- It is a mistake to engage and stay.
You're going to get flanked.
Hit, move, relocate, and create a chase.
And we see Oh Dae-su do that in this fight scene.
(dramatic music)
- Hey everyone, welcome back
to another episode of "Scenic Fights"
Fight Scene Breakdown.
I'm Logan Lo.
- I'm Chad Vázquez.
- And today we're breaking down the classic hammer scene
from the original 2003 "Oldboy,"
starring Choi Min-sik as Oh Dae-su.
It's actually our second hammer scene that we've done,
the first one being "Raid 2."
So if you haven't seen that, definitely go check that out.
All right, so you ready for this?
- Yes, I guess, yeah.
- Okay, so Oh Dae-su has a knife against a captive's throat.
That's a lot of dudes, man.
- [Logan] Did he just drop the knife?
- [Chad] He did.
- [Logan] Okay.
- [Logan] I probably wouldn't have done that.
Okay, so he's left with the hammer.
He's doing a lot of low shots.
He's doing good targeting here.
Flanked the guy,
but is himself flanked by all the opponents.
- [Chad] Yeah.
- So originally he had people in the funnel
and he allowed himself to get flanked,
and now he's paying for it.
Ooh, that's a lot of abuse.
- [Chad] It's a beat down.
- All right, you know what, I'm gonna say in real fight,
I would call this right now.
- Yeah.
- [Logan] What's interesting is you see
they're not actually using the weapons that they have.
- [Chad] Yeah.
- I mean, I understand cinematically
why they wanted to do that,
why they wanted to show this amazing scene
and have this person survive.
But in reality, right, they're taking their sticks-
- Yeah.
- And they're just stomping him like this,
as well as stomping him with feet.
- Yes, that makes sense, yeah.
- [Logan] Okay, he just had a stick broken against his back.
He's wildly now swinging the hammer.
- [Chad] Now there's a group stomping session.
- Interesting, so he's hitting the feet.
That makes sense, right?
He's a downed opponent, and he's gonna hit
the closest thing to him.
Slamming this onto someone's toes,
you're breaking feet, you're incapacitating them.
So that makes sense.
Unfortunately, whereas in the beginning,
he had them in the funnel,
which means everyone's in front of him.
So they're all approaching him.
Not one-on-one, but at least two or three on one
versus all 30 or 40 or how many people are there.
Here he's gotten flanked from both sides
and now he's paying for it.
Oh, did he just take a knife in?
Oh, he took a knife in the back.
- [Chad] It was a knife in the back.
The side of his back.
- [Logan] He's not having a good day.
- With the knife in his back,
how's it playing a role besides maybe bleeding?
- Yeah, I mean, so it's interesting.
This is yet another instance, and we've seen it before,
in "Bourne Identity," in "Nobody,"
where the weapon is impaled in the person.
Here it's in his back,
so he probably can't extricate it easily to reach it.
- Sure, yeah.
- There is a danger if you have a long weapon,
like an arrow, an arrowhead sticking into an animal,
as the animal runs,
because the longer length of the arrow is outside,
it's cutting up the inside of the animal.
Here, because it's a much shorter weapon,
it's a knife in the back,
you don't have that jiggle as much,
but certainly it's continuing to cut as he moves.
He just hopped back up.
Oh, bam.
Front kick.
He's just punching.
Okay, he regained the funnel.
- [Chad] All right, so we have some classic boxing, right?
Jabs, one-twos.
He's throwing hooks here.
All right, so now the guys are getting a little intimidated.
So there's a mentality,
a mental factor happening now of fear.
Okay, one goes in and, oh cool, a liver shot.
Okay. - Nice.
- [Chad] He's backing up, leaving distance here.
Allowing one guy to come at him at a time.
Just hitting them with his hard strikes,
which meant the guy must punch like-
- Like an ox, right? - Like a robot, yeah.
Boom, okay.
He's getting flanked.
Lot of weaving.
- Really nice weaving too, I have to say.
- All right, boom, nice jab.
Yeah, he's backing up, letting them come one at a time.
- Right. - Which makes sense.
And this guy.
- Chad, guarantee that would be me.
If I'm in a group fighting, I'll be like,
"Ah, go on without me."
- You're flopping, yeah.
I'd have been playing dead.
- Sure. - Way by the door.
- Not stupid. - Yeah.
- Not stupid, people. - Nah, man, what?
No.
And this guy does not, yeah, he's like,
"My crew's down, I gotta flop now.
I ain't handling this."
- Yeah, that's totally me.
- Yeah, and it, he just-
(laughs) He just goes, "Yeah." - Oh, two, three.
- Stops that fear right away.
- Yeah.
Yeah, I like how they're showing he's tired.
'Cause I would be exhausted by now.
- [Chad] Yeah.
- All right, listen.
Oh Dae-su, man, that guy is made of iron.
'Cause I'm not taking that much abuse, I don't think.
- Nah.
- Oh, he picked up a weapon again.
Hammer. - Hammer.
- He's just kind of holding it and not, oh.
- They're just throwing sticks.
- They're just throwing stuff at him.
- (laughs) That's...
- They're just throwing the sticks at him.
He's backing away.
He's like, "I'm out."
- Trying to show just at least some effort.
- And end scene.
Now, before we continue, just want you to know,
this is one of my favorite fight scenes in general.
Having said that though,
we understand that it was shot cinematically a certain way
for a certain look and aesthetic.
It looks really cool.
But Chad and I are just looking at
the real world applications
of the fighting techniques that are used.
First of all, how Oh Dae-su could have used Sinawali,
double weapons, rather than just
sticking to the single hammer.
And let's also talk about fight tactics.
You know, keeping people in the funnel and what that means.
- Let's do it.
- So in the beginning of the scene,
Oh Dae-su has both a knife and a hammer.
However, he drops the knife and relies only on the hammer
in his dominant right hand.
Two things happen.
One, a man runs at him and throws a big haymaker.
He ducks underneath the haymaker, comes around, spins,
slams the leg to the second person
and then continues with his progression.
It makes sense, but it's suboptimal
when he had access to a secondary weapon.
As we saw with Hammer Girl in "The Raid 2,"
she used two weapons simultaneously
so she could attack at the same time,
attack and defend, or defend and attack.
Let's look and see what Oh Dae-su could have done,
had he had the hammer still in his dominant hand
and a knife in his secondary hand.
So once again, an assailant is running at me.
I merely hold out my weapon.
He runs into it or not.
If he doesn't run into it, I'm no worse off
than I did not have a knife in the first place.
But we assume arguendo, ideally he runs into it.
I pull this out, I continue my spin,
I slam this into the knee,
but now I have the additional weapon.
I finish off that assailant now.
So now I have two less assailants to worry about.
Whatever the number is, let's say it was 40,
now I have 38 to deal with,
and I can continue my progression.
With all of that, he now has two things of lethality
with which to deal with a multitude of people.
Why would he give up one weapon?
That doesn't ring true to me,
even for someone that's not trained.
Clearly it was a director's choice
to have that scene be a hammer-only scene.
And I understand that.
So we talk about environment a lot
when it comes into fighting.
Here we're gonna talk about something called the funnel.
The funnel is essentially what's in front of you.
So if you've seen the movie "300"
that talks about the Battle of Thermopylae.
The only reason why 300,
300 Spartans could fight off an entire army of Persians
is because they didn't have to deal with
all of the Persians at once.
Instead, they just had to deal with
the number that were in front of them.
So they could finish off the first group in front of them,
and then finish off the second group and so forth and so on.
By maintaining the funnel,
there is a chance that Oh Dae-su would have won
in a real fight against multiple attackers.
Why?
Because he only has to deal with
the one or two in front of him.
However, by breaking the funnel,
by allowing himself to get flanked.
So Chad, if you get behind me.
As I'm attacking this person,
nothing's stopping the person from behind me
from attacking me in some manner.
What are you doing back there?
One of your primary objectives is to maintain that funnel
and not allow yourself to get flanked.
Now, later on in the scene,
Oh Dae-su recreates a second funnel.
He actually goes through everyone,
and then now is on the other side of the funnel.
So now this is a perfect opportunity
for Chad to talk about fighting multiple attackers
without any weapon unarmed.
- So Oh Dae-su is now moving forward
with mostly boxing now at this point.
Within the funnel that Logan mentioned,
the first attacker that engages Oh Dae-su,
he goes with a lead punch where Oh Dae-su does a snapback.
So punch happens, here we go.
Now, both fighters engage here with the second punch
and they kind of lock up here.
But now look.
Logan is open for this liver shot.
From here, he performs this turning action,
right to a spot there.
Now lemme tell you something.
I have been dropped twice in my training by liver shots.
One by knees and definitely by a punch.
That is no joke.
It feels like there's this aggressive,
painful cramp inside your organ
and your whole body covers up.
And I'm telling you, when a good liver shot lands,
you are not fighting back.
You are at the mercy of what that person wants next of you.
You're just in a ball in the fetal position,
and if they wanna do whatever, it's happening, bro.
I'm sorry.
That's what it is.
So it is a very powerful shot.
In a boxing context, or just let's say general fighting,
a good way of setting it up is also
just be aggressive on the neck, right on the head here.
So I can use combinations to get a guard up.
And when I see that, boom, that's opening.
So for example, I throw a one-two.
Level change, and my head moves to the side.
So now when I rotate, that's my hook.
So from here, as I pull back, whomp.
That's my liver shot from there.
And that's what Oh Dae-su does
to the first guy that comes at him.
And it's a really cool technique,
and it's very effective when it lands right.
So Oh Dae-su, he delivers that body shot, the liver shot.
You can see that the opponent
is out of the fight for a while, for good reason.
Oh Dae-su backs up and now is being engaged
by multiple people.
Let's take this opportunity to go over fight theory
against fighting multiple people hand to hand,
and how boxing can fit into that context.
First off, try to avoid that as much as possible.
- Definitely.
- Chances of you being effective,
even with the training, is very low, very low.
But here's what I'd say.
You wanna deal with one guy at a time.
Now, it's tough.
Most likely the person in front of you,
his allies are flanking.
So you have to move,
which you actually do see Oh Dae-su do a lot,
you see he goes in the following tactic.
Makes contact, head movement, back away, there's space.
The new space that's made now,
someone has to take up that slack.
So his hope is that it's one person at a time.
It is a mistake to engage and stay.
You're going to get flanked.
Hit, move, relocate, and create a chase.
That's the best way I can think of
in which boxing fits in the context
of fighting multiple people.
And we see Oh Dae-su do that in this fight scene.
- For sure, and also, if you're part of the mob,
there's at least a little part of you that's thinking,
"I'm gonna let Bob go.
I'm gonna let John go.
I'm gonna hang back a bit."
So it's not completely unrealistic
that a single person could survive against a melee attack.
However, in this scene,
he unfortunately ends up in the ground.
Now, Chad is my instructor in groundwork.
And the reason why groundwork is so important
is because fights do in fact end up in the ground.
Here's the issue.
One-on-one fights ends up in the ground.
I have a chance thanks to the great training
I've had from Chad.
However, if I'm on the ground
and I've got like 8, 10, 20 people coming at me at once,
at this point, that fear that I just mentioned,
"Oh, I'm gonna let Bob go,"
changes to, "Oh, he's down.
Let me have a piece of this."
There is that danger.
So in my opinion, and I think Chad would agree with me,
that first time that he fell, in reality,
unless he's extremely lucky,
or as Chad said, the assailant are particularly nice,
I don't think he would've survived that.
- I agree.
Being on the ground when fighting multiple people
is a huge no-no.
One skillset that we do teach in grappling
is the skillset of standing up during resistance.
And that's a very important skill set,
especially if you're fighting multiple people.
So it's best to do the following.
If you're fighting multiple people, one, don't engage it.
- Don't engage it.
- Okay?
Especially if it'll be in the ground.
- Apologize.
Apologize, say, "I'm sorry.
Terrible mistake.
I'm out."
- In any way you can, apologize, okay?
And if you have to engage 'em, movement, baby.
Movement.
Move the head, move your feet, relocate,
and try to deal with one person at a time, right?
And boxing can play a role in that strategy
- For sure.
One thing I wanna talk about the narrative of the story
is is basically Oh Dae-su in solitary confinement
for X number of years.
So all he can do is shadow box.
And in a lot of traditional martial arts,
when you're dealing with things
that have all of these forms,
one thing that you're missing is distancing.
The reason why people that practice muay thai,
that practice grappling, that practice jiu-jitsu
they tend to do better than people
that only do traditional martial arts
without active sparring is because grapplers and strikers
that have active sparring,
they're always measuring out distance.
So the jab hand is the measuring tool, okay?
I'm not hitting you, I'm not hitting you.
Now I'm hitting you.
I know where you are, now I can finish you.
That's something that I feel is unrealistic.
I'm not saying it's impossible.
It's a little bit unreasonable
to believe that Oh Dae-su would be so accurate
when it comes to fighting this group of people.
(dramatic music)
I love this scene.
It's shot beautifully.
It's really cool.
The weapons weren't used by either side.
Neither Oh Dae-su nor the assailants
really used the weapons to the maximum capacity.
Oh Dae-su did have some cool movements with the hammer,
but gave up the knife completely.
The assailant barely used the sticks.
They essentially threw the sticks at Oh Dae-su.
I felt that they could have done much better
with the weapons work.
- On the flip side,
we see Oh Dae-su use good boxing concepts
to maintain the funnel and not allow him
to get flanked so much as we saw when he was using weapons.
Good boxing combinations, liver shots, footwork,
and backing up, and maintaining distance
- But highly unrealistic.
I mean really, he should have died twice.
With that being said, we give the scene a B-.
Now go buy these awesome t-shirts, people.