It was still the domain of tough guys looking to kick ass and sculpt their bodies. This was before The Karate Kid (1985) turned martial arts into a youth craze. Growing up in Israel in the 1970s, he saw Hong Kong imports like Enter the Dragon (1973) and Fist of Fury (1972) around the same time that the first karate dojos opened in tiny postwar Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Millennium Filmsįor Florentine, 61, movies and martial arts are fatefully entangled. Isaac Florentine directs Scott Adkins (left) in a fight for Undisputed III. How these two true believers found each other is a window into how the action genre has survived into the 21st century, and the singular, if lesser-known, creators who have done the hard work of keeping it alive. He’s an excellent actor and amazing screen fighter.” “He should be the next James Bond,” Florentine told me later. “Well, I would if I was offered, wouldn’t I? But at the end of the day, I can only deal with what I’m offered.” “I get these messages on Facebook: ‘Why don’t you go play James Bond? Why don’t you go be in a Marvel film?’” Adkins said.
A self-described blue-collar director, Florentine is happy to hold down his status as a cult favorite Adkins wants nothing more than to compete with Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves for poster-topping roles.
None of their films required Oscar winners faking a ball check.Īdkins and Florentine both have an almost religious commitment to old-school action filmmaking, and yet they differ significantly in how they approach their respective careers. A set of spinoff sequels to Walter Hill’s 2002 drama Undisputed, which swapped prison boxing for MMA cage, achieved a Raging Bull-level synthesis of talents. Ninja: Shadow of a Tear was their Taxi Driver. Jackson or Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Isaac Florentine, a martial artist and veteran B-movie director with a sterling reputation for blunt-force filmmaking, forged Adkins’ cult status as the best screen fighter in the direct-to-video circuit. Not unlike the special actor-director partnerships of Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L. Johnson (2019’s acclaimed Triple Threat and Avengement) are renowned for concocting the best fight scenes of the past decade, packed into 90-minute-or-less genre rockets.
In the 2000s, Adkins found a way around Hollywood, becoming the go-to leading man for a band of filmmakers who believed in “damn hard work.” In the modern action pantheon established by martial arts magazines, movie blogs, and connoisseurs like author Outlaw Vern, directors like John Hyams (the Universal Soldier sequels) or Jesse V. “I’d like to see it and believe it,” Adkins said. Why hire a karate expert when A-listers could be made into killing machines in post-production?Īdkins remembers Greengrass telling him, “Scott, the less you see, the more you believe.” Yet for a certain action star, seeing is the whole point. Whether you blame choppy edits, tricky framing, or CGI, the sun was setting for actors with physical ability and dexterity. I wouldn’t choose to do it that way, but I understand why he does it.”
“When the Bourne films came along, they figured out how to shake the camera in such a way that you could kind of disguise the failings of the performer,” he told me this past summer, calling in from London. The role was exactly what he needed as an actor breaking into studio films in 2007, but in retrospect, that was also a time when the action genre as a whole was sinking. In the third Bourne film, he played a thankless CIA officer, fodder for the dizzying karate chops of Damon’s super soldier.
When Hollywood blockbusters like Doctor Strange or The Brothers Grimsby need a martial artist who can actually zip up walls or tumble with a pair of pistols, they call Adkins. This was the era of Hollywood casting, in which Oscar-winning celebrities like Damon took the lead roles in action films, and guys like Adkins, the trained screen warrior, took blows below the belt when stunts went awry.Īdkins, 43, is an action star in the mold of Jean-Claude Van Damme, a handsome and charismatic performer who can also spin kick high enough to clip a guy’s head. This particular slip, on the set of 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum, only really stung because it was a hard reminder.
Life as a professional martial screen fighter had whisked Adkins from Hong Kong to Bulgaria and everywhere in between, and served up plenty of fouls along the way. There was nothing personal when Matt Damon kicked Scott Adkins in the groin.