(Annoying) Screen-fighting Trends

I haven’t actually done a study of recent action movies, but in my unscientific observations, I’ve found two growing (and annoying) trends in action direction in the past few years:

1. Shaky-Camera Syndrome
2. Repetitive Martial Arts Expertise

Shaky-Camera Syndrome: This trend is fast becoming the bane of my existence. All too often, directors and actions directors are choosing to use hand-held cameras to shoot their fight scenes and instructing their camera operators to have epileptic seizures in the middle of the takes. Why?

They incorrectly think that giving us motion sickness with blurry images will put the audience into the fighters’ shoes. (Think Christopher Nolan and his Batman movies.) What, as if whenever you’re in a street brawl, you suddenly suffer from Parkinson’s and blurred vision?

Some directors might choose this technique for stylistic reasons (re: Paul Greengrass and The Bourne Supremacy). But more likely than not, they shake the camera furiously in fight scenes to obscure the fact that the actor is not particularly skilled at fighting.

The solution? Use stunt doubles, hire better actors, or train the actors far longer prior to filming. But please don’t subject us to more vomit-inducing camerawork.

Repetitive Martial Arts Expertise: This trend is in reference to a plethora of movies (mostly from Hong Kong and Asia) that feature main characters that are inexplicably highly-trained martial arts masters, who use the exact same style and use the same moves over and over and over and over again. In every fight scene. Again and again. I’ve talked about this before, but I’m noticing it in a lot more movies than just Watchmen.

This single-style repetition was one of my biggest problems with Donnie Yen’s Flashpoint. Yen’s cop character was an accomplished MMA fighter (for unexplained reasons) and when he went to take out the gangsters in the movie, they all by some huge coincidence were also knew MMA-style fighting. So almost every fight scene was a big MMA brawl with everyone using the exact same techniques.

A similar thing happened in The Rebel, a Vietnamese-language action movie starring Johnny Tri Nguyen (The villain in Tom Yum Goong and a Spider-Man stunt double in the first two Sam Raimi hits). Everyone in The Rebel fights with the exact same Muay Thai-infused wushu style, from Johnny and the female star to the thugs and main villains.

Basically, what’s happening is that the action directors and fight coordinators are either to enthusiastic about a particular style (obviously the case with Yen and MMA in Flashpoint) or just haven’t analyzed their characters and the script enough to give each person a unique fighting style that will help tell the story.

How do we remedy this?

Watch Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master 2. In it Chan displays several different kung fu styles (including, of course, drunken kung fu) while his allies and opponents all have different fighting systems, from Hung Gar to kickboxing.

As my friend John Kreng always says, watch the masters and you’re bound to learn something.

Tags: action direction, Donnie Yen, Drunken Master 2, fight choreography, Flashpoint, Jackie Chan, Johnny Tri Nguyen, shaky camera, The Rebel