Chen Zhen: The Tokyo Fight (2019)

Chen Zhen: The Tokyo Fight (2019)
Aka: Shocking Kung Fu of Huo’s: Fist of Legend
Chinese Title: 霍家拳之精武英雄
Translation: Huo Family Fist: Ching Woo Hero

 

Starring: Wang Wenjie, Zhao Chenyu, Wu Heng, Li Qianfeng, Yin Jiaxuan, Jin Jiahui
Director: Dai Wei
Action Director: Qi Liang

 

Oh boy...sometimes I watch a movie and want to make insensitive, polemic remarks like, "The people involved with this should be dragged into the street and shot," or "the filmmakers should be consigned to active duty at a labor camp." Shocking [Crap] of Huo's: F***-You of Legend is just such an example. It should represent some sort of national crime in the People's Republic of China to take one of the greatest martial arts films of the past 30 years, if not 50 years, which stars their greatest wushu star of all time, and make such a slipshod remake of it that fails on even the most basic of tenets of action direction. Honestly, people. The only contribution to the Chen Zhen mythos that this film makes is to answer the question: Did Chen Zhen and Mitsuko Yamada ever actually sleep with each other? The answer is "yes," although the actor playing Chen Zhen is so bland and expressionless that it doesn't look like he actually enjoyed it.

This film takes the first five minutes of Fist of Legend and extends it to feature length. We open with a bunch of Chinese nationals in Japan--members of the Self-Reliance Society--stealing some sort of document from the Black Dragon Society, a prestigious karate school. Before they can get the document to the Western Press, they are ambushed and murdered by a female assassin. Sadly, the fight is lit by the same unhappy people who worked on Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem and thus is completely obscured by darkness. We then switch over to a Japanese university where Chen Zhen shows up as the new student in the engineering course. He makes friends with the other Chinese students, who are members of the Self-Reliance Society. He also makes friends with a pretty Japanese girl, Mitsuko Yamada, whose father turns out to be a Japanese general. Moreover, his top henchwoman is none other than the assassin we saw in the first scene. Bad things are brewing.

Mitsuko falls for Chen Zhen despite the objections of her father (he says that it's a disgrace to study the history and admire a "defeated people") and the fact she's in an arranged courtship with Shinji Ito, the top student at the Black Dragon Association. After some Chinese students mysteriously disappear, we learn that the military is using the Black Dragon school to shanghai the foreigners to be used in Camp 731 type experiments. More specifically, they are being injected with meth in order to determine if the drug can make their own soldiers impervious to pain and resistant to injury during battle. Chen Zhen has a few run-ins with the Black Dragons, but doesn't equate them with the disappearances until his colleagues find the needed evidence. Then he shows up at the Yamada residence, ready for blood.

Admittedly, I watched the butchered version that the Wu Tang Collection posted to their Youtube channel a few days ago. I really have no desire to see the film in its entirety. The plot is serviceable, but the tonal shifts between horrible torture, light romance and heavy-handed Nationalism are a bit much, even by Chinese cinema standards. A surer dramatic hand would have improved that a lot. It doesn't help that the actor portraying Chen Zhen is very forgettable and stone-faced in his role. He's portrayed almost as an infallible paragon of virtue and morality, and his personal perfection makes him less appealing as a character.

Interestingly enough, the two main Japanese characters, Mitsuko and Shinji Ito, fare a lot better and have more compelling character arcs. Mitsuko has a reason for despising her father--his ambition in the military caused him to be an emotionally-absent husband and his wife died of a broken heart--and has to make some real sacrifices in order to find love. She understands both the sacrifices and what it would mean to be with Chen Zhen and stay in Japan. Shinji, on the other hand, finds himself torn between the teachings of his Sensei Fumio and the aspirations of the military. His obsession with his bride-to-me ultimately pushes him into the hands of the military, with tragic results.

Unfortunately, a few good characters and Mitsuko's bare back are offset by the dire fight scenes. An early fight scene at the university between the Black Dragon students and Chen Zhen has the latter slapping them into submission. And they're not cool slaps like in Bodyguard from Beijing, they're regular b**** slaps that are somehow strong enough to knock teeth out. A second showdown between the two is derivative of Fist of Legend in which he goes all Chin Na on their asses, but adds nothing new to the equation. Chen Zhen does have a showdown with Fumio over a game of Goh, which features some decent handwork from both fighters. It does feel like a rip-off of similar fights in The Magnificent Butcher and Dance of the Drunk Mantis. Near the end, Chen Zhen has a duel with Shinji Ito, which is the probably the best in that it's set in the day and in an open space. Both men are decent martial artists, but the fight is no great shakes. 

The climax is a huge disappointment: first Chen Zhen rescues his friends by killing a few members of the Black Dragon school. In a scene stolen from Wu Xia, he punches a guy in the temple, making his eyes go red with blood before he dies. Chen then squares off with the female assassins, who fights with EMEI PIERCERS!!!! You know, those spinning blades that Legendary Superkicker Hwang Jang Lee uses in Secret Rivals II. Unfortunately, the fight is filmed in the dark with lots of quick cuts, so we can't see what's going on. That's awful. Why arm your assassin with such a reare weapon and then film it in a way that we the viewer can't see it in action? Bad action direction, folks. Finally, he has a rematch with Shinji that is very one-sided, even after the latter gets hopped up on meth and goes all invincible on him. Once more, the fight is badly lit, filmed up close, and littered with quick cuts. And thus ends the film that generates so much bad feng shui that Huo Yuanjia might very well rise up as a jiangshi in short order and get his revenge against the Chinese cinematic community.