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Elaborating martial arts actors' style of onscreen fighting


DiP

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Individual styles make fight scenes. Over the years I've kept reading Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan's construction of fight scenes with their own brand styles. How would you properly describe them in detail as well as these following forefront martial arts actors (past and present):

Jimmy Wang Yu

Gordon Liu

Sammo Hung

Yuen Biao

Jean-Claude Van Damme

Steven Seagal

Jet Li

Jason Statham

Donnie Yen

Tony Jaa

Iko Uwais

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Cognoscente

Jimmy's fights are like what if a martial artist got into a real fight. He's almost like an everyman. I think his films would have been more popular had he been depicted as a regular guy who gets into scraps as opposed to being a Kung Fu expert. He could have been the martial arts equivalent to MacGyver - a role that Jackie adopted as time went on.

Yuen Biao is the ultimate balancing act in martial arts cinema. No many how flips and leaps that he does, he can jump or land on a small bit of elevated architecture in an elegant way that can only be successfully mimicked in cartoons.

Steven Seagal, for all of his faults, is living proof that you don't need the best kicks to survive in a fight. I like his Aikido style. I wish that he got into a screen fight with a Hapkido master during his golden years.

Jet Li is the human equivalent to a tornado. His style is so circular and fluid that it's almost unreal. It's the martial arts equivalent to ballet. Like Bruce Lee, there's always the underlying feeling that his back problem prevented him from soaring to new heights of athleticism.

Speaking of Jet's ailments, a SCMP article ("Martial arts superstar Jet Li has been plagued by injuries since his teenage days") revealed...

"I’ve suffered from illnesses, for example hyperthyroidism. I am fat but I can’t lose weight because I am taking medication for my illness. The medication is to control my heart beat. That’s why I can’t do lots of exercise,” said Li, who revealed his resting heart rate was around 130 to 140 beats per minute (a normal resting heart rate is between 60 and 100bpm).

He suffered his first major injury at 18 when he tore his knee and required seven and a half hours of surgery. He retired from competition in 1979 to focus on a movie career and got his first big break when he starred in Shaolin Temple in 1982, but the injuries were already beginning to mount up for the young actor, including a broken leg.

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