The 13 Cold-Blooded Eagles (1993)

The 13 Cold-Blooded Eagles (1993)
Chinese Title: 新冷血十三鷹
Translation: New Cold Blood 13 Eagles

Starring: Waise Lee, Cynthia Khan, Yen Shi-Kwan, Chui Fat, Lau Ji-Wai
Director: Chui Fat
Action Director: Chui Fat

When the period piece action film in Hong Kong became popular again in the early 1990s, it was a slightly different creature than it had been back in the 1970s. Like the ol’ days, studios produced both kung fu movies and wuxia pian, or swordplay dramas. Both films took advantage of the advances in wire-stunt orchestration, which meant that any actor, regardless of martial ability (or lack thereof), could be hoisted about on wires and look like a martial artist or swordsman of sorts (and it would be easier to hide his/her stunt double, too). Stylistically, older kung fu movies often had a certain bias for Southern kung fu styles like hung gar and choy li fut, which were characterized by deep stances, animal techniques, and hand-based attacks. However, once Jet Li blew the audiences away in Once Upon a Time in China, studios started scrambling for Mainland-trained wushu stylists like Vincent Zhao Wen-Zhuo, Jacky Wu Jing, Yeung Fan, Willie Chi, and others. Wuxia Pian filmmakers, on the other hand, started casting handsome and bankable actors, since most of the action in those films was wire-assisted and heavy on the Qi blasts, which required little formal training, if any. Swordplay dramas often ended up having little actual swordplay at all!

The stories also changed during this period. Back in the 1970s, we had kung fu and wuxia movies about Japanese pirates, Japanese ninja, Japanese occupiers, opium dealers, rival schools, rival clans, escort companies, the buring of the Shaolin Temple, the aftermath of the burning of the Shaolin temple, Ming patriots (who opposed the Manchurians/Qings), Sung patriots (who opposed the Mongols or the Yuen Dynasty), bandits, extortion gangs, rapists, tournaments, missing kung fu manuals, vengeance, and the list goes on. Kung fu movies during the 1990s tended to focus primarily on the fictitious exploits of Chinese folk heroes like Wong Fei-Hung, Fong Sai-Yuk, and Hung Hey-Kwun. Wuxia films tended to be adaptations of Louis Cha’s wuxia novels or remakes of Shaw Brothers classics...often both at the same time. Today’s film, 13 Cold Blooded Eagles, falls in the latter category, as it’s a rather loose remake of the 1978 classic Avenging Eagle.

The film opens with a gang of bandits raiding some random village, killing the men, raping the womenfolk, and setting all of the thatched huts on fire. After retreating to the forest to rest and boast about their exploits, the bandits are confronted by team of a vigilantes/assassins known as the “13 Cold-Blooded Eagles.” The Eagles declare their aims to rid the world of all evils before hacking the desperados to pieces with the kung fu equivalent of a meat cleaver. Returning to base, the Eagles are received with open arms by their foster father and teacher, whom we’ll just call Foster Father and is played by Yen Shi-Kwan (who showed up in nearly every wire-fu movie made in the 1990s after playing the lead villain in Once Upon a Time in China). Foster Father informs the Eagles that their next mission will be wrest the Kung Fu Instruction Manual for the Mythical “Star-Bleed Skill” from the hands of an old master named the Shinshu Monster (who’ll be played by the director, Tsui Fat). 

After a brief interlude in which we learn that the second highest Eagle, Red Eagle (Waise Lee of A Better Tomorrow and Wing Chun) is in love with Purple Eagle, we get to the next action scene. The Eagles try to ambush the Shinshu Monster while he’s practicing the Star-Bleed Skill, which apparently involves stabbing oneself in the chest with daggers, but the Monster is no easy target. One of the Eagles, Yinmin (Lau Ji-Wai, who played a guy named Batman in The Legend of the Liquid Sword), delivers the killing blow, but not before being injured and getting washed away in a river. Yinmin is rescued and nursed back to health by a mysterious kung fu beauty (Cynthia Khan, who set the Girls n' Guns genre alight with films like In the Line of Duty III and Madame City Hunter). He eventually makes it back home.

The Eagles are then sent by Foster Father to eliminate the Shinshu Monster’s old master, since the Monster himself didn’t actually have the manual. Unfortunately, their next target isn’t an evil man in any sense of the word. However, Foster Father uses the reasoning that anybody associated with the Star-Bleed Style is guilty by association, so the Eagles take flight once more. Red and Purple Eagle, plus another one of their cohorts, try to lead the initial assault on the old man, who’s holed up at the Qinlin mountain. The three are set upon by Master Qinlin, who makes kills Purple Eagle and the other guy, and banishes Red Eagle to a cave. There, Red Eagle finds an old man who has been prisoner in the cave for 20 years and learns the truth: the old man is Red Eagle’s dad and Foster Father had raped and killed his mother years before. When the old man tried to get revenge, he fell into conflict with Master Qinlin, who crippled him and left him to die in the cave. Red Eagle swears revenge and after getting an infusion of his father’s qi, escapes from the cave and kills both Master Qinlin and the old master, who really didn’t deserve to die at all. Unfortunately, Red Eagle is killed after unsuccessfully trying taking it to the limit and assassinating Foster Father.

At this point, we’re nearly an hour into the movie, so the narrative focuses on Yinmin again. Foster Father has figured that the old master’s daughter, Qiuhua, now has the book, so it’s off with her head. Now, Qiuhua just happens to be the same kung fu beauty that saved Yinmin’s life, so you know there’s going to be a conflict of interest right there. Yinmin eventually turns on his Foster Father and fellow Eagles, joining forces with Qiuhua to avenge her father and all of the wrongs that the Eagles had committed. Of course, Foster Father isn’t going to be a pushover in the fighting department, so Qiuhua may just have to use the Star-Bleed Skill herself as the last resort, even if it kills her.

So what do this film and its inspiration, Avenging Eagle, have in common? Well, both of them revolve around a team of assassins trained by their “foster father.” Both of them have a least one member of the team turning against his colleagues and guardian. In both films, the Foster Father uses a metal claw as a weapon. That’s about it. In Avenging Eagle, there was only one rebellious Eagle (Ti Lung) and his partner was the husband of one of their victims, who was played by Alexander Fu Sheng. The original was primarily a revenge/redemption tale, while this film brings more stock wuxia elements into the plot in the form of a super-powerful martial arts style and manual, no doubt inspired by the success of the Swordsman series at the time. Each Eagle in the original wielded his own weapon, whereas the killers here all use meat cleavers (actually it’s a weapon known as the dadao, or “big blade”). The tragic ending is sort of reversed here, too.

The main problem with the film is a narrative that never quite knows who the main protagonist is supposed to be. The first act makes Yinmin out to be the main hero, but he disappears in the second act when Red Eagle takes the stage. Once Red Eagle bites it, Yinmin steps up to the plate, although this time he has to share his screen time with Qiuhua, who ends being even more important to the resolution than Yinmin is. Almost the entire second act revolves around setting up a convoluted way in which Yinmin might have a plausible reason for turning against his so-called family, when the major reason for his change-of-heart has a little less to do with Red Eagle’s accusations and more to do with the compassion he feels for Qiuhua, who saved his butt earlier. Then there’s Cynthia Khan, who’s given first billing for this film, but only shows up in two non-action scenes during the first hour of the movie. The movie needed to give her more to do, since she's the most physically-talented protagonist in the cast (plus looks stunning in period garb).

If you can get past that, then you should enjoy most of the action sequences. Tsui Fat was always an underrated action director and his work here is easily on par with the same stuff that Ching Siu-Tung was doing at the same time. The latter is obviously the former’s inspiration, especially whenever we get the quick cuts of people doing random flips, a Chingism from that era. While the actors are all wired-up, there’s a lot more physicality in the sword fighting than there was in many wuxia film of the time, especially whenever Cynthia Khan, an actual martial artist, and her flexible belt sword are onscreen. Most of the extreme graphic violence that permeated the 1990s wuxia movies is toned down here, with the best moment being when Waise Lee slices off a man’s hand (sword in hand), stabs him to death, and then kicks the severed hand across the room so that the sword its holding skewers another guy. There’s also a welcome absence of Random Qi Blasts, which means that the actors depend more on their weapons than on extending their arms and making things go boom. The most memorable fight is arguably when Qiuhua and Yinmin take on Foster Father’s contingency plan: 13 young kids (probably no older than 10) who Foster Father has been training in secret to take the place of the current Eagles once they’re of no more use to him. Since our heroes don’t want kill any children, they fight back by attacking the kids’ pressure points and paralyzing them (temporarily, I imagine). None of the fights are classics, but I never felt frustrated by the lack of swordplay in a film about swordsmen, which is more than I can say about Jet Li’s overrated Swordsman II.

As Hong Kong, much like Hollywood, continues to lose its way with more and more “big” offerings, low-budget guerilla efforts like 13 Cold-Blooded Eagles start looking better in comparison, narrative flaws notwithstanding.