Enter the Fat Dragon (2020)

Enter the Fat Dragon (2020)
Chinese Title: 肥龍過江
Translation: Fat Dragon Crossing the River

 

Starring: Donnie Yen, Niki Chow Lai-Kei, Teresa Mo Sun-Kwan, Wong Jing, Joey Tee, Louis Cheung Kai-Chung, Jessica Jann, Naoto Takenaka, Tetsuya Watanabe, Chaney Lin Qiunan
Director: Kenji Tanigaki
Action Director: Donnie Yen’s Stuntman Team

Enter the Fat Dragon isn’t so much a remake of the Sammo Hung classic from 1978 as it is a reimagining of the premise of a martial arts dynamo who a) likes Bruce Lee and b) happens to be massively overweight. But more than that, the comic stylings of the film—it was written by, produced by, and co-stars Wong Jing—brought back to the late 1990s when I used to watch VCDs of films like Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Stars and Future Cops. It feels like an homage to the bygone era of those screwball Hong Kong action comedies that throw in a Bruce Lee parody or two because…those somehow have never gone out of style (unlike The Matrix parodies, which were passé by 2000).

The movie begins with maverick detective Fallon Zhu (Donnie Yen, of Wing Chun and Crystal Hunt) getting ready for a wedding photo shoot. Zhu’s fiancée is a bitchy TV actress named Chloe (Niki Chow, of Naked Ambition and Chasing the Dragon) who browbeats her soon-to-be hubby into caving into her every whim. While at the photo studio (which is also a bank? Or a high-class jewelry store?), some robbers break in and point guns at everyone. It doesn’t take long for the whole thing to devolve into a huge shootout, followed by a Mr. Nice Guy-esque fight scene inside of a moving van. By the time the smoke clears, several bystanders are injured and Fallon almost runs over the police superintendent.

The fallout from this reckless display of heroism is two-fold. First, Chloe gets mad at Fallon for ruining the photo shoot and acting like the responsibility for solving the world’s crime falls solely on his shoulders. Thus, she leaves him. Second, Zhu is demoted to work in the evidence locker, where he mainly sits around doing nothing all day. Since he really has nothing to do and nothing to keep him company save a vending machine, Fallon starts filling up on unhealthy snack food. Within six months, he has more than doubled his weight. Enter…the Fat Dragon.

At this time, we learn that one of the victims of the aforementioned robbers’ assault was a Japanese porn director named Yuji (Hiro Hayama, of The Myth and The Shinjuku Incident). Yuji was wanted in Japan for some traffic accident or something and now the Japan police want him extradited. Fallon’s former superior, Huang Ching (Louis Cheng, of L Storm and P Storm), puts Zhu on the case with the simple task of accompanying Yuji back to Japan and seeing that he is taken into police custody there. Huang even promises to reinstate him as an inspector if things go without a hitch. If you have ever seen Ridley Scott’s Black Rain, you can probably see where this is going…

Fallon soon finds himself running around Tokyo trying to find Yuji, interacting with colorful characters like Maggie (Jessica Jann), the peppy Japanese-Chinese interpreter for the police; Thor (Wong Jing, of Magic Crystal and Ghost Fever), an ex-HK cop living in Tokyo; and Charisma (Hard Boiled’s Teresa Mo), the loud-mouthed owner of a Chinese restaurant. He also learns that Yuji was wanted by the Yakuza because of something he accidentally recorded while making some video involving a large tuna and a woman dressed as a mermaid(!).

If you like (and even miss) the goofy, non-sequitur action-comedies of Hong Kong’s Golden Age, you’ll probably enjoy Enter the Fat Dragon. This is the sort of movie where Donnie Yen can be in the middle of a pitched fight inside a moving van and the punchline is that two rival reporters are trying to film the fight from either side of the van, doing whatever they can to extend the fight for the benefit of their audiences. Like Saint of Gamblers, there is a random kung fu kid (Chaney Lin) who shows up to randomly kick butt during a fight sequence. Sadly, the movie does nothing with him after his initial demonstration of alternating hop kicks. Wong Jing plays a human punching bag, which is to be expected. You have to admire him for allowing himself to be subject to the same sort of shtick that he was 30 years prior. Even Sammo cut it out after the 1990s. Interestingly enough, despite much of the film taking place in Japan, the writers don’t really have much fun at the Japanese’ expense, save a running gag at the Tokyo police station.

As a result, the movie is mainly about people bickering with each other in a strange mix of both Cantonese and English, with a little bit of Japanese thrown in. I don’t think it quite reaches the level of mo lei tau, which is complete nonsense. On the other hand, this is a movie where Wong Jing wreaks havoc with a forklift after accidentally getting coked up while trying to eat a frozen tuna. So what do I know? I suspect that some of the bickering will be funny to people who speak Cantonese. I had a hard time following it, because the characters talk so fast that the Portuguese subtitles on the disc I was watching wouldn’t stay onscreen for more than a second.

One thing that kung fu fans will recognize is that the main theme of the film is an updated version of the Way of the Dragon theme. That actually makes sense when you think about. Despite the English title being a reference to Enter the Dragon, the Chinese title translates as “Fat Dragon Crossing the River.” That is a play on the Chinese title for Way of the Dragon, which is “Flying Dragon Crossing the River.” And film does follow the exploits of a Chinese martial artist getting into hijinks in a foreign land. And there is a Chinese lady running a restaurant. And the finale is set on a well-known monument of the city the characters are in: in Way of the Dragon, it was the Coliseum; here, it’s Tokyo Tower. One may think of it as a mo lei tau reimagining of Way of the Dragon, rather than any sort of a remake of the original Enter the Fat Dragon.

The fight scenes were handled by Donnie Yen’s team, which includes him, director Kenji Tanigaki, Yan Hua, Takahito Ouchi, and newcomer (to the team) Masaki Suzumura. Suzumura looks like another Japanese veteran who has done stuntwork a lot of those blood-n-boobs films for horny ohtaku, like Robo-Geisha and Machine Girl. He also choreographed Dead Sushi and one of the Kunoichi Ninpôcho films. If he’s trying to up his game working with Donnie Yen, then we can hope for better stuff from him in his native Japan in the future.

Donnie Yen does his usual work in this movie, mixing his trademark kicks with a Bruce Lee moves and the more modern MMA/Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu throws and takedowns. Thankfully, the ground fighting doesn’t take precedence over the kicking and punching this time around like it has done in some of his other more modern movies. Despite being in his late 50s when this was filmed, he seems to be able to pull of parkour still…or the use of wires for a lot of the exaggerated jumps was a lot smoother than it was in Master Z: Ip Man Legacy. Moreover, although his character is supposed to be overweight, it never actually hampers his actual fighting. I don’t mind watching Donnie do Donnie under several pounds of fat makeup, but if his weight is supposed to be an important plot point, they could at least do something with it.

The first fight in the van is obviously a homage of sorts to the same one in Mr. Nice Guy, albeit longer and goofier. As I mentioned before, much of the humor is derived less from the fighting itself and more from non-sequitur moments, like how the main robber keeps on injuring the driver accidentally. There are several big group fights in Japan, including a long one set at a fish market. One fight near the end has Donnie doing another homage to Jackie Chan, fighting off a gang of people with a giant 7-Eleven sign. He then starts jumping up and down the different balconies, signs, and roofs in a way that calls to mind Chocolate. This was also done in Master Z, but the use of wires was obvious. It works better in this movie. The finale pits Donnie against a Japanese Yakuza, played by Joey Tee (of Rurouni Kenshin: Final Chapter and Baby Assassins 2). Tee seems like a pretty good kicker, but the treat is when the two go at it with sai swords and nunchaku. The choreography is fast and fluid and doesn’t simply rely on them doing twisting-and-twirling demonstrations of their weapons. I enjoyed Donnie’s work with the ‘chucks a lot more here than I did in Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen. And that is Enter the Fat Dragon: not all that original, but it does some stuff better than the movies that it obviously drew inspiration from.

This review is part of "Month of the Dragon"