By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Sword fighting has been a staple of the action genre since the earliest days of film.
And when a duel is good, it sticks with you.
What makes a sword fight a sword fight? For the purposes of this list, we’re sticking with one on one combat, in which at least one of the two combatants is fighting with an actual sword.
So no Jackie Chan versus the Ax gang on this list, unfortunately, but seriously you must go watch that immediately because wow, Jackie Chan is a lunatic who cares nothing for his own safety and you should love him for it.
With what a sword fight is established, now we have to figure out what makes one good.
And it’s not enough for a duel just to be technically proficient. It has to mean something, surprise us, move us, or make the unbelievable happen. It also helps if it’s beautiful.
Hide your sixth finger if you’ve got one because this is Giant Freakin Robot and these are the best movie sword fights.
Blade
In the final showdown of Blade, Wesley Snipes’ half-vampire hunter faces off against Stephen Dorff’s Deacon Frost.
By the time Blade confronts Frost in the Temple of Eternal Night, the movie has spent nearly two hours establishing exactly what kind of fighter he is: ruthless, efficient, and smooth as hell. The final fight cashes in on all of that.
Choreographed by Jeff Ward with input from Snipes himself—an actual martial artist with a background in Shotokan karate and Capoeira—the fight blends swordplay, hand-to-hand combat, and cinematic flair.
Frost, supercharged with blood magic, is faster and stronger than any opponent Blade’s faced. He doesn’t block—he absorbs. He doesn’t dodge—he regenerates.
Fans remember the fight not for its finesse, but for its cool factor. It’s a duel soaked in blood, techno, and attitude—a reflection of everything that made Blade a genre-defining hit. It paved the way for The Matrix, Underworld, and even the modern Marvel boom.
Rob Roy
Rob Roy’s final duel—between Liam Neeson’s Rob Roy MacGregor and Tim Roth’s Archibald Cunningham—is the soul of the film.
This fight is intimate, brutal, and personal. Set in a stark hall lit by daylight, with no music and no crowd, it strips the sword fight down to its barest form: survival.
Cunningham is a trained aristocrat—fast, agile, sadistic. Rob Roy is slower, broader, and entirely self-taught. And that imbalance is exactly the point.
Roy is completely overmatched. He stands his ground but he’s being killed, slowly, while we watch.
The choreography was designed by William Hobbs, a veteran fight director known for realism over flash. Neeson and Roth trained extensively for the scene, and insisted on doing it all themselves, which adds to the grounded, high-stakes tension.
Rob Roy wins not by finesse, but by sheer willpower and endurance, culminating in a sudden, explosive act of violence that turns the tables in the final second.
Kill Bill
The final fight between Uma Thurman’s Bride and Lucy Liu’s O-Ren Ishii isn’t just the climax of Kill Bill Vol. 1—it’s a moment of pure, cinematic poetry.
Director Quentin Tarantino shot it on a massive soundstage in Beijing. Production designer Yohei Taneda and cinematographer Robert Richardson turned it into a visual dreamscape.
Choreographed by Yuen Woo-Ping, the legendary fight master behind The Matrix and countless Hong Kong classics, the duel blends samurai discipline with Chinese swordplay.
This isn’t a flashy fight—it’s measured and respectful, more Kurosawa than kung fu movie. There’s little dialogue. Just the crunch of snow and the clash of steel.
The duel was directly inspired by a very similar showdown in the classic 1973 Japanese revenge film Lady Snowblood. He even used music from that film in his movie’s closing credits.
Hook
Everything that happens in the life of Peter Banning leads to Hook. And in the final moments of the movie named after his antagonist, Banning becomes a boy again, long enough to face him down in an epic duel.
The fight takes place on Hook’s ship, a lavish set designed to resemble every child’s fantasy of a pirate lair.
There are ropes to swing from, stairs to leap down, and enough room for a proper old-school swordfight. And that’s exactly what Spielberg delivers, with a whimsical Peter Pan twist.
Robin Williams trained extensively in fencing for the role, coached by stunt coordinator Nick Gillard (who later worked on the Star Wars prequels). Dustin Hoffman, leaned hard into character, making Hook’s technique foppish but dangerous—every flourish as theatrical as it is lethal.
The duel is as much about performance as swordplay. Hook goads. Pan taunts. It’s not a fight for the fate of the world, but for identity, revenge, and closure.
The choreography mixes real fencing techniques with gravity-defying fantasy—Pan can fly, after all—which adds a dreamlike edge to the swashbuckling.
Hook’s final stand, complete with a last sneering monologue, gives the villain his due. And Pan’s refusal to kill him outright feels like something out of a storybook—because it is.
Drunken Master 2
We’re filing this entry under Drunken Master 2, since that’s the best martial arts movie ever made, but pretty much any time Jackie Chan gets his hands on a sword probably deserves to be on this list.
There’s only one sword fight in Drunken Master 2, but because Jackie Chan doesn’t know how to not be totally original all the time, it’s one of the most unique sword fights ever captured on film.
Most of it takes place with the combatants half crouched under a train, trapped in the workings of its undercarriage.
The enemy is played by Ken Lo, Jackie’s real-life bodyguard and an elite martial artist, whose precision turns the space into a razor-edged minefield.
This fight was filmed on location, using an actual train. There were no digital effects or green screens because this is a Jackie Chan movie.
The choreography, co-designed by Lau Kar-leung and Chan himself, is a masterclass in improvisational defense. Jackie uses his surroundings with genius: steel rods, train axles, and tight spaces become both weapon and shield. It’s less about form and more about survival.
There’s no wirework. No camera trickery. Just relentless movement, real danger, and perfect timing.
And somehow, Chan makes it fun, despite the stakes. That’s the magic of Drunken Master 2: you can’t believe what you’re seeing, and yet you’re grinning the whole way through.
Pirates of the Caribbean
Jack Sparrow’s final duel with Barbosa in Pirates of the Caribbean is the chaotic, cursed, and clever heart of the entire film.
Jack shoots Barbossa in the heart. Nothing. Barbossa stabs Jack through the chest—and moments later, Jack steps into the moonlight to reveal he’s cursed too.
It’s also eerily beautiful. It’s set in a moonlit cave containing glittering Aztec gold and involves a gimmick pulled off by incredible effects wizardry: moonbeams turn the combatants into living skeletons.
As the two dance between moon beams, crossing swords, their true forms are revealed and hidden, revealed and hidden.
Both Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush performed the bulk of the sword work themselves, under the guidance of veteran fight choreographer George Marshall Ruge.
Victory comes not through brute force but through sleight of hand and perfect timing. As Barbossa gloats, Elizabeth returns the last coin, and Will drops it in with a blood offering—breaking the curse just in time for Jack’s pistol shot to finally count.
Return of the Jedi
The Return of the Jedi duel between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader wasn’t the most acrobatic or technically complex as some later in the series, but it may well be the most powerful.
Filmed on a soundstage at Elstree Studios in 1982, the duel was choreographed by stunt coordinator Peter Diamond, a veteran of British stage fighting. Mark Hamill and David Prowse were both on set for the staging, but the actual saber blows were often handled by stuntman Bob Anderson in the Vader suit.
Anderson, a world-class fencer and sword master, gave Vader’s attacks a weight and precision that helped convey the character’s power even under.
It’s not just a fight—it’s a test of identity. Vader isn’t trying to win. He holds back, perhaps because he doesn’t want to kill his son, or because he’s ready to turn on Vader.
No flips. No flourishes. Just a father, a son, and a weapon that means more than just a blade of light.
The Princess Bride
Swashbuckling style sword fights, born out of stage sword play, were the norm in Hollywood from its earliest days. The style that made Errol Flynn famous and sent audiences of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s rushing to theaters for the new Zorro flick reached both its peak and its end in The Princess Bride when Inigo Montoya fought The Man in Black.
No stunt doubles were used, and actors Carey Elwes and Mandy Patinkin trained for months with legendary Hollywood swordmasters.
Like those great Errol Flynn duels of old, the sequence was designed with fun as its North Star. That doesn’t mean reality wasn’t a factor. The duel was meticulously choreographed, and the fencing moves mentioned in the dialogue, like Bonetti’s Defense, are real fencing styles.
Highlander
Highlander is a franchise filled with fantastic sword fights, both in movies and on the underrated Highlander television show.
But the climactic duel at the end of the first Highlander film between Connor and The Kurgan, set the tone.
The fight, filmed in a decrepit Silvercup Studios building in Queens, New York, is an atmospheric masterstroke.
Christopher Lambert played Connor McLeod, and he, incidentally, is legally blind. In real life, he wears heavily lensed glasses, an appliance he could not wear during this fight.
Clancy Brown, towering as the Kurgan, was instructed not to go full force during rehearsals—he ignored that, nearly injuring Lambert more than once.
The reflective floor, the blue lightning, the crumbling set—it’s operatic without being over-polished.
The moment when MacLeod finally beheads the Kurgan and claims “The Prize” is iconic, capped by Queen’s soaring rock anthem and a swirl of 80s-era visual effects.
There’s really no better way to cap off a duel than with a song purpose-written for it by Queen.
You’re probably wondering why Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon isn’t on this list, and I’d tell you but… oh no, I’ve randomly floated away before I can say anything.
