Although they don’t advertise it, action thrillers like Prime Video’s Heads Of State and Netflix’s The Old Guard 2 owe a clear debt to the martial arts films of the previous century…
On a farm in a remote part of Belarus, the British Prime Minister and the United States of America are in the middle of a punch-up with a gang of young-ish thugs wearing tracksuits. Both leaders are big chaps, but they’re outnumbered and older than their opponents; their victory ultimately comes as much from pure luck as their strength. The fight reaches its comedic zenith with one goon left hopelessly coiled up in barbed wire while another’s set on fire by a stray cigarette.
This is Heads Of State, director Ilya Naishuller’s enjoyably daft action thriller which emerged on Prime Video on the 2nd July (you can listen to our extended interview with the filmmaker in a special Film Stories Podcast). In it, Idris Elba and John Cena – who play the PM and POTUS respectively – show off their talent for physical comedy as well as verbal sparring.
That fight on a Belarus farmstead also feels like a distinct tip of the hat to the type of mayhem perfected by Jackie Chan in the 1970s and 80s. Take, for example, 1978’s Drunken Master – one of the films that turned Chan from a young hopeful emerging in the shadow of Bruce Lee to one of Hong Kong cinema’s biggest stars. In one stand-out scene, Chan’s hero is getting thoroughly beaten by a bunch of hoodlums until he drinks several bottles of booze and unleashes his wild, unpredictable fighting skills.
It’s a moment that highlights Chan’s ability to combine acrobatics, traditional martial arts and unapologetically retro comedy; his fighting here has as much in common with Popeye and Buster Keaton as it does with a typical kung fu film of the period. In subsequent films, Chan continued to build on his style, fusing imaginative fight sequences with increasingly high-wire stunts. By the 1990s, such films as Project A, Police Story, Armour Of God and Rumble In The Bronx had turned Chan into a global superstar.
The action in Police Story, in particular, soon made an impression on Hollywood filmmakers; remarkably similar set-pieces later appeared in Tango & Cash and 2003’s Bad Boys II. What’s also notable, though, is how often the influence of Chan’s films and other martial arts emerge in films released by such streaming giants as Prime Video and Netflix in the 21st century.
It’s easy to imagine Jackie Chan and his frequent collaborator Sammo Hung staging a similar fight scene to the one in Heads Of State – repeatedly taking hits, accidentally landing hits, and using surrounding props as weaponry was their forte in the earlier part of their careers. A fight between co-star Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Alexander Kuzentsov has a hint of the bruising face-off between Jackie Chan and Benny Urquidez in 1984’s Wheels On Meals (co-starring and directed by Sammo Hung).
Not that Heads Of State is remotely a martial arts film in its purest sense; it’s also a world-spanning thriller vaguely in the mould of James Bond or Mission: Impossible, while much of its gunplay has a whiff of the stylised, hyper-choreographed action of another Hong Kong genre, the heroic bloodshed movie.
Numerous other streaming movies have mashed up genres in a similar way. The most successful example is 2021’s Red Notice, directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber. It’s an action comedy vehicle for Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot, much as Heads Of State is for its stars. It also takes in global locations, spy thriller elements and plenty of banter between its leads. But when the pace picks up and the fists start flying, Red Notice begins to look uncannily like a Hong Kong martial arts film: there’s an extended chase and brawl involving rickety scaffolding in a museum, for example, that looks exactly like something Jackie Chan and his stunt team would have dreamed up in their heyday. (Ryan Reynolds’ character even uses his jacket as an improvised set of handcuffs at one point – a distinctly Chan-esque flourish.)
To this day, Red Notice remains the most watched movie on Netflix, with over 230 million views. In fact, action thrillers are reliably popular on Netflix; elsewhere on the platform’s top 10, you’ll find Carry-On, The Adam Project, Back In Action and The Gray Man. The latter, in particular, has a sprinkling of Hong Kong martial arts in it, with a hospital battle between Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas and Indian movie star Dhanush – one of the highlights in an otherwise forgettable outing.
Elsewhere on Netflix, there’s The Old Guard (2020) and this year’s sequel, imaginatively titled The Old Guard 2, which both have lengthy hand-to-hand combat sequences. And while their fights mix in grapples and throwdowns from wrestling and mixed martial arts, their debt to the style and precision of Hong Kong action can still be seen. This is particularly true of The Old Guard 2’s alleyway battle between Charlize Theron and Veronica Ngo, which is full of intricately-timed blocks and gravity-defying somersaults. (It’s possible that Shaw Brothers classic Martial Club, starring Gordon Liu and a favourite of The Raid director Gareth Evans, was a touchstone here.)
Why does martial arts figure so prominently in these streaming films and so many others? The obvious answer is that a generation of directors, writers, stunt coordinators and performers all grew up watching and learning from Hong Kong cinema, and it can’t help but figure in their output, even subtly.
Drunken Master director Yuen Woo-ping’s choreography in 1999’s The Matrix was also a decisive moment in western cinema. Not massively keen to be involved in the film in the first place, Woo-ping said he’d only work on it if the actors took part in an intense bout of training which lasted about six months. To his surprise, the actors (and directing duo the Wachowskis) said yes. The resulting film proved that, with the right training, some stunt doubles for the really dangerous bits and some good editing, Hollywood stars could stage an action sequence that at least approached the kinetic fury of Hong Kong cinema.
The way fight scenes look and feel has evolved since, but the path laid by The Matrix remains. Thanks to that film, we now get Ryan Reynolds (or at least a very obvious stunt double) fighting on some wobbly scaffolding in Red Notice, or Charlize Theron trading kicks in The Old Guard 2.
And if these modern, straight-to-streaming fight sequences don’t quite have the eye-bulging impact of their predecessors – despite the often huge budgets – there’s a reason for that, too. In the 70s, 80s and 90s, Hong Kong filmmakers would think little of spending weeks or more on choreographing and executing the perfect fight sequence – and those involved were commonly injured in the process.
What the makers of films like Heads Of State or The Old Guard 2 recognise, though, is that despite all the innovations in modern filmmaking – digital cameras, VFX and so forth – there are few things more cinematic than the traditional fight sequence. The best of them are miniature stories in themselves: full of highs, lows, twists and unexpected turns of fortune. The best of them are, in short, timeless.
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