Dr Lindsay Steenberg

The hotel is a key setting for Hollywood’s fight sequences, which we argue are always determined and understood through spatial orientation and architectural setting. Offering both private and public spaces, the upscale hotel offers a compendium of the contemporary action film’s fight scenes in one locale. Foregrounding a compelling fantasy of extravagance and mobility, the luxury hotel fight is foundational to the resilience of action heroes such as John Wick or James Bond. Indeed, John Wick is unimaginable without the fictional assassin hotel, the Continental. But the action hotel fight is not singular. For instance, the hotel room fight scene in Haywire plays with the erotic secrecy of the clandestine hotel room meeting, whereas the expansive lobby in John Wick 3 becomes a multi-participant battlefield.

We argue that the hotel fight is a notable, specific, and underexamined space in action cinema with a particular relation to propulsion and violent action anchored to concepts of luxury, erotics, and precarious service economies. Considering the concepts of luxury and class that shape both the service economies and the erotic charge of luxury hotels, we look at the fights that map and are mapped by these spaces. We consider the hotel fights in luxury hotels that play with liminal public/private spatiality to articulate the architecture of violent action. We focus throughout on John Wick’s Continental Hotel, but also draw on other key contemporary Hollywood action films and franchises that foreground luxury hotels as a character, setting, and choreographic element.

This article situates Bruce Lee’s films and star persona in the context of wider patterns in global genre cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. I argue for a connection between the Western reception of Lee’s films and those of the mid-century Italian sword and sandal films, beginning with the Colosseum fight between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris that concludes Way of the Dragon (1972). From the dojo fights of Fist of Fury (1972), through the tournament structure in Enter the Dragon (1973), to his statistically led re-animation in the EA Sports UFC 3 (2018) videogame, Bruce Lee can be usefully considered as a gladiator. Bruce Lee, as fighter, performer and star persona, contributes to the enduring gladiatorial archetype that is an embedded feature in the Western visual imaginary. Furthermore, I argue that the gladiator archetype itself shifted because of Lee’s onscreen roles and the discourse that surrounds his star persona. In order to map these shifts and patterns of confluence, I chart three main points of impact that Lee has had on the gladiatorial archetype using his Western-facing roles on film and television, namely the television series Longstreet (1971–1972) and Enter the Dragon (1973). First, I consider the inclusion of martial arts and, second, the opening up of the field of representation to different models of masculinity, including a leaner body type and a non-White – in this case, ethnically Chinese – gladiator. The third point is the emphasis on a popular, or vernacular, stoicism. Ultimately, I elucidate the relationship between the gladiator, Bruce Lee, and philosophy, arguing that Lee embodies a vernacular stoicism that has become one of the defining features of the post-millennial gladiator and notions of heroic masculinity in popular culture more widely.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a transnational generic hybrid, rather than as a

“pure” example of the wuxia genre. This article interrogates issues of translation,

gendered violence and excess to explore the fracturing and subversive potential of the

film. Rather than seeing Crouching Tiger as a window into the spiritual and martial truths

of ancient China, the paper examines it as an amalgam of genres and (national) identities

recognises its status as part of a global cinematic imaginary.