The one thing is clear: martial arts cinema has one hell of a roster from traditional practitioners like Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee to the comedy and action legends Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, and Lucy Liu trendsetter Tony Jaa and Iko Uwais. Martial films are also far more diverse, covering every genre and using various techniques that involve wirings and camera systems, with more screams and flying kicks. So, this article will offer you an insight view regarding the Top Ten Best Martial Arts Movies!
Martial arts movie fans of 21st-century movies are more conscious and appreciative of good films than their predecessors were ever. Once Upon a Time in China II is one of the highest rating movies on Amazon Prime. There are three main reasons for the Chinese martial arts film’s success, such as Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, and Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers in the West; the use of stylized Hong Kong action in Hollywood blockbusters; and the international success of Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, and their cohorts. These movies were based on their impact on martial arts cinema, as well as their choreography. Here, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1977) is leading the list, which is best known to start a new genre of martial arts films known as Guo shu pian—followed by Police Story(1985) in second place and then Drunken Master II (1994) in third place.
We have handpicked ten best Martial movies that you must watch. Let’s round them!
10. Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior
Hands and feet in martial arts are one thing; knees and elbows are another. And you would put Tony Jaa’s money against any other movie fighter after viewing this Muay Thai showreel. Even in those situations where Jaa doesn’t struggle with anyone, he’s fantastic, only taking few steps. Ong Bak a film is rather simple: town villains take the Buddha’s head of a hamlet, and a modest peasant goes to retrieve it back and shatters each opponent in the process with his bare hands.
It needs everything. The primary goal of Ong Bak is to say, “Can you believe this man?” And with the note added that there were no special effects or doubles of stunt, he does more than he does. The fighting is competently carried out, especially a thrilling battle.
Released year: | 2003 |
Director: | Prachya Pinkaew |
IMDB Rating: | 7.2 |
9. Once Upon a Time in China
This movie initiated the Kung-Fu renaissance in Hong Kong cinema and catapulted Jet Li into a future of under-standard Western action films. Wong Fei-hung was a genuine person: a martial arts teacher of the turn of the century and a healer who became a folk hero. The subject had previously been well-known to local audiences. Jackie Chan performed the Drunken Master, and many other dads of Bruce Lee and Yuen Wo-ping were given roles in a long-standing Wong Fei-hung film series in the 60s.
This narrative of a Chinese rebel struggling against oppressive colonialist forces was translated into Hong Kong in the 1990s, with its transfer from British to Chinese sovereignty on the horizon. Its British and American antagonists are caricatured, and the scenes are frequently so overwhelmed that they are impenetrable, of course, but what the picture offers mainly is a gleaming, bright, cinematical, epic, pre-CGI performance.
Released year: | 1991 |
Director: | Hark tsui |
IMDB Rating: | 7.3 |
8. The Raid
The raid would have been worthy of mention as a frantic, vicious drama in the arts shot in Jakarta by a Welshman that; is an accurate and imaginative film that takes the sequences of fighting into the world of horror, humor, and the musical. The story is as basic as the choreography. One morning a policeman goes out to take control of a gang-raided tower block in Jakarta.
However, it is not just a gang: this mob has managed the high increase from a top floor control room with sophisticated CCTV and controlled public speaking systems. The gangmaster, who heads CCTV, transmits a message to his tenants: “We got business. You know what to do. You know what.” It doesn’t imply putting up the kettle and opening up the custard creams. The weapons talk, firearms, knives, swords, hammers are more in the movie since there’s not much communication.
Released year: | 2012 |
Director: | Gareth Evans (Gangs of London Season 2) |
IMDB Rating: | 7.4 |
7. House of Flying Daggers
Watch the 20 minutes of the Flying Daggers House open. It is not difficult to see why the safest country Czech Republic has chosen its director, Zhang Yimou, to organize the Beijing Olympics inaugural ceremony. However, in a somewhat large, bursty waiting room, the action takes place instead of in a stadium, Zhang’s many aspects in 2008. This movie is full of traditional Chinese music, dance, brightly-colored silk cloth swaths, drummers, and martial arts, of course.
It’s a great show that puts the remainder of the movie at a high level. Fortunately, Zhang’s debut wuxia film, Hero, is more blinding to come in this follow-up. The Golden Flower curse of Zhang’s 2006 finished the trilogy. However, the greatest of them is the lyrical, operatic, yet satisfactorily concise Flying Daggers. That’s why this movie ranked number seven in our list of Top Ten Best Martial Arts Movies.
Released year: | 2006 |
Director: | Yi-Mou Zhang |
IMDB Rating: | 7.5 |
6. Police Story
Although it was clear in those days, it seems surprising now that Jackie Chan had, in its bleak intensity, been carefully preserved by at least one Hong Kong producer as the heir of Bruce Lee, the luminous master of the martial arts. However, after several experiments in the genre, Chan pushed things considerably more comically but not less sportively. Thus the former stuntman had found himself in Hollywood and added light comedy to The Cannonball Run in 1981 after breaking out in Yuen’s Woo-ping masterpiece Drunken Master.
Chan’s career in Hollywood did not pick up, however. After a disappointment in 1985 with The Protektor – a collaboration with James Glickenhouse, the neo-grindhouse director, perhaps not the sympathetic of all talents – Chan went back to Hong Kong to take concerns into his own hands and control and cowriting Police Story.
Released year: | 1985 |
Director: | Jackie Chan |
IMDB Rating: | 7.6 |
5. A Touch of Zen
In 1971, after Quentin Tarantino showed the wuxia of King Hu, the mogul began to spend a contentious amount to the east, resulting in a controversial engagement with Snowpiercer by Bong Joon-ho. We praise him for Harvey Weinstein’s interest in Asian film. It is not trying to understand why Hu’s picture is exceptionally epic, clocking in at three o’clock, and creating movie history as the first Chinese picture awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes that won the Technical Award.
A touch of Zen is presently most noteworthy as a blueprint for Ang Lee’s crouching tiger, Hidden Dragon, the narrative of an artist from the 14th century, Ku. Ku meets a lovely woman with her old mother who lives in a hut. In wuxia tradition, though, she isn’t all she looks, and thus the plot continues to expand until Ku realized that he was in between the competing sides in a big dynastic conflict. And with the evolution of the plot, which easily absorbs humor and romance, so is the spectacle, which is growing in scope and scope in ways unfathomable today. Overall, it is one of the best Martial Arts movies. That’s why this 70s movie ranked number five in our list of Top Ten Best Martial Arts Movies.
Released year: | 1971 |
Director: | King Hu |
IMDB Rating: | 7.6 |
4. Enter the Dragon
Bruce Lee fans might or might not agree that his finest film is Enter the Dragon. This is the legendary film of that unrivaled martial arts hero who died before the brain response to drugs. It’s the biggest shooting of the 1974 boxing company and the most renowned film. Lee erupted into action images that were just so popular and profit-oriented that Warner Brothers decided to create Enter the Dragon, with Bruce Lee (Warrior Season 3) as the lead character.
After a career as a kid star in Hong Kong, he was nearly Macaulay Culkin of his days. Jackie Chan is the only celebrity in Hollywood who has now opposed him – and since Enter the Dragon, Hollywood has shown little interest in supporting an Asian-American A-lister. The style of the film is exotic and exaggerated. In particular, its spectacular gazebo fight with Lee sports the strange, nearly tribal cuts across his stomach. That’s why this movie ranked number two in our list of Top Ten Best Martial Arts Movies.
Released year: | 1973 |
Director: | Robert Clouse |
IMDB Rating: | 7.7 |
3. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Why is the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon so sublime? Maybe it shouldn’t work because every bone in your body warns you. This is a calm action film. And it is a Kung Fu kick love tale. It begins with the theft of the green destiny, a mythical sword. When the sword is taken, the camera flies with the thief, forced to wear gravity in a restrictive costume. Warrior Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) hunts and cheerfully skips across roofs, which glitter silver in the light of the moon.
The rule book on action films is not merely dropped but cut into shreds when chase gives way to fight. The scare of witnessing a smooth movement by Sam Peckinpah was not a dismal virus, but an innovative one will provide part of this same freeing jolt to viewers too young to recall. Without the emotional weight, Lee gives the image of shallow action situations, particularly in the mostly untouched tenderness between Yu and her partner, the warriors Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat).
Released year: | 2000 |
Director: | Ang Lee |
IMDB Rating: | 7.8 |
2. Yojimbo
The story of Yojimbo, notably the Hollywood western and Dashiell Hammet’s broken-cities melodrama The Dain Curse, has been derived by Akira Kurosawa from American pulp materials. A lonely warrior (Toshiro Mifune, Wolf to the emperor of Kurosawa), perhaps in shame, hungry, walks through a city where two sides are in perpetual contention, blinding at each other on the other side the city’s vast, main Western thoroughfare.
Because every party does not have a prominent warrior with whose help they might help balance the power, everyone wants the newcomer on their side, which the samurai finds in only a short time, exploits the 60s film. Kurosawa shows a command of his craft in practically every frame as the power games play into its nihilistic and corpse-choked finale. Its feeling of space is incomparable: panels inside the walls glide away to expose entire external street scenes and crowd scenes fully encased inside the smaller new framework.
Released year: | 1961 |
Director: | Akira Kurosawa |
IMDB Rating: | 8.2 |
1. The Matrix
In his 1930 feature film The Blood of a Poet, Cocteau saw the mirror as a portal to a new universe, and it testifies to the longevity of that idea that it never lost any of its attractions when it appeared again in The Matrix. The movie reveals a further debt, which suggests we truly perceive a cosmetic façade built to hide a horrific fact of our life. Neo, the boffin of Keanu Reeves, has been chosen to take the load of illumination.
The blankness of Reeves’s section is great, mostly because Neo only has the talents and attributes to show in his head. He is placed in the corresponding computer application to master jiu-jitsu. In no time at all, he takes away those techniques of martial art films from the 1970s, when a person may take a flight and brew a drink somehow, read a short novel and complete his tax return before his feet touch the earth. Overall, it is a good martial arts film. That’s why this movie ranked number one in our list of Top Ten Best Martial Arts Movies.
Released year: | 1999 |
Director: | Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski |
IMDB Rating: | 8.7 |
Check out the list of best Martial Arts movies streaming on Netflix:
Movie | Year | IMDB Score | Rating |
---|---|---|---|
Million Dollar Baby | 2004 | 8.1/10 | 13+ |
Ip Man | 2008 | 8.0/10 | 18+ |
Enter the Dragon | 1973 | 7.7/10 | 18+ |
Ip Man 2 | 2010 | 7.5/10 | 18+ |
Five Element Ninjas | 1982 | 7.3/10 | 18+ |
Painted Faces | 1988 | 7.2/10 | 7+ |
The Patriot | 2000 | 7.2/10 | 18+ |
Ip Man 3 | 2015 | 7.1/10 | 13+ |
Ip Man 4: The Finale | 2019 | 7.0/10 | 16+ |
The Five Venoms | 1978 | 7.0/10 | 18+ |
Return to the 36th Chamber | 1980 | 7.0/10 | 18+ |
Legendary Weapons of China | 1982 | 6.9/10 | 18+ |
Love on Delivery | 1994 | 6.9/10 | 16+ |
Avengement | 2019 | 6.6/10 | N/A |
The Grandmaster | 2013 | 6.6/10 | 13+ |
Conclusion!
Few things like martial arts are as delicately enjoyable. The best way to transform it around is to stick to your sofa. You are alongside the plot, looking forward to the next fighting scene. However, great martial arts flicks combine a great fight with a story that makes the time between roundhouse kicks worth it. So, have your popcorn and pick any of them as they are all the best Martial Arts Movies of all Time.