Other times, however, you really get the feeling that 100 percent of a character's fighting ability is due to clever editing and a script that calls for his opponents to fall down at his touch. With that in mind, here are seven supposed badasses who we're pretty sure you could take in a fight:

Some fictional badasses come with a certain level of credibility. Watching a dead eyed Sylvester Stallone machine gun an entire Vietnamese village to shreds, we had no trouble believing John Rambo could rip our throats out if the situation called for it.

6 The Karate Kid

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Strengths:

Good handyman abilities; high tolerance for menial, mind-numbing work, creative costume designer; able to take a good beating.

Weaknesses:

Fairly limited formal instruction in martial arts, little to no musculature, fighting techniques consist of "special" moves of questionable usefulness.

How You Can Beat Him:

The Karate Kid is hardly an imposing specimen, and his fighting style consists mostly of looking scared while trying to remember the four actual moves he was taught. While he gets props for being able to take a punch--repeatedly and to many different areas of his body--such a fighting style is generally not conducive to winning a fight. We like your chances.

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He relies heavily on some obscure technique that seems to require his opponent to rush blindly into it. So when you see him propped up on one leg, your obvious strategy would be to go low and kick his other leg out from under him. That should be followed by a righteous stomping from the top. This should provide a better chance of success than the Cobra Kai's favored tactic of running at him chin-first with their arms behind their back.

Further research (that is, watching the second film) should teach you not to make the opponent's mistake of falling for the same trick ... 50 times in a row.

Yes, while the old block-and-punch maneuver is mighty clever, we'd suggest changing the approach once you get hit by it once, and not allow yourself to be knocked unconscious by getting smacked with the same move for five straight minutes. We learned our lesson on that back in 5th grade.