Used to be in movies there were guys like Indy, who just used their fists. Or cowboy movies with big bar brawls. Nowadays all the action is karate and people with 20 years of Muy Thai and stuff like that. What happened?
You young punks. Get your kung-fu off my lawn!
Yeah, it seems that everybody is kung-fu fighting.
Bwahaha 
Still alive, but heavily influenced by MMA.
Fighting (2009)
Gamer (2009)
The transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong to the PRC in 1997 meant that a lot of people in the Hong Kong film industry got the hell out and moved to the film industries elsewhere. That resulted in a transfer of fight choreography style to the US.
Karate and kung fu and such are at least entertaining to watch. Battering with fists/barroom brawls were popular in John Wayne days. I know a nurse who says she can’t count the number of brain damaged or paralyzed losers of barroom brawls she’s seen over the years. Braining someone with a wooden chair is NOT the same as braining someone with a balsa wood chair. So maybe it’s a good thing.
Uh, I don’t think anyone was advocating brawling in real life.
While I didn’t much care for the latest Indiana Jones movie I did appreciate the knuckle dragging fight between Indy and the Russian soldier. It was an old fashioned beat down as opposed to the karate stuff.
Odesio
Brendan Fraser in the *Mummy *movies is a brawler. (he’s an Indy knock-off, of course)
How about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? He was a brawler in *The Rundown *and Walking Tall.
Marv in Sin City.
Jack and Sawyer and most other characters who fight on LOST.
Mal and Jayne and Zoe from Firefly and Serenity. (River was a kung-fu fighter)
Very true. They count muchly.
Fight Club seemed to me to be mostly brawling, all the way through the movie. Very fluid (and very dirty) fighting, but definitely brawling.
So, The Rock brawling VS some skinny, little guy from Taiwan getting all artistic, but without the wires?
FTR, an OLD, skinny, little guy from Japan kicked my ass, but I was not prepared (by several decades of his Ryu, which he developed, anyway).
You’re right in that there has been a change. The big action movies used to star big guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, but now they mostly star smaller guys like Matt Damon or Ryan Reynolds. I’m not sure about the reason, but I have seen articles that discussed the idea.
The Craig James Bond is essentially a brawler, albeit a trained one.
When was “used to be”?
Indy came around in 1981, which was considerably after 1973’s “Enter the Dragon”, which had a little fellah named Bruce Lee in it, who may have used a little bit of kung fu here and there.
As far as big bar brawls, “The Big Brawl” was the first time I saw Jackie Chan, and it was released in 1980. That’s a year before Indy, and it does include some kung fu here and there.
Indy, when faced by an expert swordsman, went for the firearm solution. A different version of the same thing had been done in “Yojimbo”, back in 1961. That one may have had some iaido and iaijutsu in it.
In 1964, Fred Flintstone himself, a man whose credentials surely stand up to those of John Goodman as former Greco-Roman Wreslter and current ninja crusher Pops Racer in the live action version of Speed Racer, resorted to a “Judo, Judo, Chop Chop Chop!”
So, what happened was that Hollywood got all hyped up on the traditional (and mythical) martial arts, leading to that embarassing ninja thing in the 1980’s, and reality caught up with the fact that while you are delivering your trademark clever line and throwing your Sunday Best haymaker the other fellah is shooting for a double leg takedown, and if he can’t pass your guard to ground and pound he’s letting you get on top so he can throw up a triangle or an arm bar, and it doesn’t look like it did back when people fought all clean and honourable like, in the Old West.
Of course, in the Old West the people involved didn’t know they were going to be a paragon, so they were practical and cheated. In the unlikely event that none of those people had brought a knife or a gun to the fight (what’s the first rule of unarmed combat? Get Armed!), it would be Journal of Manly Arts customary to resort to gouging, fish hooking, and other stuff that just doesn’t stand up to a good old punch to the jaw.
Like Indy would do, if he didn’t remember he had a fucking revolver. Or John Wayne would do, if he didn’t remember he had a fucking revolver.
They usually remember they have a fucking revolver.
What about that olde tyme bare-knuckle boxing style found in movies like Gangs of New York?
Not to mention Bruce Willis, Vin Deisel and John Cena.
I think what it basically comes down to is a really big musclehead just bashing the crap out of a dozen guys just got cinematically boring. And those big dudes just can’t move like more regular sized guys like Matt Daman (Bourne) or Jason Statham (Transporter and Crank).
Don’t forget that he’s got to have audience identification, and he’s got to bash the crap out of a dozen guys to get to the boss, which means that the boss has to have something going for him or her that the dozen guys didn’t. This means the boss must have some kind of big, or muscle, or martial arts, that the other guys didn’t.
Our Hero, whom the audience identifies with, still wins.
This means that if you are going to pick a fight you should go for a tall muscular martial artist, preferably one weighing over 200 lbs, because they always lose to people just like you.
That little smiling bald wrinkled man in the corner? Run away.
If you have to kick me to kick my ass, you’re not a real man.