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A fan and a starĪdkins in action, ‘Ninja: Shadow of a Tear’ A working actor, he’s prolific as all hell, peaking in 2016 with a whopping eight films released. There’s a better than even chance you’ve seen Adkins getting soundly slaughtered by the hero of countless films: Jackie Chan roughed him up in The Accidental Spy and The Medallion, Hugh Jackman faced off against him in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (did you really think that was Ryan Reynolds at the end?), he traded spells with Benedict Cumberbatch in Doctor Strange, and was a foil for a whole platoon of ageing action stars in The Expendables 2.īut Adkins has carved out his niche and attracted a fervent following in the VOD world where he went from villain to hero in the Undisputed series, subbed in for Jean-Claude in Hard Target 2, and even played the hero to Van Damme’s villain in the criminally underrated Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning.
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He soon found himself working with legendary action auteurs like Yuen Woo-ping, Corey Yuen, Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan. Studying Judo, Taekwondo, kickboxing and acting, he landed a few small roles in British soap operas in the late ‘90s before decamping to Hong Kong after being spotted by Hong Kong Stuntmen Association members, director Wei Tung and producer Bey Logan. Kane Kosugi and Scott Adkins in ‘Ninja: Shadow of a Tear’īorn in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, England, in 1976, as a teen Adkins nurtured two obsessions: martial arts and movies. The stars of this genre substrata might crop up in more upmarket fare from time to time, but they thrive in action B-movie milieu: Tony Jaa ( Ong Bak), Iko Uwais ( The Raid), Tiger Hu Chen ( Kung Fu Man), Michael Jai White ( Falcon Rising) and especially British martial artist and actor Scott Adkins. The budgets are lower by an order of magnitude or two, but if you have a hankering for some blisteringly fast and impactful martial arts actions, they’ve got the goods. The video-on-demand world is teeming with action movies of the sort that used to keep Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and their colleagues in clover. Mainstream American action cinema is tamer than it used to be we might get the occasional John Wick-shaped outlier, but your big franchises – The Fast and the Furious, Mission: Impossible, all things Marvel – cleave to a more PG aesthetic.īut if you know where to look, you can still get your fix. It used to be that action movies had some grunt under the hood, but ballooning budgets and the need to attract big audiences mean that Hollywood blockbusters have lost some of their edge.