Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016)

 

Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen, Harry Shum Jr., Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Jason Scott Lee, Veronica Ngo, Eugenia Yuan, Roger Yuan, JuJu Chan Szeto, Chris Pang
Director: Yuen Woo-Ping
Action Director: Yuen Shun-Yee, Chan Siu-Wah, Ni Haifeng

 

Making a sequel to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon some fifteen years after the original was sort of a strange idea. It obviously had precedent in films like Drunken Master and Tron, and being the fourth book in a quintet of novels, there was still at least one sequel (and three possible prequels) that could be mined out of the source material. The Hong Kong wire-fu bug that had started with The Matrix and continued with the first CTHD and continued up through the The Forbidden Kingdom (among others) had calmed down in Hollywood by that point. By 2010, most wire-assisted martial arts were saved for Marvel movies, which integrated that sort of action with CGI-generated superpower attacks.

Nonetheless, as CTHD had told a compelling story, we martial arts fan initially embraced the idea to see more of it. But then we learned that it was being produced by Netflix…and directed by Yuen Woo-Ping…in English. Although Netflix has done its share of popular series and original films, they haven’t really gotten a hang of adapting Asian IPs into products for Western consumption. In fact, it’s become a meme that the worst thing that can happen to a Japanese manga is for it to get a Netflix live-action adaptation. They did a good job with Marco Polo (or so I’m told), but that seems to be a bit of an outlier. So, strike one!

Then there was the announcement of Yuen Woo-Ping as the director. As we already know, Sifu Yuen had been the first film’s action director, which had gotten him all sorts of award and accolades around the world. However, his work as a director is a bit more uneven than his work as an action director and fight choreographer. Oh sure, he’s directed more than his fair share of genre classics back in the late 70s and early 80s, but his work from the mid-80s onward is a bit less consistent. Iron Monkey and Tai Chi Master are both wire-fu classics; Heroes Among Heroes is less so (at least from my perspective). Tai Chi II had some good fights, but suffered from a generic plot and a few moments of terrible wirework. His last directorial effort before being hired onto CTHD: SOD was True Legend, which I liked a lot, but a lot of people hate it for good reason: the third act has very little to do with the first two, introducing new (Caucasian) villains just because films like Fearless did that. So, guarded optimism with that particular choice.

But then you get the bit about the movie being filmed in English. Y’know, by 2016, you’d think that people would be warier about “white-i-fying” an Intellectual Property whose first entry was filmed in Mandarin. Moreover, if Yuen Woo-Ping’s dramatic abilities have generally lacked consistency, why in the hell would you hire him to make a movie in a language that he doesn’t speak? Especially when that movie is the sequel to one of the most important martial arts films not only of the past two decades or so, but of all time, too? Yeah, this was starting to look like a disaster with each new detail.

The film is set some 18 years or so following the events of the first movie. The Green Destiny sword has remained in the stewardship of Sir Te[1] while Yu Shu-Lien (a returning Michelle Yeoh) has spent her years in quiet solitude. While all that has been going on, the White Lotus Clan, led by Hades Dai (Jason Scott Lee, of Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story), has been threatening the other clans in the jiang hu (or Martial World), vying for supremacy over all. At the urging of a mysterious blind woman (Eugenia Yuan, The Man with the Iron Fists 2 and Revenge of the Green Dragons), Hades Dai places his sights on the Green Destiny, the only sword which might be capable of defeating him.

Meanwhile, Yu Shu-Lien has come out of seclusion to pay her respects to Sir Te, who has recently passed on. On her way to Beijing, she is ambushed by a group of bandits belonging to Hades Dai’s clan, led by Wei Fang (Harry Shum Jr., of Crazy Rich Asians and Revenge of the Green Dragons). Shu-Lien is able to repel them with the help of a mysterious stranger, who flees her presence before she can thank him. Once at Sir Te’s estate, Shu-Lien meets a mysterious woman named Snow Vase (Natasha Liu Bordizzo, of Detective Chinatown 2 and The Day Shift). Snow Vase successfully stops Wei Fang from stealing the Green Destiny and becomes Shu-Lien’s student afterward.

Knowing that Hades Dai and his forces will come back for both the sword and for Wei Fang, Shu-Lien sends out the Bat Signal for backup from the jiang hu underworld. Help comes in the form a bunch of fighters led by Silent Wolf (Donnie Yen). Silent Wolf was not only Shu-Lien’s benefactor in the previous scuffle with Wei Fang and his men, but he’s actually Shu-Lien’s long-thought-dead fiancée! Yup, the same guy for respect of whom Shu-Lien never returned her love for Li Mu-Bai. Apparently, he was defeated in personal combat with Hades Dai many years before, but survived and went into seclusion without telling anyone. Now, Shu-Lien has to figure out her feelings for her former betrothed while figuring out what the deal is with Snow Vase and protecting the Green Destiny from Hades Dai’s assassins, led by extremely deadly Mantis (Veronica Ngo, of Furie and Clash).

When Wang Hui-Lung, Tsai Kuo-Jung and James Schamus adapted Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for film back in 2000, they knew that they were making a movie that would appeal not only to local audiences, but to audiences around the world. As such, they smartly pushed the Martial World elements of the story into the background, hinting that these characters lived in a more violent and turbulent place, but not dwelling on it. Instead, they focused on the love stories and the theme of a woman being able to choose her own destiny, which kept the movie more focused and allowed director Ang Lee to focus on five main characters.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny, under of the pen of The Forbidden Kingdom’s John Fusco, does quite the opposite, relegating the love story to a footnote status and focusing on the Jiang Hu aspects of the story. Now you have different martial clans (supposedly) vying for supremacy through mythical weapons and martial arts skills that border on witchcraft. That means that you have a lot more characters (and their backstories) to follow, which makes the narrative a little muddled. Much like the wuxia movies on the 1990s, this movie tries to fit in as many characters from the source material as possible and fill it with fight scenes, meaning that some characters are going to get the short shrift and some subplots are going to be resolved almost magically. The former flaw applies specifically to Hades Dai, who is supposed to be this evil clan leader, but we don’t see very much of him here, especially when it comes to doing Martial World stuff. The latter can be seen in the treatment of Shu Lien/Silent Wolf relationship quandary, which resolves itself with but a couple of soulful looks.

Yuen Woo-Ping seems to have left the action duties to his brother, Yuen Shun-Yee, along with Chan Siu-Wah and Ni Haifeng. Yuen Shun-Yee has been choreographing fight scenes by his brothers’ side since the late 1970, and recently had the same position in the YWP-directed Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy. Chan Siu-Wah has been on Yuen Woo-Ping’s stunt team since the 1990s, assisting Sifu Yuen in films like The Banquet and the last two Ip Man films. Ni Haifeng went on to choreograph Blade of Flower, so there’s one more YWP protégé running around out there.

Their action is heavy on the wires, as one might expect. I think there was an expectation for the fights to be heavily wired, because even Donnie Yen is being swung around on cords to do the sort of kicks he never needed assistance to do before. Then again, he was 53 when he made this, so maybe he’s just slowing down. The first showdown between Shu Lien, Silent Wolf, and the bandits is probably the best fight in the film. The following fight at Sir Te’s estate is essentially a rip-off of CTHD’s first showdown between Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi. The movie gives us a hoped-for “Ip Man vs. Bruce Lee” fight, although it’s a bit shorter than I would have liked. And that really sums the action for me: there is some good choreography at times, but the fights are generally too short. There are more of them than the first film, but there are no classics. In the end, Vietnamese actress Veronica Ngo steals the show as the ass-kicking female assassin, Mantis. She’s almost unstoppable in this film; I would have liked to have seen a climax between her and Michelle Yeoh.

If this movie had been a stand-alone adaptation of Iron Knight, Silver Vase[2], it would have been a pretty solid wuxia film. As a sequel to Ang Lee’s renowned masterpiece, it pales in comparison. John Fusco’s script needed a bit more fine-tuning and tightening and YWP should have tried to give the film at least one all-time classic fight. You usually can count on him for that, even in his post-Matrix wire-fu days. Maybe the bean-counters at Netflix got in the way with some BS commentary like, “surveys show that 85% of American viewers don’t like long fight scenes in their movies.” I dunno. Even the heavily-flawed True Legend had that wonderful one-on-one fight between Vincent Zhao and Andy On. Whatever. It’s a decent wuxia movie overall, and certainly better than some of the stuff I’ve seen coming out the PRC, but I don’t think it deserves to be attached to the original CTHD.

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[1] - Whom the characters comment is the Emperor’s brother. That detail, along with the confirmation that Li Mu Bai had been an instructor at his household, proves my theory that in the 1967 film Rape of the Sword had done an inversion of the source material and made the Li Mu Bai stand-in to be the villain, while the Jade Fox equivalente was the heroine!

[2] - The final insult to injury that this film made was to release a novelization based on the script! Why not just finance an official translation of Wang Dulu’s novel? Dummies!