7 Greatest Martial Arts Trilogies, Ranked

This is said with love, but martial arts movies do tend to be pretty simple affairs. They’re often simple in good ways, it should be stressed. These films aim to highlight excellent fight choreography over pretty much anything else, so you’ll get something like The Raid, which is just about fighting one’s way out of a very dangerous apartment building, or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which is about people all trying to get their hands on a prized weapon.

Essentially, it means plenty of martial arts movies can be started and ended pretty seamlessly in just the one film, with the aforementioned The Raid getting a sequel, but only one (well, for now). In a few cases, martial arts movies have gotten two sequels, making for a trilogy, and some of the best martial arts trilogies are ranked below. Also, if something got three or more sequels, and became a series that stretched on longer than a trilogy, then they won’t be counted here (that’s why there’s no John Wick, Police Story, or Ip Man, even though each of those were, for at least some time, definable as trilogies).

7

‘Ong Bak’ (2003–2010)

The tagline of Ong Bak (2003) was “No computer graphics. No stunt doubles. No wires.” That does sum it up. It wanted people to know this would be a little more intense and maybe old-school than some of the more recent martial arts movies that had been popular (like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon being wuxia, and The Matrix being sci-fi-heavy). And it’s probably something they wanted to highlight more back in the early 2000s, because CGI was starting to be used a lot more in action movies, and it didn’t always look great.

For what it’s worth, the first Ong Bak is easily the best. Ong Bak 2 is messy and inconsistent, but it does have a good final act that delivers the goods, as far as action’s concerned. Ong Bak 3, though… eh. Not great. Maybe a couple of parts that are sort of fun, if a bit silly. Still, it is technically a trilogy, and like, one and a half movies here are worth watching, so Ong Bak just sneaks in at the bottom of this ranking, is what it is and all.

6

‘Dead or Alive’ (1999–2002)

This is also a bit of a sneaky pick, because the Dead or Alive movies make up a very loose trilogy, overall. Also, they’re more definable as yakuza movies rather than full-blown martial arts ones, but Takashi Miike, as chaotic as always, throws a lot in to make the films here less and less “normal,” by the standards of the yakuza sub-genre. The third film in the trilogy, Dead or Alive: Final (2002), is a full-on sci-fi movie, of all things.

The first two aren’t, with Dead or Alive (1999) being weird, but still the least weird of them all, and Dead or Alive 2: Birds (2000) ultimately being the best of the bunch by quite a bit, striking the ideal level of bizarre and darkly comedic. Takashi Miike did direct all three, and they’re all crime/action-related while starring the same two actors across the trilogy, but there are different characters in each movie, and various other genres that are dipped into throughout (or, at the very least, it’s accurate to say that each Dead or Alive movie is quite different tonally).

5

‘Armour of God’ (1986–2012)

The best way to sell this trilogy is to say that it stars Jackie Chan basically doing his own version of Indiana Jones, and at least the first two movies came out when he was still pretty much in his prime. The first film, Armour of God (1986), has some really top-tier action sequences and stunts, enough so that it’s worth getting through the slower parts of the movie for that good stuff. Then, film #2, Operation Condor (1991), is probably even better, or at least more consistent.

The third film, Chinese Zodiac, came much later (in 2012), and isn’t as good as either of the first two movies, but it’s not awful for a late-stage Jackie Chan movie, with there being some fun in seeing him return to an already-established character and series one last time. If you’re after the best long-running Jackie Chan series, it is the aforementioned Police Story one, but that’s longer than a trilogy now… so, if you want something that’s right on being an actual trilogy, guess you’ve got this one.

4

‘The Samurai Trilogy’ (1954–1956)

If you don’t like seeing a samurai trilogy here, when the topic is martial arts, tough. It’s kind of hard to find a decent number of martial arts trilogies without including samurai-related ones, so here’s a trio of movies known as the Samurai Trilogy. Well, it’s one of two trilogies known as the Samurai Trilogy, but it came first. There was one a year throughout the middle of the 1950s, the first being Musashi Miyamoto (1954), named after the central character, the second being Duel at Ichijoji Temple (1955), and the third being Duel at Ganryu Island (1956).

The first movie came out the same year Mifune was in the most legendary samurai movie of all time, but these movies in the Samurai Trilogy shouldn’t be overlooked.

All starred Toshirō Mifune, and stuck to following the progression of his character from a wannabe samurai warrior to an actual one. The first movie came out the same year Mifune was in the most legendary samurai movie of all time (the one about Seven of them), but these movies in the Samurai Trilogy shouldn’t be overlooked, or entirely overshadowed by that other one… nor some of the other more famous samurai movies Mifune appeared in later on, like Yojimbo, The Sword of Doom, and Samurai Rebellion.

3

‘Dragon Inn’ (1967–2011)

Perhaps even looser than most thematic trilogies, here are three movies that kind of tie together, or have some similarities. The first is just called Dragon Inn, and it’s an absolute classic. 25 years later, New Dragon Gate Inn was pretty narratively similar to Dragon Inn, but stylistically different enough to feel like a little more than just a remake, and then nearly 20 years after that, there was a continuation of sorts with Flying Swords of Dragon Gate.

There’s a shared location across all three, more or less, and that location is used as a place for various people to meet at and fight near, all for different reasons. Things get shaken up quite a bit in terms of look and feel, between movies, and then the quality also varies, to some extent… the first is great, the second is good, and the third here is a bit forgettable, but if you wanted to judge them all as one trilogy, it’s an overall far from bad one.

2

Yōji Yamada’s ‘Samurai Trilogy’ (2002–2006)

All the films that make up another Samurai Trilogy (this one can be differentiated from the trilogy starring Toshirō Mifune by mentioning that it’s a collection of films directed by Yōji Yamada) are very quiet and drama-focused affairs, rather than being all-out action films. You get maybe a couple of brief bursts of action found, on average, in each of these movies, but they’re more period dramas about the samurai way of life, exploring things like morality and honor (or a lack thereof).

If Harakiri can count as a martial arts movie, since it’s about samurai and has a couple of moments of action (albeit also with a focus on drama), then this Samurai Trilogy can probably go here, too. The Twilight Samurai (2002) is the first and best of the bunch, with the other two movies being still quite good overall, and admittedly thematically linked, rather than being about the same characters from The Twilight Samurai. All films (including 2004’s The Hidden Blade and 2006’s Love and Honor) were based on stories originally written by Shuhei Fujisawa, too. That’s another thing that ties them up into a thematic trilogy.

1

‘The 36th Chamber of Shaolin’ (1978–1985)

With The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, as in the first movie in what became a trilogy, you get the basics, to some extent, but the basics are also done so remarkably well. If you have an idea in your head of what the typical 1970s martial arts movie might look like, it probably is The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, or something real close to it. There’s a young man who’s wronged, and he goes and trains a bunch so he can be skilled enough to get vengeance on those who’ve wronged him, and then once he’s trained enough, he goes out and gets the revenge he wants.

They’re the basics, in terms of an unlikely hero, a prolonged period of training, and some revenge-fueled action, yet handled so perfectly to the point that if you could only watch one classic martial arts movie, it could be wise to make it The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. And, okay, yeah, there’s less to say about the sequels, Return to the 36th Chamber (1980) and Disciples of the 36th Chamber (1985), but they find enough to do by way of continuing a story that already felt pretty complete, at the end of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. It also helps, for consistency’s sake, that the same director (Lau Kar-Leung) and lead actor (Gordon Liu) were involved in all three, even if the two sequels here lean a little more into comedy than the first film, and with Liu playing a different character in #2 than he does in #1 and #3 (it kind of works).