20 great movies from the past 20 years: Rope A Dope

I’m counting down to the 2025 best-of-the-year season by recommending 20 of my favorite movies from the past 20 years. Here are the previous entries, if you want to catch up:

2005: Caché
2006: Undisputed II: Last Man Standing
2007: Sunshine
2008: Speed Racer
2009: Vengeance
2010: Unstoppable
2011: The Three Musketeers
2012: Eega

This week’s pick is a bit more bite-sized (yes, even more bite-sized than the movie about the fly). It’s the excellent 13-minute action comedy short Rope A Dope, which you can watch for free on YouTube, so I’m going to embed it right here.

The basic pitch: It’s Groundhog Day as a Jackie Chan-inspired action comedy. Rope A Dope follows a guy who gets into a fight with the Martial Arts Mafia one sleepy morning. When he inevitably gets knocked out, he wakes up again at the start of the day and has to learn from his mistakes and alter his plan.

Rope A Dope is the brainchild of martial artist, stuntman, and action historian Eric Jacobus, who wrote, directed (along with Pete Lee), and starred in the short. Jacobus’s YouTube channel is a must-watch for any fans of the genre, and his recently released book If These Fists Could Talk: A Stuntman’s Unflinching Take on Violence is a fascinating look at his career and his philosophy on violence on and off the screen. While he is one of the best choreographers working today, Jacobus has largely eschewed big Hollywood projects to work on his own projects. Rope A Dope is a stand out example, as is his work designing the action for the very fun Hindi action comedy The Man Who Feels No Pain. He also does a lot of work in video games – Jacobus performs the action motion capture for Kratos in the God of War games, and his studio SuperAlloy Interactive provides motion capture work and action design for many of the major game studios.

The Rope A Dope short communicates so much of what I love about the language of action and its cross-cultural appeal in just 13 swift minutes. There’s no dialogue — instead emotions, narrative beats, and character choices are communicated with gestures and actions. There’s a lot of the language of silent cinema in Rope A Dope, and it reminds me of the filmmakers who held on tightly to that form after the advent of sound, convinced that silent cinema was the best way to connect with global masses.

Part training montage, part Groundhog Day gag, part Jackie Chan-inspired prop-based action comedy, part exploration of the fundamentals of fight choreo, Rope A Dope is one of Jacobus’s best and most entertaining projects. The sequel, Rope A Dope 2, is also great, building on the concept in fun new ways while keeping things tight and consistent with the premise.