By Joshua Tyler
| Published
The sword fights have been a must of the kind of action since the first days of the film.
And when a duel is good, it stays with you.
What makes a sword fight a sword fight? For the purpose of this list, we stick to a fight to one, in which at least one of the two fighters fights with a real sword.
So no Jackie Chan Against the Gang AX on this list, unfortunately, but seriously, you have to go and watch this immediately because Wow, Jackie Chan is a madman who does not care about his own safety and you should love him for that.
With what a sword fight is established, we must now understand what makes it a good one.
And it is not enough for a duel to be technically competent. It must mean something, surprise us, move or make the incredible happen. It also helps if it’s beautiful.
Hide your sixth finger if you have one because it is a giant Freakin robot and these are the best film fights of film.
Blade
In the final test of BladeWesley Snipes Half-Vampire Hunter faces Stephen Dorff’s Diacre Give.
As Blade confronts frost in the temple of the eternal night, the film spent almost two hours establishing exactly the type of fighter that he is: ruthless, effective and smooth like hell. The final fight cashes all this.
Choreographed by Jeff Ward with the contribution of Snipes himself – a real martial artist with a background in Karate Shotokan and Capoeira – combat combat, sword game, hand -to -hand combat and film flair.
Frost, supervised with blood magic, is faster and stronger than the fact of any Blade opponent. It does not block – it absorbs. He does not prevent – he regenerates.
Fans remember the fight not for its finesse, but for its cool factor. It is a duel dipped in blood, techno and attitude – a reflection of everything that made the blade a success that defines the genre. He paved the way The matrix,, UnderworldAnd even the modern marvel boom.
Rob Roy
Rob RoyThe last duel – between Rob Roy Macgregor by Liam Neeson and Archibald Cunningham by Tim Roth – is the soul of the film.
This fight is intimate, brutal and personal. Located in an austere room lit by daylight, without music and without crowds, it strips the sword to the most bare form: survival.
Cunningham is an aristocrat formed – fast, agile, sadistic. Rob Roy is slower, wider and entirely self -taught. And this imbalance is exactly the point.
Roy is completely outdated. He holds his ground but he is killed, slowly, while we look.
The choreography was designed by William Hobbs, a veteran combat director known for realism on Flash. Neeson and Roth trained strongly for the scene and insisted to do everything themselves, which adds to the tension with high issues and high issues.
Rob Roy does not gain by finesse, but by will and endurance, culminating in an act of sudden explosive violence which turns the tables in the last second.
Kill Bill
The final fight between the bride of Uma Thurman and O-Ren Ishii by Lucy Liu is not only the peak of Kill Bill Vol. 1– It’s a moment of pure cinematic poetry.
Director Quentin Tarantino shot her on a massive sound scene in Beijing. The production designer Yohei Taneda and the director of photography Robert Richardson have transformed a visual dream landscape.
Choreographed by Yuen Woo-Ping, the legendary fighting master behind The matrix And countless Hong Kong classics, the duel mixes the discipline of samurai with the Chinese sword game.
It is not a flashy fight – it is measured and respectful, more Kurosawa than Kung -Fu film. There is little dialogue. Just the crunch of snow and the shock of steel.
The duel was directly inspired by a very similar confrontation in the 1973 Japanese revenge film Snowblood Lade. He even used the music of this film in the closing credits of his film.
Hook
Everything that happens in the life of Peter Banning leads to Hook. And in the last moments of the film named after his antagonist, Banning becomes a boy, long enough to face him in an epic duel.
The fight takes place on Hook’s ship, a sumptuous set designed to look like the fantasy of each child of a pirate lair.
There are strings to swing, stairs to jump down and enough room for an old -fashioned sword. And that’s exactly what Spielberg offers, with a fanciful torsion of Peter Pan.
Robin Williams Trained a lot in fencing for the role, trained by the Cascade coordinator Nick Gillard (who then worked on the prequal of Star Wars). Dustin Hoffman, leaned hard on the character, which makes Hook Foppish but dangerous – which flourishes just as theatrical as they are.
The duel is as much a question of performance as SwordPlay. Hang needles. Pan mums. It is not a fight for the fate of the world, but for identity, revenge and closure.
The choreography mixes real fence techniques with a fantasy defying gravity – Pan can fly, after all – which adds a dreamlike advantage to the swashbuckling.
Hook’s final stand, with a last snicker monologueGives the bad guy his due. And Pan’s refusal to kill him pure and simple looks like something of a stories book – because this is the case.
Master drunk 2
We place this entry under Master drunk 2Because it is the best film of martial arts never made, but almost each time, Jackie Chan puts his hand on a sword probably deserves to be on this list.
There is only one sword fight in Master drunk 2But because Jackie Chan does not know how not to be completely original all the time, it is one of the most unique sword fights ever captured on the film.
Most of it takes place with half crouched fighters under a train, trapped in the operation of its rolling gear.
The enemy is played by Ken Lo, the real bodyguard of Jackie and an elite martial artist, whose precision transforms the space into a mines field on a razor.
This fight was filmed on site, using a real train. There were no digital effects or green screens because it is a Jackie Chan film.
The choreography, co-designed by Lau Kar-Leung and Chan himself, is a mastery in defense of improvisation. Jackie uses his genius environment: steel stems, train axles and restricted spaces become both weapons and shields. It is less shape and more on survival.
There is no thread. No camera deception. Just a relentless movement, a real danger and a perfect timing.
And in a way, Chan makes him fun, despite the issues. This is the magic of Master drunk 2: You cannot believe what you see, and yet you smile all along.
Caribbean pirates
Jack Sparrow’s last hard hard with Barbosa Caribbean pirates is the chaotic, cursed and intelligent heart of the whole film.
Jack draws Barbossa into the heart. Nothing. Barbossa stab Jack in the chest – and a few moments later, Jack enters the moonlight to reveal that he is also cursed.
It is also strangely beautiful. It is located in a grooved Gold Cave containing sparkling Aztec gold and involves a gadget removed by incredible Wizardry effects: the moon rays transform the fighters into living skeletons.
While the two dance between the moon beams, crossing the swords, their real forms are revealed and hidden, revealed and hidden.
Both Johnny Depp And Geoffrey Rush played most of the sword themselves, under the direction of the veteran combat choreographer George Marshall Ruge.
Victory does not come by brute force but by a sleight of hand and perfect timing. While Barbossa is delighted, Elizabeth returns the last piece and will drop it with a blood offer – breaking the curse just in time so that Jack’s pistol stroke has finally.
Return of the Jedi
THE Return of the Jedi duel between Luke Skywalker And Dark Vader was not the most acrobatic or technically complex than some later in the series, but he could well be the most powerful.
Shoted on a sound scene in Elstree Studios in 1982, the duel was choreographed by the Cascade Coordinator Peter Diamond, a veteran of British fights. Mark Hamill And David Prowse was both on the set for the staging, but the real saber blows were often managed by the stuntman Bob Anderson in the Vader costume.
Anderson, a world class shooter and master of sword, gave vader attacks a weight and precision that helped transmit the power of the character even below.
It is not only a fight – it is an identity test. Vader is not trying to win. He holds back, maybe because he does not want to kill his son, or because he is ready to light Vader.
No flips. No frills. Just a father, a son and a weapon that means more than a simple blade of light.
The princess’s bride
Swashbuckling Style Sword Fights, born from the Hors -stage sword, was the standard in Hollywood from its first days. The style that made Errol Flynn celebrated and sent the public from the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s rushing to theaters for the new Zorro film has reached its peak and its end in The princess’s bride When Inigo Montoya fought the man in black.
No double strokes were used, and the actors Carey Elwes and Mandy Patinkin trained for months with the legendary Hollywood swordmasters.
Like these great error error duels of the past, the sequence was designed with pleasure as its north star. This does not mean that reality was not a factor. The duel was meticulously choreographed, and the fencing movements mentioned in the dialogue, like the defense of Bonetti, are real styles of fencing.
Highlander
Highlander is a franchise filled with fantastic sword fights, both in the films and on the underestimated Highlander TV show.
But the culminating duel at the end of the first Highlander The film between Connor and the Kurgan sets the tone.
The fight, filmed in a decrepit building of Silvercup studios in Queens, New York, is an atmospheric master stroke.
Christopher Lambert played Connor McLeod, and he, incidentally, is legally blind. In real life, he wears highly Lensée glasses, a device that he could not wear during this fight.
Clancy Brown, dominating like the Kurgan, was responsible for not taking full strength during rehearsals – he ignored this, wounding almost Lambert more than once.
The reflective floor, the blue lightning, the ruined set – it is the opera without being over -political.
The moment when MacLeod finally beheaded the Kurgan and affirms that “the price” is emblematic, crowned by the Queen’s arrow antlers and a whirlwind of the 80s.
There is really no better way to top a duel than with a song written for that by Queen.
You are probably wondering why Hidden Tiger Tiger Dragon is not on this list, and I would tell you but … Oh no, I floated at random before I could say anything.
