The Best Hallway Fights From ‘Oldboy’ to ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’
Frenetic hallway fights are a heart-pounding, edge-of-your-seat hallmark of the action genre. Here are some you shouldn’t miss.
Big battles with sweeping cinematography are impressive to watch on a big screen, but hallway fights are where action shines. Claustrophobic locations limit movement and escape routes and can make situations more desperate and frantic. They quickly become fight-to-the-death/knock-out situations. Fighters rely on close combat, and things get deadly fast.
For filmgoers, it can mean creative camera work and crazy stunt choreography that takes advantage of walls, ceilings, stairs, and grabbing furniture and tools to use as weapons. They’re one of my favorite action sequences because of how creative they force creators to be. This list includes some that aren’t traditional hallway fights, but they’re all hyper-violent marathons set in cramped quarters.
John Wick Chapter 4
Everyone in every theater groaned at John’s first painful tumble down the Rue Foyatier. It’s open air, but the fact that it’s from point A to point B with no option to veer off course makes it a hallway fight. It is an uphill battle against an army of thugs, and the possibility of being thrown down the stone steps adds even more of a challenge.
Marvel’s Daredevil
This one-shot hallway fight is part of season one’s beginning. Murdoch takes a group of toughs to rescue a kidnapped kid. They one-upped it a few times over the show’s run (“New York’s Finest” adds stairs, and “Blindsided” adds another 6 minutes), but this is the scene that really established Murdoch as a badass. It was also the first of the Netflix Marvel shows to tackle one – they became known for them, and it all culminated in The Defenders taking on a bunch of security guys in a hallway (S1E3).
Old Boy (2005)
The way this one-shot is built is pure genius – removing a long wall and following Dae‑su as he pummels his way through the mob of gangsters. The music isn’t overbearing; you can hear every yell, every groan, every hit. Everyone is tired and injured – and it shows. The motions get clumsy. There’s desperation from all sides. It’s just brilliantly done and what all hallway fights should be measured against.
The Batman
It’s short at 27 seconds, but it makes an impact due to being lit entirely by flashlight, a staccato of gunfire, and bullets bouncing off Bruce’s armor. Greig Fraser and Matt Reeves made what could have been a typical gunfight into something truly interesting.
Atomic Blonde
I’m sorry if you didn’t get to see this on a big screen – it was amazing. In this one-shot scene, Lorraine fights her way through an apartment building while protecting an asset. It gives elevation to a typically limited-space fight by starting on a staircase and rolling into a two-bedroom apartment with one exit. It is a savage loop.
The foley and ADR crew had a tough/fun time with this one – it has no backing music.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Don’t challenge Cap if you’re a normal human. Just don’t. Even if you’re a bunch of highly trained operatives in an elevator. This scene gave the long-time stunt team screen time and proved that Cap isn’t just a smiling guy who does PSAs.
The Raid: Redemption
Iko Uwais makes a name for himself as Rama, a member of a SWAT team trying to take down a drug kingpin holed up in an apartment building. You can almost count this entire movie as a hallway fight – it goes through hallways, stairways, and limited exit rooms nearly non-stop for an hour and forty minutes.
Extraction
This one-shot takes Chris Hemsworth through an apartment building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It also involves the kidnapped boy he’s been paid to save, a bunch of police, and several innocent bystanders. The movie – from Joe Russo (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and long-time stunt coordinator and performer Sam Hargrave – has a lot of close combat scenes in tight spaces and packed streets.
The sequel ups the action and continuous shots, but it’s hard to beat his scene.
The Matrix
The scene is set in a technologically advanced world, but it was shot with practical effects and Yuen Woo-ping’s wirework because CG wasn’t quite there yet. Less hand-to-hand and more flying bullets, flowing jackets, and 90s techno. The place is rubble by the time Trinity and Neo make it to the elevator.
Inception
The tumbling fight in a hotel hallway is the most impressive of the shots in Nolan’s seventh movie. It even goes zero-G for a while. Joseph Gordon Levitt did all of his own stunts for this one. Here’s how they did it without extensive CG, all in camera on film.
Rogue One
The end of Rogue One reminded people that Darth Vader isn’t a joke. Resistance fighters scramble to get the information that had been sacrificed into the right hands as the lightsaber-wielding monster picks them off like they’re nothing.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Every hero gets a feature in this fight that is filled with slo-mo and brain-bending shots that get right into the action. It’s as goofy as it is violent, and it has the perfect needle drop.
Other Hallway Fights Worth Mentioning
Those aren’t the only ones.
- Black Widow in Iron Man 2
- Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass
- Nightcrawler in X2
- T-1000 vs. Model 101 in T2: Judgement Day
- Bullet Train – it’s all it has
- Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian
- The Punisher in Daredevil Season 2
- The stairway in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
