Marlowe, with James Garner and Bruce Lee. Fighting on a balcony, Garner steps aside when Lee launches a flying kick and sails out over the balcony.
That was the only funny bit in the entire movie: “I just made that up!”
Oliver Platt (as Porthos) enacted a comic version of this trope in the decidedly mediocre 1993 version of the Three Musketeers. Link.
The early days of UFC provided some good nonfiction examples of this. Before the sport was widespread there were a lot of single discipline guys, guys who were more or less just boxers, just karate guys, just wrestlers, etc. So you ended up with fights that were essentially boxing vs karate or wrestling vs boxing. It, of course, varied a lot based individual athleticism, but generally speaking when a karate or taekwondo guy went against a boxer or a wrestler, the guy trained in Eastern martial arts usually lost badly.
If you consider boxing a martial art then look no further than the original Rocky. It is surprising how many people don’t know that Rocky loses in the first one.
In IP Man 2
Sammo Hung dies in a match with a psycho british boxer.
From the CannonBall Run:
I must warn you, I’m Roger Moore.
In the movie Ip Man 2, the eponymous hero is trying to set up a martial arts school in Hong Kong. At first, he is fighting the other martial arts teachers in the area, to prove his abilities. However, then the British decide to host a boxing match in Hong Kong, and the winner, a thuggish British guy, challanges any of the locals to a fight.
He basically tears through the local martial art teachers until…
Ip man inevitably challenges him, and wins, but only just
I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact this film is from Hong Kong, so presumably martial arts hold a lot less mystique over there
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1386932/
edit : Bah, beaten to it
Speaking of Wild Wild West, this probably happened dozens of times over the course of the series.
I don’t remember the movie and am probably mangling the dialogue a bit:
First guy: “Whadya doin’, he coulda known karate or something.”
Second guy: “If you get a good enough first punch in, nobody knows shit.”
In Serenity, Mal beats up The Operative.
My Judo instructor, when asked “who would win…” would inevitably say: the one who gets the first good blow in.
Batman is a ninja in The Dark Knight Rises and gets beat up pretty good.
In an episode of Seinfeld, Kramer keeps beating up a bunch of kids using karate until they all gang up on him to beat him up.
Martial artist or no, I find myself wanting to dig this up and watch it, just for the premise.
Roger Moore in The Man With The Golden Gun, where the guy in the dojo bows to Bond, who promptly kicks him in the face. Played for laughs, being Moore, but would have worked much better with Sean Connery or Daniel Craig doing it straight.
The Main Event, a silly movie with Ryan O’Neal and Barbara Streisand, where O’Neal is a boxer and Streisand is his previously-rich-now-divorced agent. In one scene, a martial artist tries to explain to O’Neal how much better Karate (pronounced wrongly on purpose by the character as “KA-ra-te”) is than boxing, and O’Neal drops him with a stomach punch and says how cute he probably looks in those pajamas.
Also the enging of Black Rain, where cop Michael Douglas defeats the martial artists bad guy by just being a tougher more experienced steet fighter
Hilarious!
Check out Rumble in the Bronx (GREAT film). For the entire film, he is trying to outrun street gangs and the Mob, getting his ass kicked in the process.
Help me remember. In Oldboy, during the hallway fight scene where Dae-su Oh takes on a whole troop of bad guys, did any of them use martial arts or was it straight street fight brawl. I know Dae-su Oh basically won by withstanding more punishment than his enemies could dish out, but I don’t recall if there was any martial arts type maneuvers.
Answered my own question: It was a straight street fight with sticks and hammers and the like.
Capoeira fail. Turns out this is from a movie called Never Back Down, if youtube’s commenters are to be trusted (and of course they always are).