New Fist of Fury (1976)

New Fist of Fury (1976)
Aka: Fists to Fight
Chinese Title: 新精武門
Translation: New Ching Woo School

 

Starring: Jackie Chan, Nora Miao, Chen Sing, Han Ying-Chieh, Chiang Kam, Cheng Siu-Siu, Hon Siu, Yi Ming, Liu Ming, Henry Luk
Director: Lo Wei
Action Director: Han Ying-Chieh

 

In 1976, Jackie Chan signed on to Lo Wei’s production company, Lo Wei being the same fellow who directed Bruce Lee’s first two films. Up until then, Jackie had had only one starring role (in Young Tiger of Canton, later released as Snake Fist Fighter) and numerous gigs as a stuntman and supporting character. Lo Wei set out to make Chan into a star, although he didn’t quite no how to do so. Over the course of two years, Lo Wei would cast Chan as a wuxia villain, a wuxia hero, a serious kung fu hero and even a role originally meant for Bruce Lee. However, for their first collaboration, Lo actually put Chan in Bruce’s shoes and cast him as the successor to Bruce Lee’s most popular screen persona, the legendary Chen Zhen.

New Fist of Fury, despite being dismissed as a Bruce Lee cash-in film (which it was to a certain extant), actually begins promisingly. We open with Inspector Lo (Lo Wei, reprising his role from the original film) sneaking across Shanghai to an abandoned building. Hidden in one of the rooms upstairs is Ma Li’er (Nora Miao, also playing the same role she did in the Bruce Lee classic) and two other Ching Wu students (one of whom is the portly Chiang Kam of Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow). According to Li’er, the Japanese consul reneged on his promise to spare the rest of the school after Chen Zhen’s murder and the students were hunted down until the last three were forced to go into hiding. Inspector Lo has made arrangements for Li’er and her colleagues to flee to Taiwan, where she can hide out at her grandpa’s place and plan for her revenge against the Japanese.

Shortly after Li’er’s arrival, one of her packages is stolen by a local thief, Helong (a pre-eye surgery Jackie Chan). Hoping for something of value, Helong is surprised to find the package containing only a pair of nunchaku. Helong is determined to give the weapon back to its owners when he’s invited to one of the local kung fu schools by its teacher (Henry Luk), who’s in cahoots with the Japanese. Helong refuses to join the school on the principle that he can’t support anyone who regularly brown noses the enemy. That simply earns him a sound beating which almost kills him, if it were for Li’er and Mr. Hong (Han Ying-Chieh, the villain from The Big Boss/Fists of Fury), who find Helong and nurse him back to health. Li’er finds something to admire in Helong’s principles, even though he turns down repeated invitations from her to study kung fu.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hong and his business partner, Ma’s grandfather, are actually trying to plan a rebellion against the Japanese in secret. An assassination attempt on the local karate master, Okumura (Chen Sing, who played a Japanese villain in The Chinese Boxer and Shanghai 13), prompts the same to use his clout to bully the local schools into being assimilated into his school. Actually, most of the bullying is performed by his daughter (Cheng Siu Siu), who goes around picking fights with whomever she wants. When they show up at Li’er’s grandfather’s 80^th Birthday Celebration and try to pick a fight with the Peking Opera actors, the stress is too much for gramps, who kicks the bucket on the spot.

This convinces Li’er to reopen the Ching Wu school and start teaching the mi-tsung fist style to the Taiwanese locals. The school who tried to coerce Helong into training with them shows up and gets their collective arses handed back to them. That’s enough for the Okumura and his daughter to show up and humiliate the students. That is the last straw for Helong, who decides that it’s time to make a stand and learn kung fu. Will he learn the “fist of fury” style quick enough to use at the special “meeting” scheduled by the Okumura for all the local kung fu teachers?

There are a myriad of problems with this particular film, many of which stem from the script. The original Fist of Fury took a simple premise of a man avenging his teacher’s murder and turned it into a compelling tale of an individual standing up to the forces of oppression, and those on the sidelines who ultimately suffer the consequences for it.

This movie, on the other hand, is all over the place, with more subplots and characters than it knows what to do with. Firs,t we have Miss Lee’s quest for vengeance against the Japanese, which never gels because for all of her spunk, Miss Lee never gets her hands dirty, fight-wise. Nora Miao wasn’t a martial artist, but she at least faked it well in films like Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin. She barely even tries here. Then there’s a subplot about her grandfather in charge of a revolutionary movement and his suspicion of government corruption that is dropped before making much of a contribution to the story only to be brought up again near the end without adding anything at all to the film—in fact, it kills the movie’s momentum since it’s unrelated to the final fight. Another plot thread involving Helong’s mother being a brothel madam who regularly supplies the Japanese men with prostitutes does little for the film beyond supplying it with a few moments of melodrama. That leaves us with the major storylines, which are Helong’s journey from a reluctant thief to Chen Zhen’s spiritual successor and Mr. Okumura’s attempts to assert influence over Taiwan’s kung fu schools.

Much like the other subplots, these two plotlines feel underdeveloped, mainly because Lo Wei is too busy letting everything else get in the way. Helong’s thread is especially problematic, because it means that Jackie Chan has very little to contribute to the movie until the third act, when he finally starts his training. Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow had Jackie Chan’s character undergo a similar journey, but wisely kept the focus on Jackie and pushed his training into the second act, giving him more time to showcase his skills. Unfortunately, that is not the case here. The main conflict with the Japanese villain is unconvincing because other than kill a few would-be assassins, he never comes across as being truly evil. Sure, he is a jerk for strong-arming the local schools, but he seems nowhere near as corrupt as Mr. Suzuki or sadistic as General Fujita. Then again, so little time is given to his quest to consolidate his power over Chinese kung fu that it becomes just another undeveloped plot thread.

Problems in New Fist of Fury’s plotting inevitably results in flaws in the action direction, especially the pacing. The first real fight doesn’t occur until 40 minutes into the movie, which is an especially grave error in a 1970s chopsockey film. Following the succession of three brief martial arts sequences, we’re almost 70 minutes into the film before the next fight occurs. And then there is the whole Jackie Chan as a good-for-nothing layabout bit, which means that he will not be performing any martial arts until after he’s been trained. Since that doesn’t occur until the third act, that means Jackie Chan will only let loose during the film’s finale. Bad move, Lo Wei. We understand that Jackie Chan wasn’t a household name at that point, but who wants to see a movie starring the potential “next Bruce Lee” if that actor isn’t even going to fight until the very end? It’s ultimately that problem, more than the script, which sinks the film faster than a Chinese junk facing a Yamato-class battleship.

At his worst, fight choreographer Han Ying-Chieh exemplified everything that was wrong with early 1970s: flailing arms, lack of power in the hits and sloppy kicking. The action here is a little better than his work in those early Bruce Lee movies. Jackie Chan acquits himself well, especially during his fight with Cheng Siu-Siu, where he uses some more acrobatic moves and drop kicks. He even uses some praying mantis techniques, which Chan never used in his movies, since he mainly focused on southern Chinese styles. Unlike Bruce Lee’s Chen Zhen, Chan’s Helong spends both of the two final fights as the underdog, which was a questionable decision since it undercuts a lot of his physical talents.

Chan Sing is also solid, using his usual tiger claw technique (despite playing a Japanese villain) and sai swords. Cheng Siu-Siu, who plays Okumura’s daughter, kicks pretty well, although her jump kicks are obvious wire/trampoline-assisted. Everybody else, including Han Ying himself, are pretty nondescript. Where the fighting really falters is those moments where Chan tries to ape Bruce Lee with the slow-motion hand movements, which look extremely silly, and the use of the nunchaku at the end. Both are badly-filmed and choreographed, cheapening the otherwise decent choreography. Nonetheless, there isn’t enough action here to justify the movie’s existence and keep this from being one of Jackie Chan’s worst movies ever.