After a week in which the world has been breaking out the popcorn to watch an increasingly bitter feud develop between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, we've rounded up some big, not so beautiful movie bust-ups. Warning: these clips contain graphic scenes
Braveheart
For skull crushing, claymore-swinging, bone snapping gore - and giving the English a very nasty migraine, it’s hard to beat Mel Gibson’s historical epic Braveheart. This account of the life of Scottish national hero William Wallace is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year and while it may be historically wonky, those huge, pitched battle scenes (partly filmed on the mighty plains of The Curragh) were to have a huge impact on movies such as Gladiator, The Lord of The Rings, 300, and Game of Thrones. You can still feel the mud, hear the clash of steel, the smell of blood, and, well, wince when yer man gets an arrow straight into his bare backside.
Nobody
Bob Odenkirk will forever be oily lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul but in this thoroughly daft vigilante thriller, he plays Hutch Mansell - an average nobody, living his life like a snuck. However, just like that nice Liam Neeson in the Taken franchise, Hutch has a very particular set of skills and is actually living a lie.
After he bottles it when his family home is burgled, he gets mad as hell and finds himself pitted against an almost cartoonishly evil, karaoke-singing Russian mob boss, who has a seemingly endless supply of henchmen and not just a terrible taste in music.
Nobody is a salty and ultraviolent actioner and the best sequence arrives when Hutch single-handedly takes on a gang of drunk eejits on a downtown bus . . .
Bad Day at Black Rock
One-armed World War Two veteran John J. Macreedy breezes into a no-horse Californian desert town looking for an old buddy in this classic 1955 American noir neo-Western directed by the great John Sturges.
Macreedy is played by a suited and behatted Spencer Tracy and he’s a cool customer who speaks quietly and carefully. However, the not-so-good townspeople are mighty suspicious of this stranger who is asking all types of awkward questions. Most wary of all is Reno Smith (played with quiet menace by Robert Ryan), who has a very dark secret to hide. It’s a taut, gritty and very smart thriller and the finest moment comes when Macreedy drops by the local diner only to be confronted by Smith and his henchmen, among them Ernest Borgnine as Coley Trimble, who Smith avers is "as changeable as a prairie flag." Or as the big, dumb lunk says himself, "I’m half-horse and half-alligator. You mess with me and I’ll kick a lung outta ya." What happens next comes as a nasty surprise for the bad guys and a thrilling moment for the viewer.
Old Boy
In a film already full of very eeewww moments (we can never un-see that live octopus scene), the hallway fight scene in Park Chan-wook Oldboy has become a defining moment in Korean cinema.
Making full use of the claustrophobic space, Park Chan-wook executes a savage procession of violence that sees the anti-hero of the film’s title despatching a horde of baton-wielding henchmen with only a hammer and sheer force of will. It lasts just under four minutes (and is soundtracked by sombre piano and strings), but it took seventeen takes over three days to get right and was shot in one continuous panning shot, with only one edit. Warning: avoid the entirely pointless 2013 Hollywood remake.
The Quiet Man
Quite literally the movie which gave us the expression `a haymaker’ (ok, I made that up), the epic ding dong between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen is a scene for the ages. In John Ford’s shamrock-tinted tale of romance in a small Irish town, Wayne plays ex-boxer Sean Thornton, an interloping Yank who arrives in the village to claim his inheritance only to fall for the strong-willed Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O'Hara) - much to the annoyance of her wasp-chewing older brother, Squire "Red" Will Danaher (McLaglen).
When the Squire and Thorton finally have their showdown, it comes as nine minutes of good honest to god fisticuffs but the ever canny Ford also gives us a tour of the movie’s location - the gorgeous town of Cong in Co Mayo. Thorton and the Squire’s rage ranges across the landscape, from a farm to a dunking in a river, to a break for a pint of porter in the pub. Of course, the rubbernecking locals, who have been relishing the fight since the start of the film, place bets and whoop along goodo. It’s a John Hinde postcard as a boxing match.
