Never Bring A Knife To A Fist Fight - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Samurai robots beat guns, no question. So it's just me and a shovel."

— Elsa Bloodstone, Nextwave

"You're bringing knives out in a fight like this?"

— Firo, Baccano!

Knives are scary. A single glimmer from its profile has been known to launch a thousand screams of horror. They're eminently deadly, dangerously easy to use... and utter liabilities in a fistfight. In a Wire Fu movie, you should Never Bring A Knife To A Fist Fight, because Good Old Fisticuffs is king. Knives, guns, and any weapon that would give the wielder an advantage in a fight, especially if they're blood-spilling and are used against an unarmed opponent, have the reverse effect. They make it likelier that they'll never land a hit (Clothing Damage or minor cuts across the cheek or torso notwithstanding), and eventually get disarmed or forced to throw away their weapon.

In a good old-fashioned western, any bounder who pulled a knife in a fistfight would get involved in a down-and-dirty rassle on the ground, then fall (or roll over) on his own blade.

Much like all products of the Inverse Law Of Utility And Lethality, this applies equally to Heroes and Villains, though villains are usually likelier to pack heat or hidden knives. If someone does get stabbed, shot, skewered, or otherwise hit with the blood-spilling weapon, it was Only A Flesh Wound (though regenerators are exempt). Often goes hand in hand with finding out that just like weapons, Armor Is Useless. One way to exploit this trope is to make an immobilizing Knife Outline, as the likelihood of fatally skewering someone becomes zero.

Oddly enough, a dramatic death where someone gets skewered or shot aren't subversions, since they rely on the unlikelihood of such weapons actually killing for their dramatic punch; plus, the person shot usually lasts long enough to deliver an inspiring Final Speech and turn out to be Not Quite Dead afterwards. Instantly fatal stabbings or headshots are subversions, though.

Unusually, some martial arts actually teach this: a person using a blade will focus only on using the blade, and will rarely do much more than try to stab or cut. A good fighter can use this to their advantage by placing themselves either too close or too far away from the blade's wielder for it to be used properly, because the user will more than likely try to employ the weapon anyway. For example, if you grapple a man with a knife, he'll likely keep trying to stab you rather than doing the smart thing and trying to push you to the floor. This is why jujitsu students are often found in emergency rooms and morgues.

Note: This only applies to humans. In Speculative Fiction, you can skewer and dismember as many golems, undead, Mecha Mooks or what have you as you damn well please.

Examples:

A View From The Bridge is an old example: in the final scene, Eddie Carbone pulls a knife on Marco, and is pretty much instantly killed as the knife is turned against him. For some bizarre reason, only after he's been lethally wounded does his family step in...
The Charlies Angels movies have this in full effect; any villain going at them with any kind of weapon to bear rarely even nicks them. The second movie Scotch Tapes this, by saying that the Angels don't use guns.
Quite possibly the point of everything Jackie Chan stars in. Then again, his action sequences are so impressive it hardly jars.
- This was actually subverted in Rumble in the Bronx. Jackie pwns the gangbangers in an extensive hand-to-hand combat scene, then one of them pulls a revolver on him, forcing him to grovel and be humiliated (in context, he was in a narrow alley several dozen feet away, preventing him from dodging or ambushing/disarming the guy like he usually does).
  - Subverted even further as his characters generally have a habit of grabbing any damned thing within their reach and putting it to good use.
- Actually this is pretty standard across the board in Hong Kong action films, especially any of the '80s classics starring Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Dick Wei, Michelle Yeoh, Cynthia Rothrock, Jet Li and/or Donnie Yen. Fandom seems to implicitly understand the rule that once the gun gets kicked across the room, it ain't coming back.
Depending on if he's fighting Faceless Goons or recurring villains, Wolverine can go from messily skewering everything that moves to barely managing to nick the bad guy's costume.
- Particularly bad in the cartoons, because unless he's fighting a robot his entire battle strategy has to revolve around body checks.
Big Bad Shredder of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had claws as part of his costume, yet he never really does much shredding with them.
Exhibited quite a bit in Avatar The Last Airbender, probably to escape the Media Watchdogs. The show presents numerous swords, spears and other weaponary implements of various intricate, traditional designs, but as of yet, no one has been struck by any of them. One particular sequence had Bad Ass Normal Sokka basically just standing with his back hunched carrying a big knife doing absolutely nothing while his bender teammates took on the opposing guards. However, this may have been justified in that one instance; they were trying to avoid seriously injuring them, so he couldn't just run up to one and shank him in the gut. But there's no excuse for his tag-team fight with Zuko against Azula, where he lunged forward just enough to get her off balance, and then just stopped and stepped back.
- Mai is also guilty. She's good enough with her throwing knives to pin some one to a wall via their close, but never drew blood throughout the series.
Subverted in the Devil May Cry series: Although the second fight with Vergil in DMC3 starts with him using the Beowulf gauntlets and greaves, he pulls out his Yamato katana after he finds that having the hand-to-hand weapon isn't stopping Dante from kicking his ass. Beowulf (acquired after victory in said fight) and the Ifrit gauntlets in DMC1 are the strongest weapons damage-wise, but Dante never uses them in cutscenes, sticking to his sword(s).
- That both Dante and Vergil exhibit the most extreme forms of Hollywood Healing, and thus can and are skewered by all manner of unpleasant edged objects without any lasting harm, may have something to do with this.
Subverted in just about every beat-em-up video game ever made. Most of the time it's fist-against-fist combat, but when an enemy shows up with a weapon, that enemy will, nine times out of ten, be much stronger than his companions. Bosses, likewise, are usually always armed. By the same token, disarming a foe and stealing their weapon will give you a massive advantage… until the thing falls apart.
- This is doubly true in Lugaru: The Rabbit's Foot. While weapons are just about as deadly and easy to steal as in any other beat-em-up (when in use), if somebody's dumb enough to try and run away, an auto-aimed thrown knife landing in their back is always an instant kill.
  - Only in the demo of Lugaru. In the full game, wolves can survive impalement by a knife or, depending on the difficulty level, a sword. However, weapons remain easy to grab - in most fights involving only one sword, the two fighters will wrestle it out of each other's hands so often that battles have been known to end when one man dies of exhaustion.
  - True, but if you can knock over your opponent while there's a knife in them, ripping it out of their body while they're prone WILL kill absolutely anything… Unless they pull it out themselves to fight you.
In Full Metal Alchemist, Hawkeye prefers guns due to the fact that they allow her not to have to “feel her opponents die.”
Subverted in Raiders of the Lost Ark wherein Indiana Jones simply shoots the flamboyant swordsman challenging him.
- Actually, the original script called for a full-on fight scene. However, Harrison Ford was sick (dysentery) and asked "Why don't I just shoot the sucker?" They ran with it.
- There is a Double Subversion in the sequel, where Indy reaches for his gun... only to realize that it has been lost earlier.
Pucca often bests ninja, Texan RV-bots, sharks, and other foes with super weapons and katanas with nothing but her bare hands and righteous anger at her beloved being harmed.
Exception: In the play West Side Story the violence between the Jets and the Sharks becomes more horrific as it escalates from fistcuffs to knives to a gun, leading to the violent deaths of several major characters.
In Outlaw Star, resident ass-kickers Suzuka and Aisha seem to regularly wipe out rooms of gun-wielding foes with nothing more than a wooden sword and bare hands, respectively.
- Aisha, at least, has the excuse of being a naturally bulletproof catgirl berserker.
Possibly subverted in Under Siege featuring Steven Segal, where Steve and the Big Bad eco terrorist fought very impressively with knives.
During the alley fight in Sha Po Lang, Ma Kwan manages to beat the knife-wielding assassin Jack bloody with his steel baton, but is unable to finish him until Jack manages to strip him of his baton. When Jack attacks the unarmed Kwan, Kwan grabs his knife, twists it around, and guts Jack like a fish.
Anime example: Though Rurouni Kenshin is primarily a sword-fighting anime, this trope is used early on when a thug tries to use a dagger-type weapon (with a ring-hole at the end so it can be worn on the finger) against fist-fighter Sanosuke... only to have his own finger broken due to Sanosuke's inhuman toughness.
- Also, despite being a sword-fighting anime, the "Swords > Guns" trope was subverted early on, at the end of the second arc... An evil bureaucrat massacres the arc's entire Quirky Mini Boss Squad of noble fighter villains using an imported gatling gun, all while bragging about how technology makes ubermensch fighting skills obsolete. He only loses to Kenshin because he ran out of bullets killing everyone else (in the manga), or because the last villain managed to jam the gatling's belt feed with a throwing star (in the anime).
Averted in the Order Of The Stick prequel "On The Origin Of PCs" where we first meet Belkar as he sits in jail charged with fatally stabbing several people in a bar brawl. He argues that they shouldn't have brought fists to a knifefight.
Blunty averted in Assassins Creed, where switching to your fists in a sword fight is a quick way to an asskicking.
- Yet somewhat plays straight if you switch to the hidden blade. Countering is slightly easier (but if you screw up the counter there's no blocking, naturally) and using the counter counts as a guaranteed one hit kill, rather than possibly shoving the enemy down.
  - But then, taking down an assassination target or high-level enemy soldier, who (usually) tend to be very difficult opponents, with such contemptuous ease is easily one of the most awesome things in the game.
- Attacking single soldiers with your bare hands is actually pretty effective, as long as there's only one of them. It takes a little longer, but they can't parry, and its also quite humiliating.
Subverted in Survival Of The Fittest, when Ric Chee and Bobby Jacks fight with Good Old Fisticuffs. When Bobby realises that, conversely to his expectations, he is getting beaten down mercilessly (by a guy with no combat expertise whatsoever) he pulls out a knife (well, scalpel) and immediately fatally stabs Ric.
Averted in Smallville of all places, where Lois Lane is fighting a security guard - after a period of inconclusive barehanded fighting, the guard get mad, pulls out a knife, and succeeds in stabbing her.
Batman uses this a lot, since he often faces thugs armed with knives, but one particularly obvious example is the fight at the end of Mad Love, when a very enraged Joker attacks Batman, and seems to be giving him more trouble in a fistfight than he usually does... until he pulls out a knife, and Batman instantly knocks him off the train.
- It's then averted in their final battle in Return of the Joker. The Joker actually manages to stab Batman in the leg; an injury that apparently (along with old age) forced Bruce Wayne to use a cane later in life.
Super Smash Bros. has an egregious subversion of this, intended or not; though Link isn't regarded as high tier, Marth and Meta Knight certainly are. Young/Toon Link has come under fire as a possible subversion of the trope too.
- There's also the items, such as the beam sword and the laser gun, which can give an otherwise unarmed character an advantage in range and power.
Real life subversion - this troper once took a (rubber) knife to a training session with a multi-black-belt friend, and beat him - because the opponent was too focused on the knife to defend himself against any other techniques.
- Are you sure he was a black belt? This troper isn't even a senior black belt, but he's never been beaten in a knife vs. fists fight. That's because most people solely focus on using the knife instead of fists or feet, making it fairly easy to evade and counterattack.
  - Oh yes, jujitsu and taekwondo. Note my previous statement - he was too focused on watching the knife to be aware of the possibility of, for example, being shoved to the floor with my free hand when he tried to grapple the knife arm.
  - It happens, according to this troper's Sensei. Even trained martial artists - maybe especially trained martial artists - can get too caught up in the technique they're trying to use, and miss things.
The animated Conan The Barbarian series demonstrated what a poor blacksmith Conan's father was. Any edged weapon he forged from star metal turned out to be little more than a metal club. The only exception were Jasmine's throwing stars, which could cause Only A Flesh Wound.
Most of the fights the protagonist of Vinland Saga loses are to unarmed opponents. Likewise his father was a master at this trope when fighting a horde of mooks, beating them all without drawing his sword.
In Grand Theft Auto IV, it is entirely too easy to disarm an opponent attacking you with a knife while you have nothing but your fists.
Something like this was used in the first episode of Transformers Victory. Fist, Star Saber defeats two gun-wielding Decepticons using only a sword. Later, when the Dinoforce fights the Brainmasters, Goryu criticises one of his underlings for using a gun; said underling immediately switches to an axe.
In Ranma 1/2, every martial artist is skilled with numerous weapon styles, even those that fight barehanded. So, nobody berates the dedicated bladed-weapon users (Kodachi, Kuno, Mousse, Mint) for their choice... but their weapons never strike home anyway. Most egregious of all is Mousse, whose typical assault consists of tossing various weapons (some blunt, but mostly piercing and slashing ones) from his sleeves and tie up his opponent in the ropes attached to them, instead of actually skewering anyone. But let him have a morningstar, a club, or even his own hands and feet, and he'll tear into a foe like it's nobody's business.
Subverted in this comic.
Played straight in The Matrix: Reloaded. Morpheus pulls a sword on one of the agents, adopts an Ass Kicking Pose and gives the hand gesture for "bring it on." He barely manages to cut the agents cheek and tie before the agent breaks the sword and punts him off the truck they were standing on. Of course, agents are just better fighters in every conceivable way.
Subverted in Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, when Sousuke is challenged to a duel by the karate club. Nobody thinks to tell him that things like guns, tear gas, and hand grenades aren't permitted. Hilarity Ensues
Used in Those Who Hunt Elves to show how serious the dark elf queen is. When squaring off against Junpei, she throws away her sword because it would just slow her down.
One episode of The Boondocks features ''Soul Plane 2'', a movie where terrorists take over a airline run by African Americans. One of the terrorists pulls out a knife in mid-flight and tries to announce his superiority...right before a half-dozen passengers tackle and beat him down.
In Mahou Sensei Negima, Ku Fei manages to defeat a number of armed opponents using only her martial arts skills.
Completely and utterly averted in Sluggy Freelance, at least whenever Oasis and Kusari around. They're almost never seen fighting without knives, small scythes, or other sharp implements in their hands, and their enemies usually have quite a few stab wounds when all's said and done.
Played mostly straight in the Burn Notice episode "Old Friends": when an assassin pulls a knife on the unarmed Michael, none of the strikes land, but Michael's too busy trying not to get cut to do any real damage of his own, and promptly flees the scene when a second knife appears:
Michael: "The key to a good knife defense is to control the knife hand and strike with everything you've got. Fighting is often about tactical retreat—like running away from two knives."
Baccano, as quoted above. Firo doesn't even have to mess up his nifty new fedora while handing the knifer his ass.
In the final battle in Fist Of Legend, the Japanese Big Bad is losing the fight, then pulls a katana and gets his ass handed to him even worse before Jet Li kills him with his own sword.
A full chapter in Holyland is devoted to demonstrating how to disarm a knife-user in a street fight.
- What it amounts to is basically what was described in Burn Notice quote above - Izumi grabs the punk's knife arm and beats him senseless.
Both played straight and subverted in Taken; an earlier knife-user is absolutely no threat to Bryan, but the knife-wielding Dragon, although he still gets beaten, is one of a very select group who actually wound Bryan. After their fight Bryan is visibly limping.
- He was limping before that fight, since he jumped about fifty feet down onto the deck of the yacht, most likely breaking his ankle in the process. But The Dragon did deal a good amount of damage to Bryan regardless.
Subverted in Sinister Dexter when a crime lord brings a nuclear warhead to a meeting, knowing it will end in a gunfight.
In Second Hand Lions, Uncle Hub gets in a squabble with a group of rowdy teenagers. After Hub fends off the their initial attacks, they fall back and pull out their pocket knives. At this point Hub scoffs at them and delivers a major beat down.
Or in Star Wars, never bring a blaster to a lightsaber fight.
- Justified as the only way to block would be to be a magical wizard, or a cyborg with enhanced reflexes. Everybody else would most likely kill themselves with their own weapon if they used a lightsaber, and realistically, normal people can't block blaster shots. Even some Jedi can be taken down with enough concentrated fire.