Keysi Fighting Method

I was watching my DVD of Batman Begins last weekend, when I finally got around to watching the extras on disc 2. There is a great short feature on the fight choreography for the movie. As we have already discussed at length on this site, Bruce Wayne is trained in a secret ninja training facility somewhere in Tibet -- or Bhutan, as the extras on the DVD point out. But how many of you have even heard of Bhutan? Oh, and while I'm at it, let me drop this controversial quote from a kung fu website into our old debate: "Upon release, he makes his way to the Himalayas, climbs a mountain, winds up with the League of Shadows, bumps into Ducard, and Ducard tells him that they are all ninjas. What would have been neater and geographically correct would be for Ducard to explain that they are a remnant of the Chinese Forest Devils that existed in South China, the true progenitor of the ninja. (?) Then having a group of assassins who look and fight like ninjas but live in the Himalayas wouldn't have been a stretch. Likewise, the training sequences would have made more sense since Bruce undergoes Shaolin pole training, where people fight on top of tall wooden logs hammered into the ground as seen in Donnie Yen's IRON MONKEY."

Unfortunately, the fighting system used for the fight scenes is not genuine ninjutsu (or to be more accurate, taijutsu). Instead, the producers turned to a far newer style called the Keysi Fighting Method. The short on the DVD is great and makes the Keysi look really dynamic. But then, it has to be photgenic or they wouldn't have used it for the movie, or devoted valuable DVD space on the short. Keysi in action looks a bit like Thai Kickboxing without the kicking. It's all close range, brutal elbows being swung into exposed portions of the adversary. The fighting, at least in the video, is done mostly at trapping range.

Keysi was developed by two friends, one of them trained in the Bruce Lee tradition of Jun Fan kung fu, Jeet Kune Do and the Filipino arts. The other is English, which accounts for the penchant for close-range head butting, I'm sure. Beyond Hollywood, I've never heard anything about this art, but it sure looks cool. But can it deliver the goods outside of a carefully arranged fight sequence?