Scott Adkins has been in many outstanding action movies, but what are his personal picks for his five best of his career? Beginning in television work on the BBC and a handful of mostly small roles in Hong Kong action films in the early 2000s, Scott Adkins has gradually risen to become one of the most popular and respected martial artists in modern action films — to be the point of even being fan cast as Dalton in a Road House reboot. While he’s largely known for straight-to-video action films, he’s also one of the people most directly responsible for that once scoffed at cinema sub-set now very frequently outdoing big-screen action films with much larger resources.
Adkins is best known as Yuri Boyka in the Undisputed series, but a rundown of his resume includes some of the best martial arts-packed action films of the 21st century, including the Ninja films, Eliminators, Ip Man 4:
The Finale, and The Expendables-style ensemble of martial artists Triple Threat. When the news broke that Adkins would be joining John Wick: Chapter 4, there was no doubt left to be had that he’d become one of the quintessential modern-day action heroes. Adkins has also become a prolific YouTuber, showing tutorials on his impressive kicking techniques and interviewing many of his colleagues in the industry on his YouTube series The Art of Action. Meanwhile, when production was halted (the very first day) of the Dolph Lundgren-directed Castle Falls at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Adkins took to YouTube to offer his rundown of what he feels is the best of his own work. Here are Scott Adkins’ picks for his top five best of his own movies.
5. Ninja: Shadow of a Tear (2013)
Four years after the solid but not quite fantastic Ninja, the return of Adkins’ other Boyka-level character Casey Bowman in Ninja II: Shadow of a Tear was arguably one of the best pure ninja movies ever made. Describing Shadow of a Tear as the toughest film he’s ever done, surpassing even the rigors of the Undisputed films, Adkins dealt with an unexpected back injury while filming the movie’s bar fight, which called upon stunt man Brahim Achabbakhe to fill out some of Casey’s kicks. Praising both Florentine as “the greatest martial arts director living in America”
and fight coordinator Tim Man, whom he fights in one of Ninja II’s best action scenes, Adkins also speaks highly of Kane Kosugi’s performance as Nakabara, describing his and Casey’s final showdown as the film’s best action scene and Kosugi himself as “an underappreciated performer.” With the film’s darker revenge story, more fleshed out portrayal of Casey, and exceptional action scenes that are never more than ten minutes apart, fans of the ninja movies that Shadow of A Tear connects to are in for a blast.
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4. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)
The convoluted history of the Universal Soldier franchise hit its peak with 2012’s Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning. Coming off of 2009’s surprisingly potent semi-reboot Universal Soldier: Regeneration, Day of Reckoning sees Adkins as John, man on a revenge mission against original Unisol Luc Devereaux, played by legendary martial-arts-movie icon Jean-Claude Van Damme, only to slowly realize that his reality is not what it seems. In another case of Adkins working around an injury, he tore his ACL six weeks prior to production, but kept the injury to himself out of fear of being recast. Adkins also praises the direction of John Hyams in Day of Reckoning,
Particularly with the twist of John’s implanted false memories and vendetta against Devereaux making him the true antagonist by the end. Adkins describes the plot twist as “a bold move by a filmmaker,” while considering it “almost like an honor” for Van Damme’s Devereaux to allow John his victory. Day of Reckoning is perhaps the most unrelentingly brutal Scott Adkins movie yet, and the film’s fight sequences, coordinated by Larnell Stovall of Titans fame, are must-see for fans of the martial arts movie genre.
3. Accident Man (2018)
Scott Adkins took a more hands-on role in the creative process of Accident Man as both producer and co-writer, with the movie having been his pet project for years. Based on the Accident Man strip in the ’90s British comic book Toxic!, Adkins plays Mike Fallon, an assassin who specializes in masking hits as accidents, who goes on a revenge mission after the murder of his pregnant ex-girlfriend. Being a fan of the comic as a kid, Adkins describes Accident Man as “the closest to my personality,” and while he’s known for edgier anti-heroes like Fallon, Accident Man brings a dark sense of humor never really seen in an Adkins-led movie before (Adkins’ The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud later being a more family-friendly comedy for him.)
Helmed by longtime stuntman Jesse V. Johnson, Accident Man is plenty action-packed, Adkins classifying the dojo fight between Fallon and fellow assassins Mick and Mack (played Michael Jai White and Ray Park) pulled right from the comic, as the film’s highlight. Lady Bloodfight’s Amy Johnston is also a sinister rival to Fallon as Jane the Ripper, so named for reasons that fall right in line with the film’s very R-rated sense of humor. With Accident Man 2 in the works, viewers are surely in for more of Scott Adkins’ predilection for black comedy that the first Accident Man showcased with nefarious glee.
2. Undisputed II: Last Man Standing (2006)
Yuri Boyka’s boast of being the Most Complete Fighter in the World was put to the test in Undisputed 3: Redemption, and the movie left no doubt by the end that Scott Adkins — who saved the Undisputed franchise — had the chops to be a major action movie star. Boyka’s defeat and shattered knee in Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing leaves him depressed and demoralized at the beginning of Undisputed 3, but after healing his knee, Boyka wins a place an international prison MMA competition, with the victor to win his freedom, while forming a tenuous alliance with fellow fighter Turbo (Mykel Shannon Jenkins). Described by Adkins as his personal favorite of the Boyka-starring Undisputed movies, Adkins says that based upon the response to Undisputed 2, “We could see people really seemed to gravitate towards Boyka as a character.”RELATED:
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Adkins describes Boyka’s inviolable honor code as being want enabled his shift to the protagonist of Undisputed 3 while allowing the story to “not change the character too much.” Boyka runs into a whole new challenge with a corrupt prison apparatus, and a tournament being fixed in the favor of Colombian fighter Dolor, played with delectable narcissism by Marko Zaror, (who’s also aboard the John Wick train in Chapter 4). The fight scenes of Undisputed 3 come fast and increasingly spectacular every time, including Adkins’ battle with big-screen Capoeira wizard Lateef Crowder Dos Santos, while Boyka’s and Dolor’s final showdown is described by Adkins as the best fight of his career. Despite the series’ gimmick of shifting villains in one film to anti-heroes in the next, Boyka continued as the series’ lead with the next installment, Boyka: Undisputed, simply because by Undisputed 3, the franchise had found its perfect star in the Most Complete Fighter in the World.
1. Avengement (2019)
Scott Adkins’ pick for his best of his own movies is one that, like Accident Man, showed his versatility as an actor, but from the opposite end of the spectrum as a prison convict far more merciless than even Boyka in his villain days in 2019’s Avengement. Adkins plays Cain Burress, who takes a group of local gangsters hostage in a London pub to regale them with the story of his wrongful imprisonment and significant facial disfigurement, as part of his plot to enact revenge on the man behind it all. Adkins describes getting the audience to sympathize with Cain as “an interesting challenge for us,” while feeling that “the trajectory from him as this naive kid to this absolute monster is very believable” in how the flashback-heavy story unfolds.
For low-budget action movies like Avengement, short shooting schedules aren’t unusual, but it’s downright astonishing for Avengement to have been filmed in just 17 days. By Adkins’ own estimation, “This film has no right to have as much action in it as what it does on a 17 day shoot”, and certainly with the build-up to the climactic, Road House-level bar brawl of the movie, the fact that quite arguably no bar fight before or since has outdone it is incredible even by the standards of Adkins’ career. Adkins even had to fight hard for the necessary time for the finale when the schedule was shortened by half a day. The results more than speak for themselves, making it that much easier to see why Scott Adkins selects Avengement as his choice for his personal favorite of his own movies.