Greatest Fight Scenes Ever - Now Disc. Private Mellish vs. German Soldier, "Saving Private Ryan"

Tommy Lee vs. Dae Han, "Best of the Best" (1989)

"To save a life in defeat is to earn victory and honour within."

"When he was a child, (Rocker) Tommy Lee lost a brother and a cone of ice cream to Korean Tai Kwan Do champion Dae Han. Since then Dae Han has won every national tournament held and Tommy has trained vigilantly to take a spot on the U.S. National Team and exact his revenge. Tommy gains the ability to murder if he turns his foot sideways before kicking. I don't know how it works. But he knocked the hippie kid on his ass with it, so I'm going to guess it would remove Dae Han's throat and throw it through a brick wall.

I love the entire Korea vs. United States championships (since they're the only two teams competing?) largely because Sonny and Virgil (aka the two characters with the least amount of personable character growth) get crushed by the Koreans and it's up to a sassy cowboy, a concerned single-father, and an Asian guy to bring home the Gold. And what better American idealism is there than having to pick up the slack of everyone around you only to realize that unless you're a complete jerk everything is going to turn out wrong?

"Best of the Best" is my all-time favorite 80s feel-good martial arts film, besting Bloodsport with its sincerity and lack of bare Van Damme butt into bikini briefs. It's still the only movie of its kind to make me cry that "Field of Dreams" cry of appreciated masculinity."

 

Zombie vs. Shark, "Zombi 2" (1979)

"Brains?" Roar, maybe? Does a shark roar?

"Sometimes Fulci just took the camera and put it in the woman's ******. I'm sure of it. A naked scuba diver (a "boob-a diver") is scared by a shark, so she swims into an underwater cave. In the cave she is scared by an underwater zombie. So then the zombie comes across the shark and wants to eat it. This all makes perfect sense, right?

Zombie (a man wearing weighted shoes and makeup) battling a shark (with no teeth, on some kind of drugs) isn't the catch-as-catch-can match-up you'd imagine it to be because it was the seventies on a very low budget in Italy and was A ZOMBIE FIGHTING A SHARK. But anything this ridiculous and retardedly brilliant deserves more infamy than it gets. Would you go to see a movie if you heard Dracula fought a grizzly bear in it? Of course you would."

Oh, probably.

 

Ash vs. Ash's Hand, "Evil Dead 2" (1987)

"Gimme back my hand... GIMME BACK MY HAND! "

Complete objectivity, especially on the Internet, means including Bruce Campbell. And Bruce Campbell is at his Bruce Campbellian best when battling his own possessed hand. Chris Pettazonni, who helped me pen the Seven Hill City screenplay, was particularly moved:

Evil Dead 2 taught me that movies could be out of their ****ing minds while they were being serious. There's a billion other movies that could have taught me that, but I was 8, and this was the first one to fall into my lap. It defied all convention for me, and took humor that I loved to a new height. I'd loved watching horror movies that couldn't help but be bad, but this was the first one I saw that COULD have helped it, but didn't. Why? Because they liked what I liked.

This barely nudged out "Devon Sawa vs. His Hand" from "Idle Hands" for a spot on the list. Nah, I'm just kidding. I never even seen that ass**** before."

 

Bruce Campbell is GOD. I love him, and the Evil Dead series is purely awesome.

I actually forced my friends to watch all of the ED's last night till this morning. My theory, nothing says New Years like Evil Dead!

 

Indeed.

"Bob Barker vs. Happy Gilmore, "Happy Gilmore" (1998)
commentary provided by Justin

"The Price is Wrong, bitch."

After a day of shoddy golf and constant bickering, Bob Barker punches Adam Sandler in the mouth and calls him a bitch. Fight scenes don't get much more overt than this. In fact, one could go so far as to say any given Adam Sandler movie could be classified as the film most devoid of subtext in the history of cinema. And while I wouldn't normally try and contest such a claim, there seems to be something more going on in this scene. It could be the ferocity with which Bob Barker lands blow upon forcible blow, or maybe it's the way Adam Sandler's eyes express a sense of fear and terror that he himself could never hope to emote externally. Either way, there's something about this fight that's never sat quite right with me and I think I've figured out what that is.

I've got a running theory that this isn't so much a profile of Bob Barker the actor as it is Bob Barker the person. I refuse to believe that there aren't days when Bob Barker dreads having to get out of bed in the morning and deal with the lowest common denominator who routinely populate his studio audience. You can just see the torment in his eyes every time an overweight housewife lumbers onstage shrieking like a banshee, ****s up even the most rudimentary of pricing games, and insists upon planting her greasy lipstick against his weather-worn skin before being ushered back to her seat with an autographed 8x11 and a gift certificate to Sizzler. I guarantee there are times during the commercial breaks when he gazes wistfully up at the announcer's booth wondering why God, in all his infinite wisdom, decided to accept Rod Roddy into His kingdom instead of him. When given the chance to finally let loose and act upon impulse, Barker undergoes a metamorphasis not unlike that one uncle we all have who seems like a really cool guy when he's around the family, but once you're alone he touches me in places so inappropriate no amount of therapy or alcohol can properly repress the memories.

Or, you know, it's just Bob Barker punching Adam Sandler in the face. Either way, really."

 

Kaneda vs. Tetsuo, "Akira" (1988)

"TETSUOOOOOOOO"

"I want this list to be objective but I don't want to take the same cop-outs you see on every other "best fight scenes" list online. People are always chiming in with video games ("the time Rodney and I had an awesome game of Tetris") or television shows ("WELL METHINKS THE FIGHTS ON HERCULES THE LEGENDARY JOURNEYS WERE BEST"). Anime is a touchy subject. I'm very loyal to Studio Ghibli but I know that there is an entire, broad spectrum of animation that I don't necessary like or appreciate, and I also know that most of the world doesn't appreciate either. It's JAPANIMATION, or as I like to call it, JANIMATIONPAN.

Before Sailor Moon, before Pokémon, before Princess Mononoke and Cowboy Bebop it was "Akira" that we all associated with anime. I saw Akira before I saw anything Miyazaki had ever done. I imagine most people did. Now kids are growing up in a saturated market where every cartoon about a sexy French maid with guns for hands gets their DVDs stocked at the mall and hardly know what it's like to wake up one day and know, finally, that there was something different.

The Tetsuo and Kaneda battle has guns, motorcycles, the voice actor who did Leonardo on the old Ninja Turtles cartoon, and a progression of plot that leads one character to be engulfed and suffocated by the body of another. And then there is some philosophy. But whether we understood it or not we'd never forget it, and I'm not about to deny that here.

E.X.P.L.O.D.E."

 

Yu Shu Lien vs. Jen Yu, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2000)

"Without Green Destiny, you are nothing!"

"When I was compiling my initial list of candidates for the list, my girlfriend suggested, "Why not more girlfights?" What am I supposed to put on here? Joan Collins falling into a swimming pool? Lindsay Lohan and Rachael McAdams fighting in "Mean Girls?" If I worked for E! Entertainment Television and was compiling a list of the 50 Sexiest Sexy Sexes that Ever Sexed Out of Control I'd put Lindsay Lohan on the list, but since I've got enough artistic integrity to not go to bed wanting to eat off my own face I decided against it.

Michelle Yeoh most definitely deserves to be represented on the list for just about everything she's been in that Pierce Brosnan wasn't. Zhang Ziyi deserves a spot on the list in case she ever gets into Internet journalism and is looking for a man who appreciates her. "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is full of the overly-dramatic cello wire-fu that sometimes get a bad rap, obsessed more with visuals and textures than realism and action. It's true. Crouching Tiger has people fighting on swaying tree branches and Chow Yun Fat standing sternly so we don't start asking him about his kung-fu. This fight has some Jack Evans-like unnecessary backflipping but between weapon switches adds the severity and emotion you expect from two aggressive women going at it. They switch off between swords, axes, and karate bazookas but the true fight is in their eyes. It's intense before they ever start swinging. They ain't even gotta touch or nothin'. It ain't like I like chick on chick a somethin!

As a personal message to Ziyi Zhang, my interests include long walks on the beach, puppies, and women who can make their leg stick straight up in the air."

 

Private Mellish vs. German Foot Soldier, "Saving Private Ryan" (1998)
commentary provided by Jon

"Nononowait.wait.pleaseplease--"

"Best fight scene? I certainly couldn't give a scene that impacted me so negatively a "best anything". But there's no doubt that it's among the very most intense on this entire list.

Corporal Upham, the soldier we can most relate to throughout this 170-minute gauntlet of death, destruction and trauma, is "Johnny on the Spot". He is to run ammunition to those who need it. He's supposed to be up there in the second floor of the bombed-out building, dropping off ammo. He isn't. He is sitting, ammunition draped around his neck, sobbing on the staircase. Thirty feet away, Sergeant Hill is furiously gasping for his dying breaths and Private Mellish desperately claws for life against his attacker. The German foot soldier gains the upper hand, and slowly turns Mellish's knife against him toward his chest. And suddenly, we're gasping for air too. We can't breathe. We can't do anything but watch. Mellish knows what is coming, and fruitlessly, madly, he begs to live.

It reminds me of a dream I've had several times: I'm sitting in the road, and a truck is coming my way. It's in slow motion, and I have plenty of time to get up, but I can't. I'm too weak. My body feels like it's made of lead. It's a moment that either replays over and over, or is so slow I can't stand it.

Moments later, it's finished. The German slowly walks down the creaky staircase, merely stepping around the hopeless Private Upham. And when I think about it, I realize that it's this micro-catharsis that gives the scene its terrifying power. In a scene, and a film, full of hardened military men who killed without blinking, never owned a television, and are now mostly in their graves, this is a person in which we can see ourselves. When you can make that sort of a connection with the character, you might as well be in the story yourself. Well, we were there, and it was terrible."


I remember this scene, and it is indeed painful to watch.

 

i can't relate to upham at all....