is also fun and emotionally varied. It’s a classic with a bit of everything, and if you're okay with calling it a martial arts film, then it might well be the very best of the bunch.
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Seven Samurai
pg-13
Action
Drama
Release Date
April 26, 1954
Runtime
207 Minutes
Director
Akira Kurosawa
Writers
Akira Kurosawa
Cast
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Toshiro Mifune
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Takashi Shimura
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Enter the Dragon
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Police Story
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