SerpApi.Org
Most martial arts movies are purely fun, but very few of them are absolutely flawless, with choreography, story, direction, and star power aligning so perfectly that they don't feel dated even decades later. These five movies represent the genre operating at its absolute peak, spanning three different eras and philosophies of what a martial arts movie can be.
There's the meditative training epic that basically invented a subgenre, the wire-fu masterpiece that crossed over into Oscar territory, the death-defying stunt showcase built on real broken bones, the arthouse wuxia film that reinvented the form for a global audience, and the drunken boxing showcase widely considered the greatest physical performance ever captured on film. These entries are the best of the martial arts genre and the cornerstones that other movies get measured against even today.
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin Builds Up The Tension Gradually
Directed by Lau Kar-leung, this Shaw Brothers classic follows San Te (Gordon Liu), a young man radicalized against the Qing dynasty oppressors after Manchu soldiers kill his family and fellow rebels. He flees to the Shaolin Temple, where he spends years mastering 35 grueling chambers of training, each one isolating a specific skill, from eyesight to arm strength to staff work. He then petitions to create a 36th chamber that would teach kung fu to ordinary civilians.
What makes it perfect is its patience. Liu doesn't throw his first real punch until well over an hour in, and the film is stronger for it, because every technique he later deploys has been earned onscreen. It's less a revenge movie than a martial arts film about discipline and transformation, and its training montage sequence influenced everything from The Karate Kid to Kung Fu Panda.
Hero Was The Highest-Grossing Film In Chinese History In 2002
Zhang Yimou's wuxia epic stars Jet Li as the nameless assassin summoned before the King of Qin after claiming to have killed three legendary assassins who had been plotting the king's death. As Nameless recounts his story, the film unfolds in shifting, contradictory versions, each rendered with its own color palette, gradually revealing the truth behind his real motives and the politics of a war-torn China.
The duels in Hero are particularly exciting -- think lakeside sword fights suspended just above the water and battles waged entirely through calligraphy and imagination. Combined with Christopher Doyle's cinematography, a cast stacked with wuxia royalty (Li Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Donnie Yen, Zhang Ziyi), and a finale that turns the entire genre's usual revenge logic on its head, Hero becomes an action film that is almost poetic in the way it unfolds.
Police Story Is A Jackie Chan Essential
Jackie Chan wrote, directed, and starred in this Hong Kong action landmark as Chan Ka-kwun, a cop framed for murder by the drug lord he's trying to put away, forcing him to clear his name while protecting a key witness. The plot is functional B-movie stuff, but what matters is the events that happen around it.
This is the kung fu film with the bus-pole stunt, the mall chase through a wall of glass shelving, and a finale that sees Chan sliding down an electrified pole through multiple floors of shattering lightbulbs. Chan performed this with zero rigging beyond the era's rudimentary measures, and he reportedly suffered major injuries when he performed it. Police Story is perfect because it fuses slapstick comic timing with actual death-defying stunt work in a way almost nobody has replicated since, with a cop thriller premise.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Focuses On Character And Fight At The Same Time
Ang Lee's wuxia epic follows warrior Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) and Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) as they pursue a stolen sword and the reckless young noblewoman Jen (Zhang Ziyi), who's secretly been trained by the fugitive assassin Jade Fox. Beneath the fights is a restrained, unconsummated love story and an exploration of duty versus freedom.
It's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's marriage of form and feeling that makes it perfect: Yuen Woo-ping's wire-fu choreography, especially the rooftop chase and the bamboo forest duel, turns combat into dance, while Lee's direction keeps every fight in service of character rather than spectacle. It became the highest-grossing foreign-language film ever released in the US at the time and won four Oscars, including Best Foreign Language Film, proving wuxia could resonate far beyond the traditional audience for it.
Drunken Master II Is The Best Of Hong Kong Action Cinema
Jackie Chan returns as a young Wong-Fei-hung in this sequel, this time protecting a shipment of Chinese artifacts from British colonial smugglers while battling his own tendency to abuse the "drunken boxing" style that made him nearly unbeatable but also dangerous. Lau Kar-leung, director of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, co-directs and appears as Won's father's rival.
The film builds to what's widely regarded as one of the greatest fight sequences ever filmed: a brutal, extended brawl in a steel mill yard where Chan, drunk on industrial alcohol, takes on dozens of attackers atop burning coals. Drunken Master II represents the ceiling of what a human body can do on camera, combining bone-crunching realism with comedy at the same time.
