By | Published June 2, 2008

On June 1, the MTV Movie Awards were held in Hollywood, California. For action fans, one of the top awards everyone anticipates is the award for Best Fight. This award has been won by the likes of Adam Sandler and Bob Barker (HAPPY GILMORE), and last year, Gerard Butler grabbed the honors for the epic battle scene from 300. This year, the mixed martial arts action of NEVER BACK DOWN would beat some odds-on favorites for the award.

The climatic battle in NEVER BACK DOWN, pitting Sean Faris’ reformed character of Jake and Cam Gigandet’s bully character of Ryan, won the Best Fight award this year, beating out the likes of Hayden Christensen and Jamie Bell in JUMPER, Matt Damon and Joey Ansah in THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, Tobey Maguire and James Franco in SPIDER-MAN 3, The Aliens vs. The Predators in ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM, and even Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker against gigantic Sun Ming Ming in RUSH HOUR 3.

The battle between Faris and Gigandet consisted of the growing popular style of mixed martial arts. Mixed martial arts, or MMA as it has been known as to fans, has become very popular with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, EliteXC, World Extreme Cagefighting, as well as Donnie Yen utilizing this style in his choreography for his films KILL ZONE (2005) and FLASH POINT (2007). With the Best Fight win of NEVER BACK DOWN, it looks like MMA is going to be sticking around for a while.

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  • http://www.myspace.com/thewanderers Andrew

    i guess im just hard pressed to enjoy such films as never back down, but im sure once it comes to dvd, ill get a kick out of it

  • Dave

    I think that this is a big disappointment I loved the fight between Matt Damon and Joey Ansah. I have never seen someone use a book to beat a man so severely like that. Fantastic I say

  • William

    They’ve obviously never seen flashpoint. Yen’s choreography in Flashpoint(any of it) was atleast 10 times better than anything I saw in Never Back Down.

  • KimchiGUN

    The American Audience doesn’t know what SPL or Flashpoint is…

    Most of the American fight scenes have Asian influences but no one knows that. They think the Matrix was the best but don’t know that Yuen Wo Ping was behind the scenes. Now, MMA went mainstream and everyone thinks Chuck Liddell is the MMA GOD, but Bruce Lee was the one who predicted it back in the 70′s. Everyone thinks Never Back Down is the greatest but WE know that Flashpoint was better.

    Closing, most of Americas cinema doesn’t have their own standards, It’s mostly influences by Foreign films. Tisk Tisk…

  • Billeh

    If the films Never Back Down and Undisputed 2 were fighters, and if they fought, Undisputed would beat the living crap outta NBD. If you reckon NBD had cool fights, raise your standards and go watch UD2.

  • http://free-mma-video.blogspot.com Mark Jamers

    I am a MMA junky