Criminal

The guys and I were sitting around Friday night, and I mentioned that rumor about Jet Li issuing an open challenge to all mixed martial-arts fighters– if any of them could beat him in a fight, he’d give them a million dollars.  None took the offer.

Anyway, for whatever reason, that evolved (or devolved) into a hilarious discussion– what actor has the most impressive list of victories in their movies?  The way it started was that Jordan conjectured that seeing Jet Li fight Tony Jaa would be awesome, but Matt suddenly shouted, "VanDamme, bitches!  Jean-Claude beat Tong Po, Chong Li, AND himself on at least two occasions!"  Of course he was just joking, but he acted so serious about it that we somehow began wondering if anybody was badder-ass.  After much discussion, involving many different actors, we kept coming back to Sylvester Stallone.  As Rocky Balboa he holds victories over Carl Weathers (as Apollo Creed), Mr. T (as Clubber Lang), Hulk Hogan (as Thunderlips, the Ultimate Male), and Dolph Lundgren (as Ivan Drago).  Those are impressive singular victories, but when you include his role as Rambo the list goes way up.  He defeated the entire police force of whatever small town the first movie took place in, and that included their sheriff played by Brian Dennehy.  In the second movie, we decided he basically defeated the entire country of Vietnam, several Soviet soldiers, and, upon returning to base, Marshall Mudock (played by Charles Napier.)  In the third and fourth movies he kills a buttload more Soviets and Burmese pirates, respectively.  As Jon Spartan (in Demolition Man), Stallone not only beheaded Wesley Snipes, he also bagged Sandra Bullock.  Matt mentioned a couple of other wins (such as Terry Funk in Over the Top and whoever the bad guy was in Copland), but I think the Rocky and Rambo victories alone cement his dominance.  That didn’t stop us from trying for a couple more hours to come up with even one actor with as many "w’s" as Sly.  A couple of guys moved up quite a bit farther than we originally thought, but still a far cry.  Even Arnold Schwarzenegger pales in comparison, mostly because none of his career "victories" really counted for much– just lots of armed grunts and that pudgy guy in Commando.  We were never comfortable actually proclaming Stallone as the king of the action stars, if only because we knew we had to be overlooking somebody’s accomplishments.

Fun stuff though.