Issue 033
January 2008
The fistic arts have long held a fascination for filmmakers and their audiences, ever since Jim Corbett and Peter Courtney boxed an exhibition bout in September 1894, their encounter recorded on a new-fangled device called the Edison Kinetoscope.
When old-timers like Corbett and before him, John L. Sullivan, weren’t punching each other in the face, they often took to the stage, touring theatres across America in plays specially commissioned for the pugilists. It was easy cash for the fighters and it must have taken a brave critic to dare to write a bad review.
Champions Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis and Mohammed Ali all made movies, although none of them displayed theatrical skills to match those they showed in the ring. The great boxing movies, Champion, Somebody Up There Likes Me, The Great White Hope, wisely chose to let professionals handle the acting. With MMA enjoying it’s boom years, many of the sports biggest stars are trying their hand at the thespian arts, sadly proving all too often that acting is best left to actors, and fighting to the fighters.
There’s a long history of martial arts movies, dating back to the silent cinemas of Japan and China, but until very recently there were precious few examples of Mixed Martial Arts on the screen. Martial arts films tend to showcase striking techniques that are visually impressive, overlooking the grappling arts, but there are exceptions. Akira Kurosawa’s first film, Sanshiro Sugata from 1945, follows the adventures of a young judo fighter and culminates with the hero taking on a rival jiu-jitsu fighter, who tries to beat him with a gi choke.
The innovative Bruce Lee was interested in grappling long before the Gracies made it fashionable. In Fist Of Fury he gets arm-barred by Bob Baker, but that pales in comparison to the opening fight scene in Enter The Dragon which sees Bruce Lee and Sammo Hung engage in what is essentially an MMA match that Bruce wins by tapout.
Tournament blues
There are other scattered examples of MMA techniques in action movies. In 1987’s Lethal Weapon, Mel Gibson’s character defeats Gary Busey’s bad guy with a triangle choke in a fight sequence that was more convincing than the ones in Lethal Weapon 4 with Jet Li. In Under Siege 2, Steven Seagal shows off a little Brazilian Jiu-JitsU (Well, he does “the guard” anyway). Straight-to-video fluff like Shootfighter, which stars two of the guys from The Karate Kid, contains no actual shootfighting techniques, but a lot of standard low-budget martial arts movie action in a cheesy story about “no holds barred” fighting.
Even after the rise of the UFC, movies about secret martial arts tournaments remain a genre unto themselves – Bloodsport, Best of the Best 2, The Quest, and so on. In France, the format is alive and well, aided by the fact that professional MMA is illegal there. Scorpion treads the familiar ground about a fighter rising to the top of the underground combat circuit. The most interesting aspect of the film is spotting the real-life French MMA stars that make cameos as fighters, including Damien Riccio, Jean-Francois Lenogue and Jerome Le Banner. Here in the UK, Sucker Punch, directed by Malcolm Martin and starring Ian Freeman, is due out next year, while Ten Dead Men features several familiar faces from the UK MMA scene, including Cage Rage promoter Dave O’Donnell as a cage fighter. O’Donnell is busy working on Cage Rage: The Movie, which he plans to go into production in 2008.
In Hollywood, America’s top MMA stars have been taking their first tentative steps into the movies. Randy Couture and Frank Shamrock played the bad guys in the quite stunningly stinky No Rules. Despite having to play a total scumbag in No Rules, a role that required Captain America to spout a stream of profanities (something he never does in public) Couture seems to have caught the acting bug. He made two appearances in TV drama The Unit and is set to have a major role in The Scorpion King: Rise of the Akkadian, the prequel to the 2002 movie that starred Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
A host of MMA stars popped up in the Jet Li vehicle Cradle 2 The Grave, in which Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell got their butts kicked by Li. Liddell, like his former opponent Couture, really seems to have developed a taste for acting. He played a biker in The Death and Life of Bobby Z, made a cameo as himself in an episode of Entourage and even showed up in the Blade TV series. Of the three former UFC light heavyweight champions, Liddell seems the most comfortable on screen, although playing a tough guy who could kick your ass isn’t much of a stretch for the Iceman.
Tito Ortiz played Famine in The Crow: Wicked Prayer, the fourth entry in the Crow series that seems only to prove the law of diminishing returns. Next up for Ortiz is a cameo in Zombie Strippers, which stars his girlfriend Jenna Jameson who is trying to move on from her career as an adult film star by playing a stripper. Baby steps, Jenna, baby steps…
As the sport itself grows exponentially, more film producers are jumping on the bandwagon as it rolls downhill. Bas Rutten starred in straight-to-DVD action flick The Eliminator, in which he scraps with Marco Ruas, a fight that would have been awesome to see in real life. Rutten has charisma to spare, but he hardly fits the profile of a Hollywood leading man, so the challenge for El Guapo will be to overcome the limits of being cast as a fighter and prove he can really act. If you don’t blink you can spot Ruas in Kickboxer 3: The Art of War, but he gets punched out almost as soon as he walks on screen.
Busey and The Russian Bear
If there’s one constant in all these movies about illegal no-holds-barred contests, it's veteran actor Gary Busey. Ever since he was triangle-choked by Mel Gibson, Busey has been inseparable from the nascent MMA movie genre. As Hollywood’s most high profile basket-case, Busey can be found in No Rules, Beyond The Ring and Blizhniy Boy: The Ultimate Fighter, in which Cung Le plays a hero forced to compete in no rules events organized by gangsters. And you thought Pride was out of business. Eric Roberts, David Carradine and Bolo Yeung from Enter The Dragon fill out the cast, alongside UFC 6 tournament champion Oleg Taktarov.
Russian-born Taktarov has surprisingly become the most successful former cage-fighter to switch to acting. After a series of background roles in which he basically had to look tough (invariably playing someone from the Russian military) Taktarov got a chance to show a broader, darker range in the thriller 15 Minutes. Cast as one half of a duo of serial killers, Taktarov’s performance impressed Roger Ebert, the movie critic from the Chicago Sun Times, who wrote, “performances by Roden [as the other killer] and Taktarov that project the kind of flat, empty-headed, blank-faced evil that is so much scarier than evil by people who think about what they're doing.” From 15 Minutes, Taktarov has gone to appear in a number of big-budget Hollywood productions, including Bad Boys II, National Treasure (starring Nicholas Cage), Miami Vice and the TV series Alias. He’s also been kept occupied in his homeland, recently taking a lead role in By the Will of Chingis Khan, a biopic about the legendary Mongol empire builder.
Light at the end of the tunnel
The problem with all the early efforts to bring MMA to the screen is that they have all been low-budget productions, with formulaic scripts and some dodgy direction. The light at the end of the tunnel may be the forthcoming Redbelt, due out in 2008. The movie is written and directed by David Mamet, who wrote the screenplay for a host of hits including The Untouchables, Ronin and Hannibal. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Mike Terry, a jiu-jitsu instructor who turns down the chance to compete in MMA in favor of running a self-defense school, but after he saves a Hollywood action star, played by Tim Allen, in a bar fight, he is gradually seduced by the glitz of Tinseltown and convinced to try his hand in the ring.
“I would say it’s a cross between a 1940s American fight film, like The Set Up, and an homage to the samurai films of Kurosawa,” says Mamet. “The question is how do you film jiu-jitsu, and I think one of the reasons nobody has made a movie about that is because it’s kind of under the radar. It seems like it’s not as filmable as the striking forms.” It was Mamet who directed Randy Couture in his two appearances in The Unit and Mamet’s reputation has allowed him to assemble an army of big names for Redbelt. The list is a who’s who of the combat arts – Dan Inosanto, Gene LeBell, Ray Mancini, Rico Chiapparelli, Jean Jacques Machado, Enson Inoue and Randy Couture. If anyone can make an MMA movie that can stand on its own as a good film, it’s Mamet and the presence of Tim Allen, who is a huge name in the US, should guarantee the film plenty of exposure.
Eastern promise
On the other side of the world in Hong Kong, action choreographer and star Donnie Yen has introduced MMA to Hong Kong audiences in Wilson Yip’s latest, Flash Point. Yen is the son of famous martial arts instructor Bow Sim Mark, who runs the Chinese Wu Shu Research Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, where Yen grew up. He got his break into the Hong Kong movie industry when he was cast in the lead of Yuen Wo-Ping’s Drunken Tai Chi in 1984. Yen and Yuen Wo-Ping collaborated frequently throughout their careers, but where Yuen preferred wirework and effects-heavy action scenes, Yen was always keen to showcase authentic martial arts whenever possible. When Yen teamed up with director Wilson Yip for the movie SPL in 2005, they had a massive hit in Hong Kong and they re-united for the comic book adaptation Dragon Tiger Gate.
What makes their most recent collaboration, Flash Point, noteworthy is for the first time a Hong Kong movie has used MMA techniques in the action choreography. There’s plenty of Hong Kong style mayhem, with people being kicked through concrete pillars and sent flying through the air, but its combined with a range of submission grappling techniques that Yen has added to his choreography after being inspired by watching the UFC. There are flying arm bars galore in the big finale as Yen’s character takes on the Triad boss played by Collin Chou. It will be interesting to see if any other filmmakers in South-East Asia follow Yen’s lead and try introducing MMA into their action movies.
As David Mamet pointed out, filming MMA for a general audience presents its own set of problems. Anyone can watch a boxing match and at least have a superficial understanding of what’s going on – two people punch each other, one wins, one loses. Submission grappling requires the audience to understand what it means when someone gets caught in a triangle choke. This may explain why no one has been able to stage a completely convincing MMA fight in a movie so far.
The complexities of ground fighting and the mechanics of submission holds may simply elude most viewers, particularly if they’ve never seen a real MMA match. That’s why much of action in films like No Rules and Scorpion focuses on the striking side of MMA. When characters apply submission holds, they are either quickly escaped or result in something breaking so the audience understands who has won the fight and why. Still, if watching No Rules inspires someone to tune in to the next UFC or episode of The Ultimate Fighter, in the end it will be the sport itself that comes out on top.
...
