Intro And Final Fight Scene – Gangs Of New York
The real question here was not whether to put this movie on the list, it was which fight scene do you put on. Now, I know many of you might scoff at this, as you expected this list to be all hand-to-hand fights. But nowhere up above in the title does it say “bare knuckle,” or any such thing. I simply said “Brutal Fight Scenes,” and this movie has quite a few of them.
Also, don’t get mixed up. Yes, these people used weapons, but this was still a man-against-man skirmish. There were no guns or anything. Just handheld weapons and some fucking crazy dudes.
Gangs of New York belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays Bill the Butcher, aka one of the most memorable bad guys ever put on film. From the moment we first meet him, even though we know nothing about him, we feel fear. He seems like a wild animal forced into human skin and made to control himself, yet you can see that he’s about to burst out at any given moment.
Though the fight at the beginning is absolutely brutal, especially when Day-Lewis sticks Liam Neeson like a pig, the real brutality lies in the final fight. It is here that we see Leonardo DiCaprio avenging his father’s death, fighting the Butcher in the same streets where his dad died years earlier. Just two dudes, fully intent on murdering each other. Kind of makes you wish that we still functioned that way, doesn’t it?
Wait, no it doesn’t.