A couple of days ago, our resident martial arts movie fanatic, EJ, wrote up a Bruce Lee movies ranked list, and the response has been great. It also got us thinking: as great as Lee is, there have been a whole lot of iconic martial arts movie stars over the years—but looking back, which one, arguably, is the best?
It’s a loaded question, as everyone has pretty passionate opinions. To many, Bruce Lee is definitive, and certainly he was the first modern martial arts movie star. However, just as strong a case could be made for some of the Shaw Bros performers who pre-dated him, such as Jimmy Wang-Yu. Yet, Lee was the first one with international appeal, and it was his rise that gave birth to the genre as an international export. Without him, none of the big international stars like Jackie Chan, Chuck Norris, or JCVD would have happened.
So—of them all, who is the best? When listing our choices, I tried to follow some criteria in order to keep the list manageable. For one thing, I wanted the actors’ work to be more or less defined by the fact that they use martial arts in movies. I also wanted all of the people on this list to have some kind of international footprint, as I know I’m probably leaving a lot of great regional stars off the list. I also don’t like it when Asian action movies all get lumped into the same category, as the kind of stuff someone like Chow Yun-Fat did has nothing at all to do with martial arts, so he doesn’t belong on this list. I love Chow, but I think the thing that hurt his U.S. career was producers dropping him into martial arts movies like Bulletproof Monk, which he was ill-suited for.
At any rate, take the vote below, let us know who your favorite is, and write in anyone you think we missed in the comments.
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