We’ve all seen fights on tv and in the movies, where people punch each other hard in the face, with the accompanying obligatory loud snap when the hand connects. How much does that sort of punch hurt each party in reality? Are movie fights realistic, or would you break your hand punching someone that hard?
More than likely, you’d break your hand.
All movie fight strikes are fake. There’s an awful lot of timing and camera work needed to make them look “realistic”.
A truly realistic fight scene in a movie would be very boring, as it probably wouldn’t last long, and/or would probably end up like early UFC matches, with the rolling and the holding and the snoring.
Most fights I’ve seen involve lots of rolling around and wild swings. You’d have to be lucky, or a good boxer, to make solid fist-to-face contact. And, yeah, it tends to hurt your hand a lot; the finger bones are much weaker than the jaw bone. It’s possible to train yourself to punch properly, so the force of your arm bones goes behind it, but still.
Another related question:
I’ve heard and read about a type of punch where, if you connect with the nose just right, you drive the upper nasal bones up into the brain, killing the hapless opponent instantly. Think Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card–this five-year-old kid kills his nemesis that way. How much truth is there to that, or is it just an urban legend?
Pretty much bunk. You’d have to crush the bone first, then hit it with accuracy unheard of. It’s mentioned at least twice in Star Trek TNG as a way to kill a human in one blow, but a blow to the trachea would do better.
That’s how almost every fight I’ve seen ended up. Real close body contact and snorting. Looked more like sex.
That said, I’ve seen a few sucker punches and the ones to the face make a nice slap/thud sound.
When I was younger I pushed a guy against a wall and hit him as hard as I could square in the face (long story). His head didn’t give way being it was against the wall. I broke a bone in my hand (little finger, in the hand past the first knuckle - I don’t know the name of that bone). Because I was just a dumb kid, and a bit embarrassed by the whole affair, I told the doctor I slammed my hand in the door. He said “Really? We don’t see many ‘boxer fractures’ caused by doors.”
DOH!
Here’s the Fight Scene from the movie I was working on. (It looks like the movie is dead, since the Director flaked.) The guy in the tuque is a champion martial artist whom I was told has trained special forces types, and he choreographed it. According to people who would know, the fight scene is realistic. But I wouldn’t know, since I haven’t been in a fight since junior high school. It does look more raw that what you’d typically see in a Hollywood film.
The file is a rough edit. I think it goes on too long. I don’t know how long it will be an active link, since it’s not my site and I’m not the one who posted it. The director chose the music. No foley has been added.
My favorite aspect of film fights is afterwards, when both parties look just fine. Maybe a little mouse under the eye. After trading mutiple shots to the face, your face and your hands would be a mess. Fighting definitely hurts - especially the next day.
Another aspect is, some folks have knockdown/out power, but it really is less common than portrayed in film.
And if you hit someone across the top of the head with a bottle, pool cue, elbow - don’t be surprised to see blood. The skin is stretched pretty taut across your scalp such that it essentially bursts apart with sharp contact. And the top of the skull is so damned thick that although such a shot will cause a mess, it has a low probability of being incapacitating.
In the ER we called it the “girlfriend argument fracture”, because most guys got it when they punched the wall.
The classic fracture is in the fifth metacarpal, which is one of the five long skinny bones inside the palm of the hand, between the wrist and the knuckle. If you broke the next bone up, its name is the proximal phalanx of the fifth digit.
They can’t be realistic. They can’t be because the director will film the fight in several takes, and you can’t beat up your actors into insensibility. You can’t even give them increasing bruising of the face; they have to start over clean at the start of each take as if they haven’t been in a fight.
The loud sound is a Foley. It is added later. You probably wouldn’t hear it so nice and sharp and loud (and well oriented into the microphone) if it was real.
Also, it’s illegal to beat people up for money. Even though actors might. If it were that or back to waiting tables.
My husband has been teaching aikido for three decades. During the miserable Seagal years, when aikido was popular among all sorts of folks who are into fads, young men would call sometimes and ask, “Can you teach me to do Aikido like Steven Seagal?” My husband would answer, “Sure. Give all your friends five bucks, and tell them that any time you say ‘Rolling,’ they have to fall down when you hit them. IT’S A MOVIE, PEOPLE!!!”
Same is true of the pucks to the head.
In the service, I was taught three “death blows,” one of which, to the trachea, was referred to in another post. The one you refer to is done by a chop with the side of the hand, but I’m not going into any detail on this subject. Don’t try this at home. 
I had a type of punch the other night that had my ass on the floor in no time. And those guys are right, it really hurts your head the next day.
The degree of realism varies a lot from movie to movie. What a “real fight” looks like depends on several things, chief among them whether the people involved are trained fighters, random aggressive drunks, or somewhere in between. Another thing it depends on is how seriously the two are intending to injure each other.
The fight in the video clip posted by Johnny LA is realistic if you’re talking about reasonably well-trained people who are trying not to kill each other, but to beat each other into submission. Fights in bars usually do end up as a ground grapple because the goal is to force the other guy into submission, plus drunk people don’t strike very effectively and tend to grab onto each other and fall over. If a fight involves one aggressive drunk and one trained fighter, they are pretty quick and don’t go to the ground unless that is the trained fighter’s preference - which I don’t recommend you do even if you’re Royce Gracie. You can be down there putting your unstoppable choke/lock/whatever on your opponent, while his buddies can take their time and comfortably kick you in the head (or use the improvised weapons of their choice).
The various “killshots” mentioned in other posts above are sort of valid, with qualification. Driving the nose up into the brain is something that might work in theory, but almost never does in practice, as the recipient’s neck usually snaps back rather than holding the head nice and still so the whole force goes in a linear way up the nasal bone and up through the cribiform plate. The punch in the larynx is supposed to be reliable, but I have myself delivered a full force punch directly to the larynx of someone who then proceeded not to die, but to nearly make mincemeat of me. Truly workable killshots are hard to come by. Your most reliable bet is a combination that leads into a good stranglehold, but see the caveat in the preceding paragraph.
Punching someone in the head is a bad idea, and most people who do it injure their hand far more than they injure the other person. That said, since most people going into a fight aren’t in it for their lives, the fist to the face acts as a stunner and effective fight ender. However, you can get just as much mileage from an open palm strike to the face, with less risk to the hand. For truly effective blows to the face, use the “blade” of the elbow (the two inches of the ulna one fingerwidth distal to the joint).
Just my thoughts… based on a fair amount of experience. YMMV.
G
Most aren’t realistic. There were a couple of threads about sword and knife fights in movies a while back that I participated in. Unarmed fights are a bit better sometimes than more esoteric stuff like using a sword, but the movie track record is pretty bad.
As many people have already mentioned, it’s a very bad idea to punch someone in the face. An open palm strike or even a nice hard slap delivered with proper technique is safer for you and may even be more effective since all the energy will get delivered; punches tend to slide off something as irregularly shaped as a face.
I got the same overall impression of the scene in the movie clip as Neur0mancer. They both look like they know how to fight pretty well but are avoiding some of the damaging target areas like the back of the head, temple, or throat, didn’t do some obvious dislocations and breaks, and aren’t doing any mayhem moves like gouging eyes or groins. Given the ending of the scene, the way they’re fighting doesn’t really make much sense as it seems like neither of them should have been holding back.
Movies I’ve seen recently that do a decent job of showing realistic fights are The Bourne Identity (Supremacy has bad camera work, so you can’t see what’s going on a lot of the time), Collateral, and The Hunted. Oh yeah, and Fight Club shows some of the blood and nastiness that results from untrained guys beating the heck out of each other, though it doesn’t show the damage to their fists too much.
Well the intent of effective punches to the face are not to break bones or cause bleeding but merely to trigger a knockout mechanism in the brain. For that, the jaw is the perfect target as it acts as a fulcrum to spin the skull faster than the brain inside. If a person is punched at a right angle to their jaw, their head will rotate sharply. This can temporarily compress the carotid arteries in the neck, essentially causing a mini-stroke, and the unfortunate slips briefly into the black.
IME, one of the best reactions you can hope for from popping someone in the nose, is their eyes water, the nose may gush blood (blood generally distracts the bleeder), and they raise their hands to guard their face, freeing you to attack more tender targets. In a fight, I think it is generally not a great idea to count on landing one knockout punch. Instead, I recommend landing as many damaging blows to as many sensitivge targets as quickly as possible. YMMV.
If bent on attacking the head, instead of using your fist, consider finger strikes to the eyes/throat, cupped hand slap to the ear, elbow strikes to the temple or jaw, or the always fun headbutt.
For the most part movie and TV fights maintain the conventions established in the early days which depend on missing the target by several inches but with the camera placed so that missed distance isn’t as obvious.
I just wanted to mention a couple of fight scenes from TV shows that appear to be much more realistic.
One is the HBO Sopranos fight between Tony and Ralph Cifaretto. There’s much more scuffling around, wrestling, hitting each other with pots and pans, spraying bug spray in the eyes, banging the head on the floor and the sort of thing most likely to happen when guys really go at it.
The other is the grisly fight between Dan Dority and Captain Turner out in the muddy street in a recent Deadwood episode. No glamor or grace at all. One of the most convincing and unsettling fights I’ve seen yet.
I would say “completely bunk.” The nasal bones are about an inch long (IIRC) and egg shell thin. About the only way you could kill someone with a the punch upward to the nose is to drive your hand through the nose, then the frontal sinuses, and then the brain pan. I would say the nasal bones are pretty much irrelevant by that point.
**Quick aside (Lethal Weapon spoiler below): **
What do you think about the one at the end of Lethal Weapon between Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Joshua (Gary Busey)? I always thought that one was about as realistic as it got in major feature films. Both characters beeing trained fighters, they start of with the usual patty-cake, but then it quickly degrades into use of nearby objects and into grappling.