If we're honest, martial arts movies don't need an R rating to be great films or to deliver incredible action. Some of the genre's best movies have managed perfectly well without one, and blood is hardly a substitute for good choreography. Give the right performers enough room to move around and a camera that actually lets audiences see what's happening, and a great martial arts movie can be thrillingly visceral and high-energy regardless of the rating. Still, some martial arts movies take full advantage of their R rating.

In R-rated martial arts films, bones break, bodies hit the floor with uncomfortable force, and fights never end with someone simply being knocked unconscious. With stars like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Tony Jaa, and Iko Uwais, these seven R-rated movies represent very different eras and styles of martial arts filmmaking, but what they have in common is that when the action starts, audiences won't be able to look away.

From Heat's brutal violence to Se7en's dark subject matter, these are the best R-rated thrillers ever made.

Tony Jaa's The Protector has a famously outlandish plot involving stolen elephants, an Australian crime syndicate, and a journey from Thailand to Sydney. The best part is, this premise gives Tony Jaa increasingly ridiculous reasons to beat up everyone unfortunate enough to stand in the way of him and those elephants. Jaa delivers multiple showstopping sequences, and never has the human body seemed capable of quite as much as it does in The Protector.

The standout scene is the restaurant setpiece, which follows Jaa's Kham fighting his way up several floors in one extended take, turning staircases, balconies, and every available surface into part of the choreography.

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