I’m thinking about great hand-to-hand fight scenes in movies or TV. No guns, no knives, no swords. Just two combatants trying to beat each other’s brains in. (We’ll allow ballpoint pens; see below). To narrow the field a little, let’s leave out movies where a big fight is essentially the main point of the film, so no boxing movies or martial arts tournament kind of movies.
I love Grosse Point Blank. John Cusack is at his coolest, Dan Ackroyd is awesome as the rival hit man, the music is great, and the dialogue is snappy. And, it has this fight.
I love this fight. You know going into it, of course, that the protagonist of the film is going to win, but it’s not a one-sided beat-down. Cusack has to work at it, and he takes his share of punishment. It looks like it could have gone either way. Also, you see the guys missing their shots. In a lot of movie fights, the characters either land every shot or there is a skillfully executed block. Here, several times one of the fighters just plain misses a punch or a kick. And they spend a lot of the fight feinting and keeping a little distance between them as they wait for the other guy to commit to a move. As much as I love The Bourne Identity, in the apartment fight, Bourne and the other guy just collide and start hitting each other, one guy gets knocked down, and they just come together again. There’s not a lot of “OK, I really don’t want to get kicked in the danglies, so let me fake him out and see what he’s going to do.”
It helped in Grosse Point Blank that Cusask’s opponent was Benny Urquidez, Cusack’s long-time kickboxing trainer. Having a couple of actors who spent their free time beating each other up probably helped sell the scene.
It may technically violate the stipulations of the OP, since it ends with dagger and strangling wire, but I’ve always been fond of the fight between Connery and Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love. It’s wonderfully choreographed, incredibly brutal, in a tight, enclosed space, and with a real sense that Bond is up against someone who’s as good, or maybe even better, than he is. Even the sound design works for it–no musical accompaniment, the only sounds are the steady clacking of the train, the crashes as the two of them slam into things, and the grunting of Bond and Grant as they mercilessly try to kill each other.
The Dan Dority vs Captain Whats-his-name fight in Deadwood was an incredibly realistic (from my limited but non-zero experience in H2H combat) and brutal fight.
It’s more of a beating than a fight, but Sonny beating the ever loving shite out of Carlo in The Godfather is some great cinema.
Second the saloon brawl from The Great Race.
Good one! I hadn’t seen it before, but I like it. I would not have recognized Robert Shaw there. He looks so different from his appearances in The Sting and Jaws. Of course at the end of the fight Bond has to straighten his tie. Nice touch!
Yeah, it has some of the martial arts film cliches, like people standing around to get hit individually. And it’s heavily choreographed. But, goddammit, that’s a hell of a fight. Made even better because Jackie Chan does all of his own stunts.
The fight between Toshiro Mifune’s thief and The Husband in Akira Kurasawa’s Rashomon – as told by the woodcutter.
In the versions told by the other witnesses (including the ghost), the fight is one of extreme sophistication and skill. But in the Woodcutter’s version – and his version of everything almost always seems the most likely – it quickly devolves into a hand-to-hand fight, and a pretty amateurish and sloppy fight at that. It’s one of the few times in cinema that important characters have a fight that, instead of being carefully choreographed, is actually pretty damned inept
Not sure if it’s my favorite, but I really enjoy the Morpheus vs. Smith fight from The Matrix. It’s the first time we see how dangerous an Agent really is. Morpheus’ desperation is palpable and Smith just takes him apart. It was short, brutal, sad, and pretty well choreographed.
Just watched that again last night, and yes, that fight was hilariously awesome.
It doesn’t wholly qualify, although Trinity started out unarmed, but the first fight in The Matrix left my jaw on the ground in the theater.
“Well, this is something different!”
The lavatory scene in Casino Royale gave me a similar feeling. And no, it doesn’t wholly qualify either, though the vast majority of it doesn’t involve gunplay. I’d include the knife fight in Quantum of Solace, but that’s totally not within the OP.
The brawl in Star Trek’s “The Trouble with Tribbles”, which according to David Gerrold, owes something to the choreography of the saloon fight in The Great Race, which I haven’t seen.
The elevator fight in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. “Before we get started, does anybody want to get off?”
Natasha vs. the thugs in The Avengers. (I’m not counting her chair as a weapon.)
It doesn’t strictly count since guns and knives were also used, but the fight between Cap and the Winter Soldier in the street was also incredibly well done, right down to the music.
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