10 Best CG-Free Martial Arts Movies

7. Fist Of Legend

A few years before Yuen Woo-ping stunned mainstream audiences with his fight choreography in The Matrix, he crafted combat scenes for Jet Li in 1994s Fist of Legend, a film which, like Ip Man, is set during the Sino-Japanese War of the 1930s. Remaking any Bruce Lee movie is always going to invite potential criticism, but Jet Li's take on Fist of Fury more than delivers the level of action fans would hope for. The conflict between the Chinese locals and the occupying Japanese army might not be explored with the depths of an historical drama, but then that would have made for a considerably duller movie - after all, we're here to see Jet Li fighting, and few martial arts stars combine speed, agility and power quite like him (while filming his scenes in Lethal Weapon 4, director Richard Donner reportedly had to ask him to slow down his moves as he couldn't tell what was going on). Fist of Legend is a highlight of Li's career, although sadly its box office takings rank it as one of his least commercially successful. That aside, it was the film which brought the attention of the Wachowski brothers to Yuen Woo-ping, and in this respect its influence on future action movies cannot be understated.