Rattlesnake Kung Fu (2015)

Rattlesnake Kung Fu (2015)
Aka: The Apprentice and the Master; Rattling Demon Staff
Chinese Title: 響尾伏魔棒
Translation: Rattle Tail Magic Wand

Starring: Cao Shuai, Xu Xiangdong, Tong Yang, Wang Xin-Hai, Luan Tianyou, Ocean Hou You-Sheng, Guo Chen, Xu Shi-Jing, Wei Jin-Tao, Zhang Yixin, Li Yu
Director: Liu Xinyi
Action Director(s): Zhang Jintao, Zhou Shao-Yan

Song Dynasty. Circa A.D. 1086. Luan Tianyou (Wang Xin-Hai, of The Lethal Weapon and The Raging Angels) is a government official working in Kaifeng, the capital of the empire. Tianyou is a righteous man and has a beef with another official Cai Jing, who is a bully and a tyrant in the making. Tianyou has made a list of all of Cai Jing’s crimes and has prepared an affidavit to deliver up to the Emperor in order to get Cai Jing kicked out of court. He even gets a number of his fellow officials to sign the affidavit. Righteousness prevails, right?

Well, no. Cai Jing (Golden Dart Hero’s Wang Jie) is a crafty little bastard. He quickly makes his way to the Emperor and accuses Luan Tianyou of all sorts of mischief. Although the Emperor knows Cai Jing is lying, he cedes to some extent and has Tianyou demoted and exiled to Nanjing, along with his family. Meanwhile, Cai Jing rises to the post of head minister, while all those officials who signed the affidavit remain silent. One of them, Liu Jin (Xu Shi-Jing) is even promoted. Someone must have informed Cai Jing of the affidavit, but who?

Such is the backstory of Rattlesnake Kung Fu, an adaptation of one of the chapters of The Water Margin novel, which revolves around one of the lesser-known characters. That character is Luan Tingyu (Cao Shuai, of Kung Fu Hip-Hop and Hero of the River), the son of Luan Tianyou. When we meet Tingyu, he is a child who is both a good scholar and the mischievous type who spies on martial arts schools in order to teach himself. By the time he has reached adulthood, he has passed the public exam and is a pretty good fighter, too. As per an agreement with daddy, Tingyu will be allowed to formally study martial arts—and not just skulk around stealing manuals—as a reward for his scholarly successes.

The teacher his father has hired is “Iron Arm” Zhou Tong (Xu Xiangdong, of A Battle of Wits and Holy Robe of Shaolin Temple). Zhou Tong gets that nickname from his mastery of the “Rattling Demon Staff” (the subtitle in the version I saw called it the “Rattling Voodoo Staff”), which he wields like an extension of his own arms. This is where things start to get complicated. You see, Tingyu has taken the opportunity to invite all of his father’s old official friends from Kaifeng to attend the master-apprentice ceremony. Seems like a lot of pomp for something rather intimate, right? Well, Tingyu has an ulterior motive: he wants to use this opportunity to publicly berate and guilt-trip the guests for their complacence and cowardice back when daddy was getting false accused. Tingyu even goes so far as to produce what he claims is the original affidavit with their signatures on it as he’s dragging the old bastards across the coals.

Once you get past the embarrassment that the episode causes the elder Luan, there is another consequence that the young and inexperienced Tingyu did not anticipate. You see, Luan Tianyou never did figure out who the mole who ratted him out to Cai Jing was. That means that one of the men who was getting berated was most likely present at the party. And he’s going to tell Cai Jing. And now that Cai Jing has an even higher post than before, so he can easily send soldiers out to apprehend the Luan family…which he does. And he starts having the other officials assassinated. So it isn’t long until the Luan family, plus the Li family, including Tingyu’s fiancée, Shiru (Tong Yang, of Lop Nur Mysterious Event), are on the run…

Rattlesnake Kung Fu appears to be a prequel of sorts to the Zhu Family Village arc of the famous Chinese novel The Water Margin, which comprises chapters 47 – 50 of the book. I have not read the novel, nor do I know anything about what happens in that arc, but a visit to the Wikipedia shows that Luan Tingyu is a character that shows up in that arc. And it confirms that he is a master of the staff, which is an important part of the film. I guess Tingyu is a martial brother of Sun Li, one of the 108 Bandits of the Marsh. But the bandits themselves do not figure into this particular film.

That would go some way to explain why the characters are talking about how evil Cai Jing is, but the only appearance he makes in the movie is in flashback. When I watched it, it felt like an incomplete narrative. It was only while writing this that I looked him up, found how that he as both a historical personage and an antagonist in the novel, at which point I learned that the film on the whole was an adaptation of sorts of the novel itself.

The film on the whole tells the story of a talented, but naïve and impulsive young individual who wants to do the right thing. However, his lack of experience in how the world works means that his efforts will bring dire consequences to both him and those around him. In that way, Luan Tingyu reminds me a lot of of Donnie Yen’s portrayal of Hung Hey-Kwun (Hung Shi-Kwan) in the TVB series “The Kung Fu Master” – the impulsive hero who matures through tragedy and training.

The movie has the feel of an early 1990s Hong Kong wire-fu film, especially The Tai Chi Master. I wonder if this was a TV movie, or if the movie was simply filmed at 30 frames per second, giving it that American soap opera look. It also has a very blah and unremarkable soundtrack, which hurts the film because it frequently fails to underscore any of the movie’s more emotional moments. Even worse is the awful CGI, used for flying projectiles—stones, staves, etc—and things like a character kicking one of those wooden prisoner cages and the logs flying off in all directions. It’s bottom-of-the-barrel sub-Asylum level digital effects, and frequently took me out of the film.

Much better was the action, staged by Zhang Jintao and Zhou Shao-Yan. Neither men have a particularly notable filmography, having spent their career in lower-budgeted Mainland films like Inn on Fire; The Solitary Man; and The Lethal Weapon. I haven’t seen any of their other films, so I have no idea how it stacks up to those. But they do a credible job with the fighting. There is a lot of fighting with ample wire assistance, some of which is a bit awkward. Both Luan Tingyu and Zhou Tong use the staff in their fights—the infamous “Rattling Voodoo Staff” is hollow and filled with shifting metal balls, allowing to change the weapon’s center of gravity and strength. The staff fights, much of which are one-on-many skirmishes, are very reminiscent of the group fights in Jet Li’s The Tai Chi Master. So, if you like Jet Li’s work in that, you’ll probably enjoy the fights in a similar fashion. The hand-to-hand is okay, although not always photographed well, and occasionally ruined by bad undercranking.

In the end, Rattlesnake Kung Fu is an interesting film, but not really great. I guess this would be more interesting to fans of the source material and maybe people who liked 1990s wire-fu, although the CGI threatens to derail it at every turn.