High&Low container yard fight is the best fight scene I've ever seen

Ever since I saw the first High&Low movie from 2016, I was completely hooked. I could not shake the idea of how well the container yard fight was done, and how it feels impossible to ever create something like that again.

With High&Low The New World coming up, this fight scene has been back on my mind.

Read also: HIGH&LOW: The New World - I Can't Wait For This

That's also around when I started looking more into K-dramas and Japanese action films, both still fairly unknown territory for me.

I'm not going to bother explaining the entire High&Low franchise or plot here. If you're reading this, you already know what I'm talking about. It's just me thinking out loud about one fight scene that ruined every other fight scene for me.

Up until today, the High&Low franchise is one of the best things I've watched, in my book. Not because of the cringy emotions, or even the plot, but because of how so many different characters can collide and still end up being friends.

I've never really fanboyed over a movie before, but I can't help myself from rewatching the entire series and franchise, and blasting a YouTube compilation from Exile Tribe that pulls together the best action scenes.

I always wondered how the fuck a movie could create one of the best fight scenes in history. It's such a mass-scale event, with constant fight sequences shot like it's nothing, and yet so complicated at the same time.

So I did some research. I wanted to know what kind of demonic arts they used to shoot that twenty-minute fight scene.

How they pulled it off

It turns out around a thousand performers and stunt people were involved. No CGI kept an ongoing battle on screen that stayed readable, easy to follow, and still had you sitting on the edge of your seat.

It never looked uncoordinated, no shaky cams like Hollywood tends to lean on. I think it's a technical miracle.

I've replayed every fight scene from those movies, at least twenty-five times each. The container yard fight specifically, at least a hundred times.

What's more impressive is what's happening in the background. Not fake air punching, not people randomly falling to the floor for no reason.

Everyone keeps fighting in the background the entire time, and even when the camera zooms out, you can see them genuinely keeping their action going. That's something you seldom see in cinema.

What I didn't know is that they used sweeping drone shots, long tracking shots, and continuous takes that weave through dozens of individual fights at once. That's what stops the massive crowd from turning into a chaotic blur, and instead keeps the geometry of the whole battle readable.

I'd challenge you to watch the entire scene and tell me I'm wrong. Or watch any other fight scene from the franchise; you'll see they do it ten times better than Hollywood.

On top of everything, the brawls look like real fights. The way people swing, connect, miss, and recover feels closer to how people actually fight than the clean, choreographed punches you get in most action movies. That realism is a big part of why the whole franchise tops about anything I've seen.

My god, I can't get fucking over it. When Netflix brought the movies back, I couldn't help myself and watched the entire franchise again.

Right now on Netflix, that's High&Low The Movie (2016), High&Low End of Sky, High&Low Final Mission, and Road to High&Low.

Even after watching all of them again, the container yard fight still tops everything else. I kept thinking about how they pulled that fucking miracle off.

The secret behind it

When I first watched the franchise, I had no idea about its history or the actors involved. It turns out one of the biggest secrets behind High&Low is that it's produced by LDH, a Japanese entertainment agency.

The cast is filled with members from Exile Tribe, groups like The Rampage, Generations, and Fantastics, which I knew nothing about at the time.

And that ended up being the advantage. These actors aren't just pop idols. They're elite, professional dancers who have trained together for years. They have freakish core strength, flawless spatial awareness, and can memorize complex physical timing almost instantly.

I really admire how they coordinate a five-hundred-person scene where the background fights look real. That takes weeks of rehearsal on set.

Hollywood vs High&Low

In Hollywood, it's usually too expensive to keep five hundred union stunt workers on set for weeks just to rehearse. Hollywood shoots the fight scenes, stitches it together in editing, and calls it done.

They lean on close-ups, fast cuts, and shaky cam to hide the fact that the background extras are just standing around, or that the main actor can't throw a real punch.

But in the High&Low movies, action director Takahito Ouchi and his stunt team spend months mapping out the fight's geography. They treat a five-hundred-person brawl like a massive dance recital.

Because everyone knows exactly when to move, the camera can pull back, fly a drone overhead, and hold wide, continuous shots, because there are no mistakes to hide.

I think that's fucking insane.

They also edit the film to match the rhythm of the music. Because they understand the flow of the martial arts, they know exactly when to hold the camera steady so you can appreciate a clean kick or a synchronized tag-team takedown.

Impossible to do it again?

Digging deeper, it's clearly an unsustainable model. I think it's a one-time miracle production, because it works as a giant promotional vehicle for LDH's music groups, concerts, and merchandise.

A standard movie studio putting that much time, physical risk, and rehearsal into a street-vandal movie would never be able to justify the cost. This is a hyper-specific Japanese sub-genre, Yankee or delinquent cinema, elevated to an absolute fucking blockbuster budget.

I have no idea how much this all cost, but it must be a lot.

Japan has a rich history of Yankee and martial arts cinema, but nothing has ever matched High&Low, because no other franchise has had that level of blockbuster funding combined with an army of professional dancers.

Before High&Low came along in 2015, Japanese delinquent movies were usually low-budget, gritty, and realistic.

High&Low completely changed the game by turning high school brawling into a hyper-stylized, multi-million-dollar comic book universe.

I honestly don't know if I should be happy or sad about that. This container yard fight scene ruined pretty much every other brawl in every other movie for me. Ever since I first watched it, I can't help looking at background fights in other films just to end up disappointed.

One scene from 2016 raised the bar so high that everything since just looks lazy by comparison. And if High&Low The New World manages to top the container yard fight, I don't think I'll ever look at a fight scene the same way again.