The 10 worst movie fight scenes of all time
Although most closely associated with the action genre, there’s no rule that says fight scenes have to be solely restricted to the realms of physically intense and violent movies that are legally and contractually obligated to feature at least one instance of people punching each other in the face.
When deployed correctly in comedy or drama, the humble on-screen scrap can either be played for side-splitting laughs or heighten the tension between the two characters who’ve been left with no other choice but to resort to trading blows, but in the wrong hands, they can be bungled into disaster.
Not every hand-to-hand blitzkrieg is going to be remembered as among the best ever, but it’s a lot easier to recall a terrible fight than it is a mediocre one. For the most part, bargain basement action cinema has been the easiest place to find them, but one of the greatest directors of all time even managed to get in on the act.
In their own unique way, the following ten fights have sunk to new lows in cack-handedly capturing fisticuffs in celluloid, with inadvertent guffaws as the order of the day, which is, unfortunately, the complete opposite of what their filmmakers intended.
The 10 worst movie fight scenes:
10. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019)
De-aging has been one of cinema’s most polarising recent innovations, but regardless of whether or not it’s a blessing or a curse on the medium, The Irishman illustrated that it’ll only ever work from the neck upwards, no more and no less.
The convincingness of the mob epic’s digital trickery regularly varies from scene to scene, but it was nothing short of laughable when Robert De Niro’s Frank Sheeran was beating a poor shopkeeper to a pulp. It was a one-sided fight, sure, but it was excruciating to watch.
It’s unintentionally hilarious to watch De Niro – moving, acting, and trying to cause physical harm very much like a man in his late 70s – inflict damage on the shopkeeper, who ends up left with no other option than to sell it like a beating for the ages when he’s quite clearly being tickled by the toes of a pensioner.
9. Rock ‘n Roll Nightmare (John Fasano, 1987)
Written, produced, starring, and with music from Jon Mikl Thor, Rock n’ Roll Nightmare was never going to be anything other than its creator’s vanity project, who heartily embraced the preposterous fantasy with all the seriousness of a heavyweight thespian.
With spectacular hair, a supremely jacked physique, and studded leather underpants, the star’s John Triton ends up engaging in hand-to-hand combat with a demon-type creature that looks as if it was created out of pipe cleaners and sticky back plastic, which appears to have favoured a rubber starfish as its weapon of choice.
They struggle – very slowly and laboriously – to gain the upper hand; bountiful slow motion is used, closeups of Mikl’s glistening biceps are apparently obligatory, and the hero doesn’t even win to rub salt into a wound that scraped the bottom of the barrel on its way to becoming a gaping lesion.
8. The Last Airbender (M. Night Shyamalan, 2010)
One of the worst blockbusters ever made and a near-fatal blow to a career that once showed so much promise, M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Last Airbender is an egregious affront to adaptations in general, with the filmmaker woefully ill-equipped to tackle a project of such scale.
When the earthbenders revolt against the firebenders, it’s supposed to be a fist-pumping, epic moment that signals the beginning of a rebellion against those who oppressed them, but in action, it comes across as a stodgily-paced rehearsal for an amateur dance theatre troupe.
The earthbenders’ choreographed movements are every bit as leaden as they are ludicrous, the action unfolds at a snail’s pace, and there’s nary a shred of excitement to be found, to the point even the background extras look more bemused and confounded than terrified.
7. Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun Li (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2009)
The first Street Fighter was bad with the sole exception of Raul Julia’s hammy performance as M. Bison, but it looks like The Godfather compared to the unmitigated nonsense that is The Legend of Chun Li.
Whoever decided that Smallville star Kristen Kreuk should anchor a martial arts-heavy action flick despite quite clearly knowing less than zero should have probably been fired, with the club showdown the pick of an altogether awful bunch.
The editing is clearly so frenetic because Kreuk was incapable of doing anything of note herself, and there are two separate instances of the title hero spinning round and round and round to illustrate her agility or something. It’s hard to tell because the whole thing is a trainwreck, but that was to be expected of a video game adaptation that cast the guy from Black Eyed Peas nobody remembers as its main villain.
6. Undefeatable (Godfrey Ho, 2003)
It doesn’t matter if the actors have no skill, poise, grace, or fighting ability, Undefeatable has the next best thing: the removal of shirts and the addition of so much animalistic grunting it would make David Attenborough blush.
It’s got B-tier martial arts movie legend Cynthia Rothrock in the lead role, but she’s not the main attraction of the centrepiece scrap, which finds the two combatants deciding that when neither can gain the upper hand, a state of undress and glacial hand-to-hand exchanges will suffice.
It wasn’t supposed to be funny, but it really is, and not just because witnessing it is more akin to seeing a couple of six-year-olds fresh from watching Power Rangers try and enact its fights on the playground. Bless them, the actors are trying, but some turds will always remain incapable of being polished.
5. Catwoman (Pitof, 2004)
Despite bombing hard and losing an awful lot of money for Warner Bros, Halle Berry‘s Catwoman spent 13 years as the highest-grossing comic book adaptation with a female title character until Wonder Woman came along. For shame.
Instead of featuring any of Gotham City’s many iconic villains, Berry’s Patience Phillips is instead tasked to defeat the incomparable threat of deadly skincare, with Sharon Stone’s Laurel Hedare the evil mastermind behind murderous moisturiser.
It all builds to a head in the climactic set piece, which features dire choreography edited to within an inch of its life, a flagrant disregard for the laws of physics, the liberal use of exaggerated wirework, below-par CGI, and not a single ounce of urgency. It’s a bad movie with good actors, but the grand finale might even be worse than the basketball scene, and that’s saying something.
4. Night of the Kickfighters (Buddy Reyes, 1988)
If anybody ever wanted to know what would happen were a kickboxing champion to go toe-to-toe with the guy who played Lurch in Barry Sonnenfeld’s Addams Family movies in a low-rent action movie that also stars Adam West, then look no further.
Andy Bauman’s limitations as an actor were clear, but he could at least be relied upon to deliver in the fight scenes that were promised right there in the title Night of the Kickfighters, surely? Surely…? Nope, the sequence is stuck in treacle in terms of pace, with Carel Struycken hardly the most nimble of opponents.
It does end in some style when Bauman gets launched clear out of a window and goes soaring through the night, so there is at least some comedy value, but the downside is that this was supposed to be a serious fight happening in a serious film, which is probably even more concerning.
3. The Room (Tommy Wiseau, 2003)
There are many things to have been said about Tommy Wiseau over the years, but it’s hard to imagine anyone would ever consider describing the actor, director, producer, writer, and all-around very strange man as remotely threatening. Well, maybe except himself, which may explain this scene.
Apparently, a push that doesn’t have enough force behind it to topple a house of cards contains enough venom to send a full-grown man sprawling backwards to leave a shocked look upon their face, as if they’ve been stricken by the realisation Wiseau’s Johnny is some kind of Herculean demigod.
People love The Room because it’s irredeemable trash, so at least the mano-a-mano display of peacocking and figurative dick-measuring is in sync with the rest of the film. Wiseau never planned on making a comedy, but it’s easy to imagine him being convinced by his own badassery after shooting such embarrassing handbags at dawn.
2. Ninja: Silent Assassin (Godfrey Ho, 1987)
It’s that man Godfrey Ho again, who clearly harboured ambitions to conquer the ninja business by making so many martial arts films in such a short period of time, the majority of which were less-than-stellar, to put it nicely.
Beginning with two dudes sitting around in office wear talking about ninjas, things suddenly give way to an ornately-costumed battle to the death, replete with countless zooms, stilted choreography, and a great deal more backflipping than is necessary for one to go about their day.
Trying to describe it doesn’t really do true justice to the insanity on display, but the transition from wooden actors hammering out a 9-to-5 straight into a daylight display of martial arts mania is enough to cause whiplash.
1. Gymkata (Robert Clouse, 1985)
Kurt Thomas won six medals at the 1979 World Championships and competed for the United States as a gymnast at the 1976 Olympics, which somehow convinced somebody in Hollywood that he had the chops to headline his very own action extravaganza.
The character of Jonathan Cabot wasn’t too much of a stretch, to be fair, seeing as he too was an Olympic gymnast, except under the circumstances of Gymkata he was dispatched to the fictional and vaguely cheese-sounding country of Parmistan at the request of the American special forces to partake in a deadly tournament.
What happens when a real-life gymnast gets hired for a movie role based on their skills? That’s right, an entire action sequence revolving entirely around a pommel horse. Thomas uses it, and for whatever reason, enemies keep stepping up to be kicked in the face. Tactical mastery wasn’t their strongest suit, then, but Gymkata doesn’t care about logic. It only wants to sing the praises of gymnastics… deadly gymnastics.
