There's plenty of good fights out there recently... this writer just hasn't watched them.
Korea is putting out a ton of great action. Obviously stuff like Oldboy and Man From Nowhere, but watch The Yellow Sea, or the recent Netflix show Bloodhounds and be amazed (though the ending kinda falls off a cliff). Worst of Evil too, some solid stuff in there. The Japanese show Avalanche had some amazing ones, and the movie Hell Dogs. China's Longest Day in Chang'an has a lot of good fights and is visually one of the best shows in years. Ip Man and countless other martial or wuxia films (though the vibes are different)... Raging Fire (last fight was amazing), anything with Donnie Yen. Indonesia and Thailand are out here too with a lot of lower budget stuff. This is all just off the top of my head.
Admittedly that's all SE Asia, US sensibilities tend more toward gunplay since in this country people pull a gun out when someone looks at them wrong. There's no martial tradition. But film and TV is global now - the US outlook on fights was, frankly, never that great. It took people like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to come in and liven things up. If you want good fights, you just have to look outside Hollywood. In a way that's always been true.
Hacker Cinema
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There's plenty of good fights out there recently... this writer just hasn't watched them.
Korea is putting out a ton of great action. Obviously stuff like Oldboy and Man From Nowhere, but watch The Yellow Sea, or the recent Netflix show Bloodhounds and be amazed (though the ending kinda falls off a cliff). Worst of Evil too, some solid stuff in there. The Japanese show Avalanche had some amazing ones, and the movie Hell Dogs. China's Longest Day in Chang'an has a lot of good fights and is visually one of the best shows in years. Ip Man and countless other martial or wuxia films (though the vibes are different)... Raging Fire (last fight was amazing), anything with Donnie Yen. Indonesia and Thailand are out here too with a lot of lower budget stuff. This is all just off the top of my head.
Admittedly that's all SE Asia, US sensibilities tend more toward gunplay since in this country people pull a gun out when someone looks at them wrong. There's no martial tradition. But film and TV is global now - the US outlook on fights was, frankly, never that great. It took people like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to come in and liven things up. If you want good fights, you just have to look outside Hollywood. In a way that's always been true.
Man from Nowhere is a good entrypoint for Korean movies.