ManWithPez

Meet me in the parking lot...Three O'Clock High!

When I watch epic films or TV series, I pay attention to the early relationships formed between the characters.  Why would I do this?  Well, it’s been my experience that the closer the relationship, the better the showdown between the characters when things go wrong.  And things always go wrong!  Then again, sometimes the chemistry works in just a way that you just know these people (or things) are going to throw down and provide you, the moviegoing/couch potato nerds with a fight worth watching!  So, here they are, my favorite showdowns!  (The criteria here is that there has to be a bit of an emotional investment in the fight, and the people involved have to have a reason to rumble.  Also, they have to actually show what happens…so, please don’t come after me with Bucho vs El Mariachi, okay?)

Bitchslapped with a powerloader! That's gotta hurt!

10.  Ellen Ripley vs The Queen (Aliens) – “Get away from her, you BITCH!”  Now, if that’s not a call to battle, I don’t know what is!  Why I would even call this a showdown is that Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) has seemingly imprinted all of her fears on the aliens, and here, we’re presented with the scariest damn one out of the lot.  The Queen means to shred her up some humans, but has an emotional stake in the fight as well, seeing as Ripley just destroyed her entire crop of eggs!  When the Queen makes for Ripley’s surrogate daughter Newt (Carrie Henn) Ripley prepares to defend her and take on her fears with the help of a powerloader in one of filmdom’s best throwdowns!

River's calling you out, Reavers!

9.  River Tam vs The Reavers (Serenity) – They were this faceless, horrible thing presented to us in the very first episode of Firefly.  The thing that made Reavers all the more terrifying was just who on the show was really afraid of them.  And, that was the toughest people in the crew:  Mal(Nathan Fillion), Jayne(Adam Baldwin), and River(Summer Glau)!  So, when Serenity came along, it was no secret that we were finally going to get to see these awful things.   And, they were awful!  Faces all ripped up, all crazy and shit, eating and raping people to death!   I’ll say it like this:  If there’s anything presented in the movie or on the show that makes seemingly fearless mercenary Jayne pace nervously and flinch, it’s good enough for me to be afraid of (Since he does the same with Mal and River sometimes, I’m afraid of them too).  So, the real showdown here?  River Tam vs. Everyone’s Greatest Fear (Spoiler in link)!  River sees only one way for her crew to come out of a pickle safely, and that’s for the telepathic assassin to throw down with an army of mindless killing machines.  Can she do it?  Stick around, and be rewarded with one of the coolest money shots in all of science fiction.

Hey! You're supposed to be duelling!

8.  Albus Dumbledore vs Lord Voldemort (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) – I can hear you bristling already!  Not so fast.  It can be argued that even when Harry takes on Voldemort, he still has to have quite a bit of luck on his side.  This matchup from the fifth book is much more evenly matched.  How do you know it’s matched?  Who else DARES to call the Dark Lord by his real first name?  Albus Dumbledore, that’s who!  Not only is Dumbledore the only wizard that doesn’t cower from Voldemort, he provides a shining example to Harry that to fear a thing is to let it control you.  Ever since the first book, when I read that Dumbledore was the only wizard that Voldemort was afraid of, I had wanted to see this duel, and when I got it, I was all the happier for it.  So, yeah, Harry vs Voldemort is cool and all, but this is where the real money is, you ask me!

The most improbable way to lose a fight...ever.

7.  Daniel Larusso vs Johnny Lawrence (The Karate Kid) – Go underdogs!  This movie was tailor made for anyone who had ever been bullied or picked on!  Daniel moves with his mother to California, finds his a nice girl, and has a happy ending, right?  WRONG!  Johnny Lawrence is sweet on Daniel’s new girl, and apparently feels the need to sweep up the countryside using Daniel’s ass as a broom!  Daniel finds he has some help though, in the guise of his building’s super, Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita).  Mr. Miyagi convinces Johnny’s karate sensei, the ruthless Reese (Martin Kove) to keep his students off Daniel until the next big karate tournament.  Thanks to a Joe Esposito montage (Hey, give credit where it’s due!) Daniel soon ends up facing Johnny one on one under debilitating circumstances.  Who wins?  Are you serious?  But, it’s Daniel need for balance and Mr. Miyagi’s ingenuity that really take the show here.

What a fine soul patch you have there. Think I'll take it!

6.  Aang vs Firelord Ozai (Avatar:  The Last Airbender) – You don’t get much more high drama in a showdown than you get in this animated show, folks, and that’s the honest truth!  Aang, the Avatar (or the one with the ability to control all four elements) must take on the all powerful Firelord Ozai during the ascent of Souzin’s comet, the time when the Firelord will be nigh invincible. The series makes no secret that this is Aang’s destiny, and boy, when these two finally meet up for the first time in three seasons of the show…KAPOW!!!  Granted, everyone in the show gets their shining moments, but it is the young boy Aang’s self wrestling with what he has been taught about holding life sacred, and the necessity of the Firelord’s death that supplies all the drama here.  Add to this that while it has been shown that Aang is almost godlike in the Avatar state, he has lost the ability to access it before the showdown!  Great stuff!

I said...PASS THE SALT!

5.  Beatrix Kiddo vs Bill (Kill Bill Vol 2) – When I went to see this in a theater in Korea, people left the theater crying “BULLSHIT” over the ending.  Indeed, we had been served vicious fight after fight during The Bride’s kill crazy rampage after all the other members of Bill’s team who had wronged her.  In the end, Bill vs Beatrix wasn’t all that violent, considering that she had killed several dozen people trying to get to Oren Ishii.  For me, though, it provided the ending I was looking for, all the while emphasizing the journey’s importance.  It was Bill’s smugness that left me rooting for Beatrix in the end, and the simple way he was dispatched surprised the audience as much as it did Bill.

Finally! Finally! FINALLY! Wait...what?

4.  Majin Vegeta vs Goku (Dragonball Z) – From the time the prince of all Saiyins takes a whoopin’ from Goku, he makes it his one goal in life to serve up an asskicking to the commoner that simply outmatched him.  Circumstance, family, and an overall need to be a good person gets in his way.  So, to finally get what he wants, Vegeta throws it all away, kills several hundred people to show just how bad he really is, and takes on Goku once and for all.  This will be the closest these two actually get to hammering out their differences, during the Majin-Bu Saga, and even then, they STILL don’t manage to finish things up satisfactorily.  For all that, it’s still one hell of a fight! 

I think you'll find that he's full of surprises.

3.  Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader (The Empire Strikes Back) – Imagine the greatest evil you can think of has just killed your mentor in front of you.  Imagine that you’re really no match for him.  Imagine that you’re throwing everything away just to have a crack at him.  There were much more emotional through-lines in the fight between Luke and Vader in Empire, than in their climatic battle in Return of the Jedi, I thought.  And, of course, Luke ends up getting the most screwed revelation of all time at the end of the Empire fight.  Is it the ULTIMATE showdown between these two?  No.  But, for my money, it’s the best.

Don't make me have to choke a bitch!

2.  Buffy Summers vs Faith Lehane (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) – From the time that the second slayer Kendra bit the dust (Boy, that Slayer legacy is a wily minx!), the Scoobies and Buffy were waiting for the new Slayer to show up.  Faith turns up as the complete opposite of the Vampire Slayer from which her heritage was obtained!  Undisciplined, unpolished, and uncouth, she still turns out to be a talented Slayer in her own right, though completely different from Buffy in much the way that Buffy was different from Kendra.  This will, of course, lead to conflict, for all those who haven’t seen a Joss Whedon show out there.  While I won’t go into the entire story between Faith and Buffy’s falling out here, I will talk about their first throwdown.  A fake Watcher comes to town and convinces Faith that Buffy and the rest of the gang are out to get her.  While this is not the case, Faith comes to the conclusion that she must take Buffy down, which turns out harder to do than she thought.  While they will square off many more times, the fight over the Glove of Myneghon from ”Revelations” ends up being one of their best! 

Never did like a flabby handshake!

1.  Sean Thornton vs Red Will Danaher (The Quiet Man) - And why not at number one?  It’s one of the longest brawls in film history, with two fairly matched opponents, and the emotional stakes are pretty high.  In the end, of course, there’s not a lot of hate involved, which may be why I like it so much.  Sean Thornton (John Wayne) comes back to his home in Ireland after years spent in the US.  What did he do there?  Well, I don’t think I’m giving much away when I saw he was a…Oh, wait, that’s totally giving eveything away!  Anyways, when he gets back to Innisfree he takes up with the lovely Mary Kate Danaher (Oooh…hot Maureen O’Hara), much to the chagrin of her brother Red Will (Victor McLaughlin), who hates Sean for buying the land next to his.  What follows is a wonderful mashup of redemption, family pride, and a big showdown looming at the end between Sean and Will.  That doesn’t stop them from stopping the middle of it for a pint, of course…This is Ireland we’re talking about, yeah?  If you’ve not seen The Quiet Man, you’re really letting one of the best films ever pass you by.

There’s my ten showdown picks.  This is another one that I can make another list on another day with, but I’m pretty happy with this one as it sits.   If I were you, and I hadn’t seen ANY of the movies or TV shows on this list, I’d look around and find them.  They’re all great…(And, yes, the Harry Potter reference in the list means the book, not the movie.) 

See you around…At high noon!!!  Muwahahaha….

Tags: List, Nerd

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 7:15 am and is filed under Books, Cartoons, Internet, Movies, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.