MMA in the Movies: How the Sport Has Changed Action Flicks

Action movie fight sequences have typically lacked one important thing: realistic fighting.

Think of Bruce Lee handily dispatching dozens of clumsy attackers with acrobatic kicks accompanied by his trademark yelps. Imagine the fantastical kung fu films in which fighters leap across treetops, guided by magical forces (and invisible cables). Recall Rocky Balboa enduring 15 rounds of blood-spewing punishment before launching a flurry of heroic haymakers.

Exciting? Absolutely. Realistic? Not even close.

For decades, Hollywood fight choreographers got away with creating impossibly elaborate martial arts sequences partly because so few people knew what a real martial arts fight would look like.

But those days are gone. The rise of mixed martial arts to mainstream popularity has not only launched a cottage industry of films directly based on MMA, but has changed the way fight scenes are made across the entire action genre.

Nobody knows this better than martial artist and film actor Scott Adkins, whose movie career mirrors the evolving tastes of action fans.

Scott Adkins in Undisputed 2 (photo via: ScottAdkins.com)

“I always wanted to get into films, so a lot of my martial arts training when I was younger was geared toward high kicks and flips,” the British-born Adkins told Fighters.com.

“But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed an appreciation for the art of real fighting — and there’s certainly a lot of MMA in fight scenes now.”

Adkins holds black belts in several martial arts, works out relentlessly at an MMA gym in the UK and is fully trained kickboxing instructor, though his passion remains with film acting.

Adkins has appeared in roughly two-dozen films including The Bourne Ultimatum, The Expendables 2 and, most recently, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, alongside Jean-Claude Van Damme and former UFC Heavyweight Champion Andrei Arlovski.

His film career began in 2001, around the same time the UFC was gaining a degree of respectability after years of being widely decried as barbaric “human cockfighting.”

In one of his earlier films, Unleashed, Adkins squares off against Jet Li in an empty swimming pool surrounded by maniacal bettors screaming for blood – that is, not far off from how MMA was imagined by its critics.

But more recent work, such as a pair of Undisputed sequels and The Expendables 2, Adkins has seen a shift toward more realistic MMA-based fight sequences (albeit with the violence and gore still ratcheted up for thrills).

Like many boys of his generation, Adkins was entranced by Bloodsport, in which a then-unknown Jean-Claude Van Damme emerged as a noble fighter in a tournament that pitted fighters from different disciplines against one another.

“You watch it now and it’s so dated, and the fight scenes don’t compare to what we have these days, but at the time it was top notch.”

Around the same time, Mel Gibson’s character in the first Lethal Weapon film introduced movie buffs to something foreign to Hollywood fight sequences: the Brazilian fighting arts of jiu-jitsu and Capoeira. To lend the fight scenes authenticity, UFC legend Rorion Gracie served as a technical advisor.

Since then, a growing number of Hollywood directors and choreographers have looked to MMA for inspiration and guidance.  Director Guy Ritchie, for example, is a student of Brazilian jiu-jitsu reportedly recruited another Gracie, Renzo, to oversee the action sequences in the Sherlock Holmes movies (look for a triangle choke during a fight on a moving train during the sequel).

Of course, the rise of MMA in popular culture has also inspired a slew of movies dramatizing the lives and struggles of cage fighters, with varying levels of palatability.  The 2011 film Warrior earned mostly positive reviews and is considered one of the best of the genre, while countless other straight-to-DVD releases don’t fare as well (see: Never Surrender, Shootfighter, Unrivaled).

Dozens of past and present UFC fighters have transitioned from the Octagon to the silver screen, and a conservative estimate puts the number of MMA-themed movies somewhere around 100, with more surely on the way.

To an actor like Adkins, who has traded (choreographed) fisticuffs with UFC legends including Arlovski and Chuck Liddell, the rise of MMA-inspired filmmaking has breathed new life into a beloved old genre.

“Now everyone wants to see UFC, and everyone has some sort of knowledge about the ground game and other aspects of the sport,” he says.

“To work with these fighters is just brilliant. There’s really no one fitter than fighters.”

The post MMA in the Movies: How the Sport Has Changed Action Flicks appeared first on Fighters.com.

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