Chris
On my thirteenth birthday, I saw Enter the Dragon for the first time. It seemed to flip a switch in my brain. Suddenly, I wanted to be Bruce Lee, immediately enrolled in martial arts, and did it for years afterward, while feeding myself a steady diet of martial arts movies. I even participated in a martial arts tournament once—but I’m not bragging because, truth be told, I was absolutely hopeless in the ring, and in my one and only fight, I was taken out by a roundhouse kick to the head that ended the fight before it even started.
Nevertheless, my love of martial arts films continued, but particular favorites of mine were tournament movies. Enter the Dragon is still the best of all of them, but I also have a huge soft spot for Best of the Best (which I always preferred to The Karate Kid), as well as JCVD’s trilogy of killer tournament movies: Bloodsport, Kickboxer and Lionheart (The Quest was nowhere near as good, in my opinion, as those earlier, lower-budget flicks). Yesterday, our own Steve Seigh posted his list of the best martial arts tournament movies, but I wanted to open the conversation up a bit more, as there are a lot of great movies that weren’t on his list that deserve some love.
Specifically, I wanted to highlight the Undisputed sequels. The first Undisputed was a cool prison boxing movie directed by Walter Hill, but the direct-to-video sequels with Michael Jai White and Scott Adkins were incredible, with them pivoting to MMA and sporting some of the best fight choreography I’ve ever seen in an American movie. At any rate, with Street Fighter now in theaters, it’s time to choose the best tournament movies (we stuck with martial arts—boxing is a different genre). Take the poll below and let us know in the talkbacks if we missed any.
I’ll italicize movie and TV titles going forward.
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