Tai Chi 2 (1996)

Tai Chi 2 (1996)
aka Tai Chi Boxer; Tai Chi II
Chinese Title: 太極拳
Translation: Tai Chi Chuan

 

Starring: Wu Jing, Yu Hoi, Sibelle Hu, Christy Chung, Billy Chow, Mark Cheng, Lau Shun, Darren Shahlavi, Gai Chun-Wa
Director: Yuen Woo-Ping
Action Director: Yuen Woo-Ping

 

 By 1996, movies like Tai Chi 2 were already an anachronism. The wire-fu period pieces that had covered the Hong Kong cinematic landscape during the first half of the 1990s had already fallen out of favor, the big nail in the coffin being the colossal failure of Tsui Hark’s deconstructionist wuxia film The Blade. From 1995 onward, Hong Kong filmmakers were looking increasingly outward to international audiences, making action movies in the mold of Hollywood blockbusters, while some stars and directors were trying to set themselves up in Hollywood itself. Jet Li took something of a temporary leave from the period pieces that made him famous to make a fairly unsuccessful (at least in Hong Kong) bid at being a modern action star. Donnie Yen, still not the household name in Hong Kong that he is now, tried his hand at directing with a few low-budget projects. There just wasn’t much room in Hong Kong for period pieces, and when they did come back, they were a completely different creature than they had been before.

Obviously that didn’t stop a few brave cineastas from trying to resurrect the otherwise dead genre. Yuen Woo-Ping had built his career on old school chopsockeys and then had been ignored by critics whenever he tried to make a modern-day action film during the 1980s. However, once Tsui Hark had brought the genre back in 1990, starting with The Swordsman, Yuen Woo-Ping found himself getting more work and the critical acclaim he had failed to garner during the previous decade. It isn’t surprising that he’d keep on trying to make the sort of kung fu movie that had been so good to his career before, even when audiences ultimately proved to be indifferent to his efforts.

The movie begins with the retirement of a famous tai chi master named Yeung (Yu Hoi, of Shaolin Temple and Ninja Over the Great Wall). Yeung wishes to get away from the so-called “Martial World” in order to dedicate himself to raising his son, Hok-Man (who’ll be played by Wu Jing of SPL and Fatal Move—the original subtitles refer to him as “Hawk Man”). Hok-Man knows his father is a martial arts bad-ass, and yearns to be one to, but has been forbidden by dad to learn kung fu. Instead, he spends most of his youth locked up in a room with his queue tied to the ceiling reading Chinese literary classics with his cousin, Ah Sang (Tam Chiu). Of course, being the mischievous sort, Hok-Man and his cousin have actually been studying martial arts in secret, encouraged by Hok-Man’s feisty mother (Girls n’ Guns veteran Sibelle Hu, who has never looked more beautiful than she does here).

One day Hok-Man and Ah Sang sneak out of the house to go see the world around them. While performing a lion dance at a local village ritual, Hok-Man sets his eyes on Rose (Christy Chung of Bodyguard from Beijing), the Westernized daughter of local official Tsao (Lau Shun of Once Upon a Time in China 3 and Blade of Fury). Rose is engaged to another official, Wing (The Peking Opera Blues’ Mark Cheng), but her modern education puts her at odds with the local tradition of arranged marriages. Hok-Man immediate falls head over heels with her and gets involved with Rose’s efforts to promote democracy and protest against the British selling opium to the locals. That quickly gets him trouble with the law, with the unscrupulous British opium dealers (led by Darren Shahlavi of Ip Man 2 and Alien Agent), with his own dad, and with one of his dad’s former rivals, the Northern King of Kicks (Billy Chow, of Fist of Legend and Tough Beauty and Sloppy Slop). Thank goodness all those years of reading martial arts manuals has made Hok-Man almost as good as his dad, not to mention the whole business of having his queue tied to the ceiling has transformed his pigtail into a deadly lash weapon with its own Spider Sense. No, I’m not making that last part up.

Robert Tai, the Taiwanese action director best known for giving us ninjas on tarantulas and Alice Tseng’s naked breast fu in films like Ninja: The Final Duel and Shaolin Dolemite, once criticized Yuen Woo-Ping as being all out of good ideas and thus becoming increasingly repetitive in his action design. I can see that to some extent; most of his 1990s films contained at least one homage to one of his old school chopsockey movies. In Tai Chi 2, we have several homages to numerous films of his. The whole queue-as-a-weapon bit had already been done by Yuen Woo-Ping in the obscure John Woo movie Fists of the Double K and then again in the 1993 Donnie Yen film Heroes Among Heroes. Gai Chun-Wah (Kids from Shaolin and New Legend of Shaolin) is essentially playing Iron Head Rat from Drunken Master. The finale is a sort of low-rent rip-off of the climax to Once Upon a Time in China, which Yuen’s brothers had choreographed. There’s a moment in the finale when Wu Jing delivers three consecutive over-the-shoulder kicks to a guy’s head, which Donnie had done in Yuen’s In the Line of Duty IV. So yeah, people familiar with Yuen Woo-Ping’s work will no doubt feel a bit of déjà-vu while watching this movie.

That said, the actual martial arts action is pretty spectacular, aside from the wire-fu stunts in the finale, which are the sloppiest that Yuen Woo-Ping has orchestrated in his career. The tai chi on display in the fights—and unlike Jet Li’s The Tai Chi Master, there’s a lot of tai chi in this film—is simply top notch and Yuen shows us once more that no director is better at portraying the style on film than he is. Yuen also makes an effort to give each set piece its own personality. When Billy Chow fights Yu Hoi at the beginning, the fight begins with them having a verbal duel, calling their moves out and then declaring what they’ll do to counter the other’s attack. Later, when Chow challenges Wu Jing, the two have a wire-fu fight in a bamboo forest, which is impressive. There’s an extended fight on roller skates midway through the movie, not to mention a mantis fist kung fu fight between Wu Jing and Yu Hoi, too. Let’s not forget the tango sequence that ends with Wu Jing performing some wushu-enhanced break dancing. As derivative as the finale may be, one must give it credit for it allowing Billy Chow to be heroic for once. The action is good enough that it more than makes up for a lead who tries to channel Jackie Chan from Drunken Master but without the natural charisma and a script full of plot holes (how exactly does a British opium dealer become a better kung fu fighter than nearly every member of the kung fu-savvy cast?). Heck, I'll give the movie a pass simply for having a romantic subplot that actually goes somewhere, as opposed to all that unrequitted love crap that we've been getting since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.