Friday, March 3, 2023

Yao's Young Warriors (1983)

Yao’s Young Warriors (1983)
Aka: Wu Tang Death Squad
Chinese Title: 岳家小將
Translation: Young General of the Yue Family

 


Starring: Xun Feng, Zhang Xi-Ling, Zhang An-Chi, Wei Wei, Huang Jun, Chen Wei, Sun Hua-Man, Zhang Yue-Ning, Wong Chan-Tin, Song Wen-Hua
Director: Wang Zhiyu
Action Director: Wang Jin-Bao

 

The Song Dynasty in China lasted for a little more than three hundred years. Starting in A.D. 960, it saw its fall in 1279, when the Mongols conquered China under Kublai Khan and the Yuan Dynasty began. However, for the all the cultural advancements that this dynasty enjoyed, it was a complicated era in the geopolitical sense. It had been preceded by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, a turbulent period in which Northern/Central/Eastern China had undergone no fewer than five dynasty changes in a 70-year period, while Southern China was fractured into ten small kingdoms. At the end of the fifth dynasty, the Later Zhou, General Zhao Kuangyin staged a coup, overthrew the Zhou emperor, and installed himself as the emperor. He then conquered the lower ten kingdoms and unified China.

Only not so much. You see, the Tang Dynasty, which had ruled prior to the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, had extended all the way to the west into what is now known as the Xinjiang region (also once known as the Uighur Autonomous Region) in Western China. In fact, the territory controlled by the Tang empire was similar to modern China, sans the Tibetan Plateau and Manchuria. However, once the Tang empire collapsed, that region was taken over by a Tibetan people known as the Tanguts. At the same time, a “proto-Mongol” tribe known as the Khitans had established their own dynasty, known as the Liao Dynasty, in what is now Mongolia. There was a complicated power play for Western China between the Song and Liao peoples, but the Tanguts resisted and ultimately declared their own empire, known as the Western Xia. For a long time, there were continuous border disputes and territory raids by these three neighboring empires, plus tributes and alliances to maintain peace, at least for a while.

That all came to halt when the Liao Dynasty collapsed. The cause? An uprising by a proto-Manchurian tribe known as the Jurchen people. They overthrew the Khitans and established the Jin Dynasty around A.D. 1115. However, they also noted the military weakness of the neighboring Song empire and exploited that, despite having established diplomatic relations a few years earlier. They invaded China and conquered the northern half of the empire, forcing the Song royal family to flee southward and establish a new capital at Lin’an. The new boundaries held for about 150 years, until the Mongols rose to power, conquered both the Han Chinese and Jurchen peoples, and simply committed genocide on the Tanguts.

Yao’s Young Warriors
is set in the final days of the Northern Song period, around A.D. 1126. The infamous General Yue Fei[1] has been fighting the Jin forces in the North. Yue Fei has been chased to Ox Head Mountain, where he’s set up fort and fought the Jurchens to a standstill. The Jin forces have come up with a plan to smoke Yue Fei out of his hiding place, so to speak. They send Second Prince Jin Tanzi (Zhang Chengzhong), Third Princess Ying Lingzi (Zhang Xiling, of Murky Shadows Over the Gorges and The Queen of Tibet), and General Zhang Zhaonu (Zhang Yuening) to Yue Fei’s massive estate with the intention of kidnapping his wife and mother. That will take the fight out of him!

Their plot is discovered by a young man named Niu Tong (Liu Weiming), who happens to the be the son of Yue Fei’s subordinate general, as the subs say. The Jurchens were smart enough to dress many of their soldiers in Song armor so as to get close to the Yue’s villa. However, that brought Niu Tong over to them and he accidentally stumbles upon a conversation about their plot to kidnap the Yue matriarch. Niu Tong flees to the Yue estate, where he informs the family about the plot.

Now, Yue Fei has five sons, all of whom are talented martial artists. And despite the menfolk being gone, they have trained the army’s children in the art of war, too. The oldest of these sons is Yue Yun (Xun Fung, of Shaolin Temple and Kung Fu Hero Wang Wu), who is a master at both the family spear technique and the double melon hammers. Yue Yun is desperate to go to Ox Head Mountain to fight alongside dad, but hearing about the plot, he stays behind to defend his grandmother instead. The first encounter between the Jin Army and the titular young warriors results in the retreat of the latter, but it establishes two things: Yue Yun is a better fighter than Prince Jin Tanzi, but not as good as Princess Ying Lingzi (who’s a demon with the hook swords).

Following their defeat, the Jin forces sneak into the Yue Villa under the cover of night, expecting to come across a bunch of kids drunken with victory (and wine). Nope. The Yue family and their retainers are waiting for the Jurchens, and another big fight breaks out. However, this melee ends in a stalemate with both sides taking hostages: the Yue family captures Princess Ying, while the Jurchens capture the youngest Yue son, Yue Ting (Wei Wei, who did stuntwork in Kung Fu Hustle). And when Prince Jin Tanzi brings in the four best fighters in the kingdom, things will really get tense…

Yao’s Young Warriors
is a small(ish) story told against the backdrop of a greater historical series of events. The conclusion feels especially small in scope, involving only the top Jin fighters and not the entire army, which sort deflates the build-up of the previous set pieces. That said, the film is a pretty solid tale of heroism, mercy, honor and filial piety, which are all important topics in these sorts of films. There is a marked contrast in how the two hostages are treated, as heroism (and its principles) guides Yue Yun in all of his decisions. His brothers (and Niu Tong) are often headstrong and itching for battle, but once Yue Yun decides to remain at the villa, he is archetype of the East Asian hero.

Being an 80s kung fu film from the PRC, you can expect that the filmmakers simply employed entire wushu schools to play the roles: many of these actors only made this film, or a couple of others. That also means that all of the action is authentic wushu, which most purists should like. The action was staged by Wang Jin-Bao, a former Monkey Fist stylist and Wushu champion, whose talents included the Monkey Stick technique and swordsmanship. Previous to this, Wang had staged the fights in an obscure PRC martial arts film called Mysterious Buddha (1980). Now I really want to see that.

Now, there is a certain acquired taste when it comes to Chinese wushu films, especially those that aren’t choreographed by imported Hong Kong talent, like Lau Kar-Leung, Brandy Yuen, or Tsui Siu-Ming. The fights are very stagy, even more so than the over-elaborate “shapes” choreography of late 70s Hong Kong and Taiwanese films. A younger me once observed to my brother that it looked like the characters were performing kung fu sets on each other. The moves are authentic, the forms are real, and there is minimum wire and trampoline use. But they have a definite stagy feeling to them that turns some viewers off. I’m not one of those people.

The long-defunct website “The Martial Artist’s Guide to Hong Kong Films” said of this: “The quality of the MA is established immediately…Very high quality wu shu and some of the best weapons work you'll ever see. Spear, staff, sword, rope dart and empty hand[2].” I’m not sure if the weapons action
quite reaches the heights of films like Legendary Weapons of China and The Odd Couple, but there is a lot of it. Several characters wield exotic weapons, like hook swords, melon hammers, Sun and Moon blades, rope darts and the Meteor Hammer. We even get to see one of the Yue children practicing with the elusive Emei Piercer, also seen in The Secret Rivals II and Knife of Devil’s Roaring and Souls Missing. Sadly, some of those weapons don’t much of a showcase, because so much is going on in the fights.

The finale, however, is quite strong with the heroes demonstrating some great spear work while facing off with a quartet of villains. One of the villains uses the meteor hammer, which is like the rope-dart, but with a round metal weight instead of a dart at the end. The guy does some great work with that. Another villain uses the Eagle Claw style, which doesn’t make sense if you consider that Yue Fei was the legendary founder of said style. But then again, in these 80s wushu films, the weapons and styles displayed have more to do with whatever was in the troupe’s curriculum, as opposed to what would have been used according to the time period. The choreography reaches its apex here, although from a storytelling point of view, I wish that the Jin army could have been involved, too. That would have been SUPER EPIC. As it stands, Yao’s Young Warriors will have to settle for “Pretty good.”



[1] - In addition to being a famous patriot, Yue Fei has been considered the Father of both Xingyi Quan (hsing-i chuan) and Ying Jow Pai (Eagle Claw style), although that has a lot to do with the tendency for proponents of different styles to attach their names to historical personages.

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