Chase Fight

Sword fighting! On motorbikes!

Louis: Run, or shoot? [Infected horde gets closer]
Louis: RUN OR SHOOT?!
Bill: Both!

— Left 4 Dead trailer

An X Meets Y cross between a Chase Scene and a Fight Scene. At least two combatants are battling in a normal way, but their fight takes them on a journey as well. This could be because one or both fighters is trying to get to a specific destination, or maybe because they're just trying to get away from the beatdown they might be taking.

When on the ground, this could feature copious amounts of Le Parkour and Roof Hopping, these fights tend to go anywhere and everywere. This is also highly improbable, as the fighters, if human, would likely be tired out of their minds to fight, run and give snappy quips at the same time. Of course, the fighters could be simply superhuman.

The mobile fight might also take place with cars, trucks, a train, boats, or spaceships.

If this is seen as a video game mechanic in a Fighting Game, that is Free-Floor Fighting. See also "Get Back Here!" Boss and (in reverse) Advancing Boss of Doom.

While this is often referred to as a Stern Chase in naval warfare, that trope actually refers to a much longer pursuit with actual fighting being relatively rare, such as a fugitive on the run from the law.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Lupin III: Episode 0: First Contact: The duel between Lupin and Goemon. Lupin runs away as an increasingly frustrated Goemon tries to fight him. It begins with Goemon on foot, chasing Lupin in a car, then they're running on top of cars, as well as around Central Park. Lupin mostly just wants to escape.
• In Naruto, Pain and the Kyuubi engage in this. Both are near-godlike beings, and the anime uses deliberate Off-Model animation to emphasise the speed and power of the chase.
• In the Davy Back Fight arc of One Piece, Zoro and Sanji do this as they attempt to reach Tonjit so they can tag him.
• In Ranma ½, occasionally the fights turn into this, but a couple of them were explicitly this, because they were a race to the finish line while trying to take out the competition at the same time.
• In Soul Eater this is how the fight between Sid and Mifune goes (while essentially snowboarding without the boards no less).
• This is the premise of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, which is all about card games on motorcycles.

Comic Books

• All-New Ultimates: Taskmaster captured the Ultimates and placed them all in his van. Sidewinder hotwired and stole the van, with the unconcious Ultimates in it, right in Taskmaster's nose. And, while he tries to retrieve his prey, Bombshell is also after the whole group, to save the Ultimates.
• Robin (1993): During an Arkham breakout Tim chases down an escapee, fighting him with his staff and batarangs as they speed down the freeway. Eventually Tim ends up vaulting himself onto the truck the escapee stole and knocking him out.

Films — Animation

• Batman: Under the Red Hood has several. The Red Hood always runs from Batman until their final encounter, usually fighting the whole way.
• Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children: Cloud has a sword and gun fight with Loz and Yazoo while chasing Kadaj while all four of them are riding motorcycles. Cloud actually ends up slicing one of the bikes in half when it gets launched at his head.
• Kung Fu Panda 2. Po chasing Wolf Boss across Gongmen City on rickshaws! Hilarity Ensues. Po wins the fight, only to find that Wolf Boss isn't just running from him, he's running to the palace, guarded by an entire army of wolf soldiers.

Films — Live-Action

• Bad Boys II has a car chase about half an hour in, with hordes of Mooks chasing after Marcus' undercover sister. With Mike and Marcus, as well as the rest of Miami's Finest chasing them, the resulting back-and-forth gunfire expends more ammo than most wars. The chase even comes to a halt partway through, replaced with a massive shootout before the chase resumes.
• The Blues Brothers. The title characters are trying to get to the Cook County Assessor's office to pay the tax on the orphanage. They're pursued by police officers, National Guard troops, Nazis and a country-western band, with much destruction along the way.
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the two main female characters have one of these across the rooftops.
• The climax of Face/Off is all this. Castor and Archer start out with a showdown in a church which leads to a long chase scene on boats as they try to kill and evade each other, ending with a showdown on a beach in a totally different city.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. The scene where the Baroness and Storm Shadow are driving to the Eiffel Tower in order to attack it and fighting with the Joes as they do so.
• Heat (1995) has the running firefight that takes place after a botched robbery.
• Very common in Mad Max films. The vehicular chase fights through apocalyptic wastelands are probably the most iconic part of the franchise. The fourth film is about 65% Chase Fight.
• Morpheus and Trinity's highway battle against the Twins in The Matrix Reloaded while trying to reach an exit so they can escape the Matrix. And there's Agents of the Matrix joining in, the more the merrier.
• Midway through Ong-Bak, Tony Jaa partakes in one of these. Naturally, he is trying to avoid confrontation, but as soon as he gets cornered, he lays a serious beat down on any of those dumb enough to attack him.
• The fight between Jack, Will and Norrington from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which takes place concurrently to Elizabeth, Pintel and Ragetti chase-fighting the Flying Dutchman's landing party.
• Raiders of the Lost Ark. The running battle between Indiana and the Nazi convoy that's trying to get the Ark to Cairo. Indiana chases after it on a horse, eventually boards the truck and fights everyone involved.
• Star Wars:
  • A New Hope: During the beginning of the movie. Princess Leia's starship is fighting with Darth Vader's Star Destroyer as she tries to escape so she can give technical data on the Death Star to the Rebel Alliance.
  • The Phantom Menace: Shortly before departing from Tattooine, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon have a high-speed confrontation against Darth Maul. It gives them the realization that the thought-to-be-extinct Sith are back.
  • Revenge of the Sith: Halfway through the movie, Obi-Wan battles General Grievous in a fight that begins in a stationary outpost full of droids, but continues across the sorrounding areas while Grievous tries to escape. Much later in the movie, Obi-Wan and Anakin have their fateful lightsaber duel across the moving rocks of the lava river in Mustafar. Obi Wan wins both fights, but they hardly feel like victories for him (much less so the second).
  • Solo: A chase fight occurs when several TIE Fighters chase the Millennium Falcon through the Akkadese Maelstrom.
• Total Recall (1990): Benny drives Quaid and Melina to the Last Resort as Richter and his partner follow in their car, with both parties shooting at each other.

Literature

• Honor Harrington, of course, being Horatio Hornblower IN SPACE, features more than a few of these. The first book has a lone undergunned light cruiser doggedly chasing down a much more powerful merchant cruiser, later books have entire fleets engaging in chases when one fleet or the other is forced to disengage and retreat, with their enemies not wanting them to escape with their forces intact. One book has an outmatched force trick a much larger force into chasing them deeper into the system so that their reinforcements can trap the attacking fleet inside the system hyperlimit.
• Horatio Hornblower: The first-published book, The Happy Return^note  Beat To Quarters, in the US, featured a climactic chase between Captain Hornblower's frigate HMS Lydia against the much more powerful warship Natividad. Also, the Natividad's stern guns have a longer range than the Lydia's forward guns, which means that the Lydia has to soak several hits before she can get close enough to return fire. To pass the time, and to keep his men from realizing how nervous he is about the situation, he invites his officers to a game of cards, and orders the sailors to have a dancing competion, even as cannon shot from the Natividad lands all around them.

Live-Action TV

• The 100 has an episode where Clarke and Lexa are being chased by a ferocious gorilla, but with Clarke occasionally forcing it back for a bit with gunfire.
• Happens all the time on all the Star Trek series when two or more ships battle each other while at warp speed.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: two documentary presenters—one about Sir Walter Scott, the other about trees—fight each other in separate cars over the microphone.

Pro Wrestling

• ECW matches tended to go all over the arena.
• WWE "Hardcore" matches often go backstage, and recently Kane chokeslammed Rey Mysterio Jr. into the Gulf of Mexico after Mysterio Hurricanrana'd Jack Swagger into the ocean. (The match started in an arena that's within spitting distance to the ocean.)

Roleplay

• Destroy the Godmodder: When the godmodder left for the house of Villains in the tvtropes session, the players followed him, beginning a massive fight with Metal Sonic, and two of the five terror nether mobs.

Video Games

• A really awesome example in Jitsu Squad, during the second (of three) fights against Dash Kobayashi. It's a Lava Surfing stage where both of you trade slashes and stabs while moving on a river of lava. And it's played to the tune of this awesome and appropriately-titled song.
• The boss fight against Vengeance in Ghost Rider (2007). You're on a fiery motorcycle, pursuing vengeance who's on a similar ride, and the two of you duke it out while chasing one another down a tunnel until the loser crashes.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: During an Escort Mission of a coach from Hyrule Castle Town to Kakariko Village, Link has to fight off several Bokoblins while riding Epona. At one point, Link must also defeat King Bulblin in a joustic match like in an earlier moment (albeit requiring a different method this time due to the opponent's higher defense).
• Mirror's Edge. The real chase fight scene is with Celeste and the two of you end up fighting on top of a ship crate with Le Parkour action.
• The cutscene after final fight between Travis and Henry in No More Heroes features this, as a visual metaphor for them trying to "find that exit they call paradise"
• This tends to be a recurring element in Sonic the Hedgehog games:
  • In Sonic Adventure 2, the final battle between Sonic and Shadow is a chase along an abandoned space station. The preceding levels are even called Final Chase and Final Rush.
  • Sonic Advance 2 was almost exclusively this style of Boss Battle.
  • Freedom Planet follows this trend with two of its Boss Battles, though only one is technically a chase; the other is more like a run-from-an-Advancing Wall of Doom-while-doing-a-Boss Battle.
  • In games with Super Sonic only final bosses, this tends to be the format they fall under.
  • Sonic Forces does this for most of the bosses. Sonic Vs Infinite on a snake, Sonic and The Avatar Vs Infinite 3 near Imperial Tower, and Sonic, Classic Sonic, and The Avatar vs Egg Robo in what appears to be cyberspace likely created by the Prometheus Ruby.
• Injustice 2 features a Super-Speed variant with The Flash and Reverse Flash, starting in Metropolis and ending in Gotham City before they slug it out with each other.

Web Animation

• The climax of the second half of Bunnykill 5 involves Dust, in full-on Roaring Rampage of Revenge mode after the Psycho Serum incident that led to him killing Snowball, having an awesome one of these against Smoke, one of the two bad guys responsible for the incident, involving Dust leaping from vehicle to vehicle, mowing down or shanking mooks in his way, and battling Smoke in his damaged helicopter gunship with machine guns and rockets, and ultimately having a one-on-one duel atop a moving semi that gets destroyed during the battle.
• In DEATH BATTLE!, Link vs. Cloud Strife (2021) starts as one of these, with Cloud on the Fenrir and Link on the Master Cycle Zero. Eventually, though, both bikes are removed from the fight: The Master Cycle Zero is blown to smithereens by Cloud's Thunder, and the Fenrir gets removed from the fight by an Ancient Arrow.
• Red vs. Blue shows Maine, Carolina, and York trying to get a briefcase from Insurrectionist soldiers, while racing down a highway.

Web Original

• In Dream's Minecraft Manhunts, this is what usually happens when the hunters are chasing Dream.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender. The climactic battle between Aang and Fire Lord Ozai is this on both sides, with each chasing the other at various times.
• Batman: The Animated Series. In "His Silicon Soul," the android Batman chases the real Batman around the Bat Cave as they fight.
• Family Guy. This is half the fun of watching the fights between Peter and the giant chicken.
• In The Legend of Korra, Tenzin fights Zaheer in the episode "The Ultimatum". The first part of the fight is a chase, with Zaheer trying to escape from Tenzin so they can fight on higher grounds.
• Popeye. In "A Dream Walking," Popeye and Bluto chase after a sleepwalking Olive while fighting over who gets to save her.
• Samurai Jack: Most of Jack's fights are pretty short, brutal and in his favour. However when he fights the formidable Minions of Set he is utterly on the back foot, and has to flee in between short desperate fights in order to survive. Add to this there is only one way to destroy the Minions and that is through summoning a god with a scarab split into three pieces, and our hero has to find the scarab first. Good luck with that, Jack.
• In a homage to Revenges of the Sith, one episode of The Simpsons had Bart and Principal Skinner in one involving each others food allergies (peanuts for Skinner, shrimp for Bart).
• The final season of Star Wars: Clone Wars features a long scene with three Jedi and Chancellor Palpatine fleeing from General Grievous and occasionally stopping to fight him.
• In ThunderCats (2011) Thundera's Gladiator Games in their thunderdome take this format: a race between two Catfolk competitors climbing, swinging, jumping and running up a giant tree to to ring a bell at its top, where violent kicking and punching in order to knock a competitor out of the tree are entirely acceptable methods of getting ahead. Young Prince Lion-O challenges Tygra to a match only to suffer a particularly humiliating Ring Out, landing in a pool of water below.

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