Hallway Fight Scene (Oldboy)
Last but certainly not least is the brutal hallway fight scene from Park Chan-wook’s 2003 South Korean action thriller Oldboy. Taking place after Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) locates the hotel prison where he was held captive for 15 years, the fight looks like something out of a side-scrolling beat-em-up video game because of the way the camera glides along the corridor in one continuous shot. It’s simple, effective, and extremely violent as Dae-su defeats more than a dozen guards. But the hero isn’t without injury here and even spends a large portion of the fight with a knife jammed into his back.
This is the first movie I thought of when I saw the impressive Shangi-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings bus fight, which appears to pay homage to Oldboy when Shang-Chi is fighting while walking from one end of the bus to the other. I’m not sure if that was intentional or not, but it was a brilliant decision.