Extreme Challenge (2001)

Extreme Challenge (2001)
Chinese Title: 地上最強
Translation: The Strongest on the Ground

 

Starring: Yeung Chuen-Ai, Ken Chang Tzu-Yao, Patricia Ja Lee, Jacqueline Li, Paul Rapovski, Somchai Siabkuntod, Stephen Tung Wai, Scott Adkins, Nikki Powell
Director: Stephen Tung Wai
Action Director: Jack Wong, Go Shut-Fung, Christopher Chan Sai-Tang

 

Extreme Challenge is a decent example of the fighting-for-fighting’s-sake martial arts film that doesn’t get made anymore in Hong Kong. It feels like a throwback to late 80s/early 90s American tournament movies with an Internet angle that really doesn’t get explored, but at least centers it in the new millennium. The fights are well choreographed, even if all the surrounding material is trite and shoddy at best…and this coming from Golden Harvest, who produced all of Jackie Chan’s most iconic films!

So, there’s a martial arts tournament called the World Wide Web Y2K Martial Arts championship. It’s organized by the Power Net Show Internet Corporation, with financial backing from another corporation called Champion Athletes, which is looking to expand business into East Asia. The tournament is organized by Karen Li (Jacqueline Li, of Gorgeous and Tai Chi Warrior), who is in charge of both the fight logistics and supervising the technical side. The current martial arts champ and favorite to win is Ian Maxfield (Paul Rapovski, of Hitman), although the corporate sponsors would like an Asian champion this time in order to appeal to the upcoming new demographic. Thus, the organizers will have their eye on Fang Jin (Yeung Chuen-Ai), one of the favorites to win.

There are two more notable Chinese participants. The first is a female fighter, Tang Ning (Patricia Ja Lee, of Power Rangers Turbo and Power Rangers in Space), who wishes to honor her late master by participating in the tournament. The second is Kuang Kin (Ken Chang, of Sunshine Cops and The Legend of the Flying Swordsman), who hails from the same school as Fang Jin. Just what are his motives for entering? I dunno, although the bulk of the film is shot (or dubbed) in English, the Chinese characters switch to Cantonese whenever they talk amongst themselves (and the version I watched lacked subs).

So, the tournament commences and there’s some drama as Karen Li tries to shore up the results by fixing the “random” computer-generated match-ups and even paying some people to take the fall. For example, when the preferred candidate for the win is to fight against a female fighter, Karen has it switched so that Champion Athletes’ new spokesperson won’t be regarded as a woman beater. That kind of thing.

Tournament movies don’t really give themselves over to lengthy reviews because the plots usually have one act worth of story and the rest is fighting with a couple of shallow character moments. That’s what we martial arts fans expect from these things, unless it’s The Quest, which manages to push the fighting all the way into the third act. Extreme Challenge is no different from the rest, so anyone expecting depth needs to refer themselves over to the first few Once Upon a Time in China movies or the works of Wong Kar-Wai. You’re not getting it here.

We’re here for the fighting, which wasn’t choreographed by Tung Wai himself, even though he directed the film. Instead, the action team consists of two former Jackie Chan stunt team members--Go Shut-Fung and Christopher Chan—and Jack Wong, who recently got award recognition for his work on Warriors of Future. Christopher Chan worked on a handful of Jackie Chan movies before moving over to Stephen Tung’s stunt team in the late 1990s. He’s since assisted Tung with films like Purple Storm; Mulan (the Vicky Zhao version, not the Disney remake); Seven Swords; and The Accidental Spy. His more recent efforts—Let the Bullets Fly and Ip Man: The Final Fight—suggest that he later switched over to Nicky Li Chung-Chi’s stunt team later on.

The first set piece and initial elimination round of the tournament is a sort of race where the fighters have to make it to a spot in the middle of a lake while not falling in ditches or into the water. The fighters trade blows while trying get a limited number of tokens that have to be inserted into a mechanism at the end point in order to move forward. There is lots of group fighting here, which is all well-staged. The second action sequence is a sort of a martial arts version of King of the Hill, where the sixteen or so fighters have to make their way up a structure while beating each other up, after which they’ll get a token and take a zipline to the finish line. The martial arts in this sequence is also quite good, although fans of Scott Adkins will be disappointed that he doesn’t fight more here.

The quarter-finals are a series of one-on-one weapons duels between the eight surviving combatants, which include our main characters, Scott Adkins, a Thai Boxer (Somchai Siabkuntod), a Japanese fighter (played by the director himself), and another female fighter (Nikki Powell, who squared off with Claire Forlani in The Medallion). Adkins does some nice work with the nunchaku. Rapovski impresses with his escrima skills. The others do respectable jobs with the pole.

The semi-finals are rather sketchy from a storytelling perspective, but the prolonged fight between Patricia Ja Lee and Yeung Chuen-Ai was really good, with just enough intensity and environment-assisted acrobatics to really make it one of the best fights of the movie. The finale pits the two remaining Chinese fighters against each other, and while it’s a good fight, I think I liked the previous one better. That said, some of the fights are hampered by out-of-place photographic effects, which suggest the filmmakers were learning about Microsoft Movie Maker and testing its features for the very first time. It’s stupid. It’s cheesy. It’s shallow. But I also lament that we don’t get any more of these movies out of Hong Kong and China anymore.