We love a well choreographed punch up…
Transcript
I’m midway through writing a video about John Wick, and suddenly remembered that the spinoff show exists, full title ‘The Continental: From The World of John Wick’ which is a totally normal way to name things. Didn’t we go through all this rigamarole with Birds of Prey and/or the Fantabulous Emancipation of Harley Quinn?
Anyway, during the prologue of the show, there’s a wonderfully elaborate one shot following Frankie as he gets up to some shenanigans in the hotel during a New Years’ party. Things go south – spoilers I guess, for the premise of the show – and he ends up fighting his way up a stairwell with the typical gun-kata action the John Wick series is famous for.
The longer the shot went on, the more excited I got. This is that thing I like, this is a one-shot stairwell fight sequence! Hell yeah! I love those things! And just when I started getting glued to the screen, it cut. The rest of the scene is pretty darn cool regardless – one of, if not the, best in the show. But I still felt like I’d lost something.
So let’s talk about one-shot stairwell fights.
Stairwell fights aren’t exactly common but they are a thing – you’ve got Casino Royale, The First Purge, Civil War and The Raid to name a few. But one-shot fight sequences are a dime a dozen now – Oldboy used to be a bit of a rarity, but now you’ve got Extraction, The Revenant, hell, the entirety of 1917.
One-shot fight scenes in a stairwell though? It just makes so much sense. There’s a natural sense of momentum as the character fights their way in one direction or another, and a ramping up of the tension as the fight progresses from clean efficiency into dirty, exhausted brutality. In a stairwell you’ve got the perfect excuse for hiding stunt actors behind the camera, and you don’t really need to worry about blocking or positioning beyond timing – there’s a very limited number of places people can be, and the camera is mostly just going in one direction.
And it all starts with the Daredevil Season 2 episode ‘New York’s Finest’. Actually, it probably starts with the Tony Jaa film The Protector, also known as Haathi Mere Saathi, or Warrior King, or Tom-Yum-Goong, or Thai Dragon, or Revenge of the Warrior, or Honor of the Dragon, but I’m not talking about a movie with that many titles. It’s like they just clicked the Asian martial arts movie name generator five times in a row. Isn’t tom yum goong a type of soup?
But no, for all intents and purposes Daredevil is to blame for this. It had already made a splash with its action choreography, particular this one-shot hallway fight which for me is still in the top 10 things Netflix has ever produced, and the best successor to the Oldboy corridor fight to date. Leave a comment if you want a video discussing corridor fight scenes, I reckon I’ve got that in me. In the Daredevil episode in question, Matt has had a little falling out with the Punisher, which results in Matt having to help an unconscious Frank avoid a very angry biker gang. Until this old guy gets involved, and Matt jumps into the fight.
You know what, fuck it, let’s rank em as well. We’re gonna judge them in three categories: originality, execution, and OPM. Maximum of 5 points each in originality and execution, and OPM is the unjustly forgotten band behind ‘Heaven Is A Halfpipe’. No, I wish, OPM is ‘ooh per minute’, I take the number of times I go ‘ooh’ and divide it by the length of the one-shot. Can’t just have a bunch of repetitive punches; you need to throw in some super moves and combo breakers. An ‘ooh’ can be anything from ‘ooh ouch’ to ‘ooh cool’ to ‘ooh damn’. I’m also counting the length of the oner from the time it begins to the time the movie makes an obvious cut, which means we’re going to overlook some of the less subtle stitching of scenes together, and some non-stairwell action will be included in this. If you don’t like that, fuck off and make your own Youtube channel. To get the total score, we’re gonna add together the originality and execution, and multiply it by the OPM. Let’s do this.
Right out the gate, Daredevil makes a big splash on originality. Thanks to the aforementioned tiff with Frank, Matt finds himself in this fight with one hand duct-taped to a gun – an empty gun – and the other hand handcuffed to a heavy chain. With conventional punching and kicking difficult to rely on, we see Matt making excellent use of his super-senses, whipping out the lights and unbalancing his opponents so they shoot each other and fall over railings. He later picks up a wrench and starts wrecking shop with that, so he gets top points for creativity – an easy 5 out of 5.
On execution, it falls down a little. Look, even slightly pulling a oner like this off is a crazy achievement. Let’s do a brief round of applause for everyone who worked on this. Now, that being said, it’s a little too dark to see sometimes, and the punches don’t all seem to land with much impact; it’s all very Dark Knight Rises. The cuts are also a little jarring, especially when we get to the actual staircase. But when you consider the tiny size of the stairwell and the fact that the camera moves not only down the stairs but down the middle and over the railings, relative to its budget, Daredevil is damn miracle, so I’m giving it a 3 out of 5.
As for OPM, the whole shot clocks in at 3 minutes and 45 seconds, so let’s take a look at the ‘ooh’s. It’s a solid showing for Daredevil – a number of them are badass poses Matt pulls off rather than actual fighting, but he got a very respectable 7, resulting in an OPM of 1.87. We’ll get to the total scores at the end.
One year later, we get Atomic Blonde. I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to say this is the scene everyone remembers the most from the film. For a lot of people, it was also the only bit they enjoyed, having expected something a little more action-packed. A lot of the marketing and early reviews touted Charlize as the female John Wick which is ever so slightly misleading given it’s primarily an espionage film set in the late Cold War with about two fight scenes.
Then again, how good is that one fight scene? One-shots be damned, it’s gone down as one of the most intense, well-shot, well-choreographed, well-acted fight sequences ever made. We can gush about it later though, so first off, originality.
At first, Atomic Blonde seems to fall down a bit here, with the early stairwell fight consisting of hand to hand combat with a light bit of gunplay. It’s when we move into the other areas that creativity really shines through and Charlize starts using everything around her. The crowning achievement is the fight with Ronny, who she bludgeons with a pistol hilt, a hot plate, and a lamp, before corkscrewing the guy and finally shooting him and running him over. Being as grounded as the film is, you don’t get any mad kung fu, so it’s not a perfect score, but still a damn respectable 4 stars out of 5.
As for execution, 5 out of 5, moving on. It’s a lengthy bu- No really, instant 5 out of 5. It’s clear, it’s gorgeous, the cuts are well hidden, the camera is as dynamic as the actors are without drawing attention to itself and breaking the immersion. And most importantly, this German Steven Ogg. 5 out of 5.
Atomic Blonde is a lengthy bugger, adding up to 9 minutes and 41 seconds, and if you tally up all the ‘ooh’s, you get a whopping 23, giving us an OPM of 2.38. You actually get a similar score if you cut as soon as they exit the building so don’t @ me about that.
We basically got no stairwell oners until No Time To Die in 2021. To be fair it was originally meant to be released in 2019 but Danny Boyle left, and then it was meant to be released in 2020 but, yknow, the thing. Who knows at what point the stairwell fight entered scripts and storyboards, but for all that happened in cinema in 2020, this may as well be considered the next year’s ideas.
It’s the closing fight scene of the film – yeah, spoilers I guess – and angry dad Bond is charging through the facility, mowing down everyone in his path like blades of grass in Lawn Simulator. And after a hilarious little grenade fight, he enters a stairwell to face another wave.
Kicking things off with originality, it’s a bit of a let-down. While it is a bit refreshing to see a predominantly gunplay-oriented one as opposed to primarily punchy-kicky ones, this certainly ain’t John Wick. He’s not pulling off any gun-fu moves or getting dirty with some Brazilian jujitsu. Unfortunately, Bond isn’t the type to struggle against an army of mooks – it would destroy the power fantasy. So instead, he just ploughs through them with nary a sweat broken. 2 out of 5.
Next up in execution, this one’s mainly carried by the special effects. There’s gunfire, actual fire, explosions, dust, dudes dying left and right. I fucking pray they got this in like two takes, because I’d hate to imagine a crew cleaning all this up to reset. Apart from this one move, the camera is pretty pedestrian, and like I said there aren’t many standout gunshots. There is something to be said about how ‘cinematic’ it all is. It’s a nebulous term I know, but I hope you get what I mean. 4 stars out 5.
No Time To Die’s scene is the shortest by far, clocking in at only 1 minute and 52 seconds. But it’s also fairly short on ‘ooh’s, with only these 4, resulting in an OPM of 2.14. It’s such a shame they cut away before the exploding eyeball, cause that would have been a definite ooh.
But on with the games, if we tally up the scores and multiply by the OPM, the winner is… Atomic Blonde, blowing the other two out of the water with a total score of 21.42. Give em a round of applause.
So, in words, why is Atomic Blonde the best stairwell fight? A lot of it is down to how visible the effort each combatant is putting in. Unless someone uses a deadly weapon, each one takes dozens of hits to go down. They stumble, they bleed, they heave these big exhausted breaths, and by the end of it, when Charlize is struggling to even stand, you feel that exhaustion because you just saw every punch that got her to that point. That visible strain was part of what made the Daredevil hallway fight so incredible, and you can see a similar kind of wear and tear in the stairwell fight, but it’s certainly lesser.
Basically if the hero dispatches all their enemies with absolute ease, then why should you fret about whether or not they’re going to make it? This is something I think plagued every Craig Bond film after Quantum of Solace. In Casino Royale, Bond was visibly damaged by his encounters, physically and emotionally, whereas in the desert shootout in Spectre, he just stands out in the open and mows everyone down like a shooting gallery. No Time To Die had some of the coolest and prettiest action in recent memory, but I never once feared that Bond might suffer a scratch, let alone death. In our heart of hearts we know the hero is going to survive to the end, but you could at least try and fool us.
The main reason Atomic Blonde is the best is probably the impact and timing. Thanks to the incredible acting and sound design, every blow hits like a cannonball. Again, this is something that makes Daredevil’s hallway fight far superior to the stairwell fight. Like, this wrench throw probably could have had the same impact as the microwave throw.
But rather than being a relentless barrage, the punches in Atomic Blonde are meticulously timed. There’s a kind of rhythm to its action that you start to get in time with. Not to mention use of the rule of three to make the final hit in a phrase really pop. Contrast all this to No Time To Die, and even accounting for the suppressor on his gun, you just never really feel the gunshots.
The timing extends to the scene as a whole as well. Given its huge length, the action is broken up into multiple beats, usually separated by location, then further broken up into clearly defined phrases. You get a chance to breathe in between these beats, whilst not breaking the tension as you anticipate the onset of another bout.
So there you have it, Atomic Blonde’s fight is amazing… What was I talking about to begin with? Oh yeah, one-shot stairwell fights are a trope, and I actually like it! This is a fairly unique situation for me – I’m aware something is a thing, it makes sense to exist, and it’s not prolific enough for me to be sick of it yet. But I can definitely see myself getting sick of it in the near future. I’d estimate I’ve got no more than two or three stairwell scenes of enthusiasm in me. So this is really more of a message to my future self, to ask “when did you get tired of one-shot stairwell fight sequences”?
Check back once a year or so and we’ll see – when the camel’s back breaks, imma leave a pinned comment with the straw what did it. In the meantime, why not pass the time with the rest of our delicious UDS Films content that you likely see before you, or on our sister channels UDS Gaming and UDS Music. I’ve been Drew, I’ll likely be Drew in the next vid, but I’ll hopefully see you there to find out for sure.
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