Wolf Warrior (2015)

Wolf Warrior (2015) Chinese Title: 戰狼
Translation: Wolf Warrior

Starring: Jacky Wu Jing, Shi Zhaoqi, Yu Nan, Zhou Xiaoou, Scott Adkins, Deng Ziyi, Kyle Shapiro, Samuel Thivierge, Sona Eyambe, Ni Dahong

Director: Jacky Wu Jing

Action Director: Nicky Li Chung-Chi

Wolf Warrior is the probably the film, even more than Sha Po Lang, where almost twenty years of hard work finally paid off for Wu Jing. He had gotten his start in film in 1996 in Yuen Woo-Ping’s Tai Chi II. While Wu had an excellent showcase for his wushu talents, the film was made a couple of years after period wire-fu films had stopped being popular. He made the transition to TV, like his fellow Beijing Wushu Academy alumni Vincent Zhao Wen-Zhuo, but the movie gods were not done with him yet. He had a couple of false starts, like The Legend of Zu and Drunken Monkey. The former represented the first fruits of the popularity of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, while the latter was the last (failed) attempt to rejuvenate the once-great Shaw Brothers studio.

His big break came with Sha Po Lang (2005), which but Donnie Yen back in the limelight, jump-started the Hong Kong action film, and was Wu Jing’s first real success. Donnie Yen became the Great White Hope of martial arts cinema on the Jade Screen, while Wu Jing found himself getting more film work, although usually in supporting roles. In 2008, Wu Jing got his first taste of directing with The Legendary Assassin, which is fun, if a bit generic in terms of storyline. Wolf Warrior took Wu Jing out of Hong Kong and back to his native People’s Republic of China, where he returned to the director’s chair. The film made about 89 million dollars, or about 543 million Yuan, at the local box office. That would have placed it at about #13 among domestic releases. It was successful enough to justify a sequel, which ended up becoming the most successful non-Hollywood film ever at the time.

The film revolves a military sniper named Leng Feng (Wu Jing), who has been disciplined for disobeying orders during a military action. Said action was a raid of a drug lab run by Wu Ji (Zhou Xiao’ou, of Police Story 2013), the kid brother of one of the biggest crime lords in the Golden Triangle. After a lot of shooting and explosions, the soldiers have cornered Wu Ji, who has taken a hostage. The soldiers are given the order to stand down, but Leng Feng goes rogue and takes Wu Ji out by a daring stunt in which he puts three bullets through a concrete wall where he approximates the guy’s head to be. For his disobedience, he is placed in confinement.

Some time later, Leng Feng is approached by Commander Long Xiaoyan (Angel Warriors’s Yu Nan). Despite his mistakes, Long has chosen him to join the Wolf Warrior squad, the Chinese equivalent to the Army Rangers. Almost as soon as he joins the outfit, the Wolf Warriors are called into participate in war games with the regular army. Although Leng Feng is a bit more opinionated than his commanding officer Li Zhijun (Confucius’s Ma Qiang) would like, Leng’s hunches end up being right. Due to a series of circumstances that I don’t quite understand, Leng and some four of his comrades end up alone in the forest trying to find their way to the extraction point. 

This is where things get hairy. In the second scene, we saw the Chinese police arresting Min Deng (Ni Dahong, of both The Assassin ’93 and The Assassins), the brother of the deceased Wu Ji. But before they can even get him inside the police car, a small gang of mercenaries led by Tom Cat (Scott Adkins, of Boyka: Undisputed and The Debt Collector) show up and kill all the police with enough firepower that Dutch’s team would be impressed. Min Deng and his mercenary team have snuck into China on official business, but the mercenaries have a side mission: kill Leng Feng.

An initial attack on the Wolf Warriors hanging out in the forest results in the one of their deaths. Let’s see: there is random guy #1, random guy #2, random guy #3, and random #4, who is always talking about his baby daughter back home. No points for guessing who gets it. Anyway, they meet up with a group of army soldiers who had been sent after them as part of the war games. But there’s not much they can do with guns loaded with blanks. But when a helicopter shows up and drops off supplies in the form of actual weapons, it’s time for the Chinese to show those evil FOREIGN mercenaries just how good China really is!

The three-act structure of this film is a bit odd. The first act sets up Wu Jing’s entry into the Wolf Warriors squad and who the main villain is and what his motivations are. The second act mainly consists of the war games, ending with a mini-climax of sorts with the first attack by the mercenaries. The third act is the running battle between good guys and bad guys. The problem is that there is no elapsed time from the scene of Wu Jing meeting his superior and the start of the war games. So, we really don’t get to know anybody in the film other than Wu Jing’s Leng Feng. It makes the film extremely one-dimensional in its characterizations. And the evil plot of the drug traffickers, beyond revenge, feels like it was tacked on, with no perceived stakes.

Like its sequel, this is a pro-China saber rattler of the likes of an old 40s war film or an 80s “Let’s win Vietnam this time” film. There is lots of talk by the superior officers—who spend most of the film staring into the camera or down at a map with concerned looks on their faces—about the greatness of the Chinese military. There is lots of Michael Bay-esque movie music meant to get the adrenaline pumping and manipulate the emotions. But the scope of the film is surprisingly small for a film meant to be propaganda, since it’s reduced to “a handful of Chinese soldiers, a couple of them being Special Forces” against a handful of dirty, capitalistic foreign mercenaries.

The action was staged by Nicky Li Chung-Chi, whom had worked with Wu Jing on a number of earlier projects—Fatal Move; Invisible Target; The Legendary Assassin, and City Under Siege. There is not a lot of martial arts in this. Actually, there is really only the final fight between Wu Jing and Scott Adkins, which is mainly knife fighting with a few stylish kicks thrown in. What the fight is not, however, is a good showcase for either men, or a suitable follow-up to the knife-fight goodness that was Donnie Yen vs. Wu Jing in Sha Po Lang. It's adequate, but I expected more from two giants in the industry.

The rest of the action is made up of gunplay and explosions (grenades, claymores, and landmines), although once the third act begins, the mercenaries fall a lot easier than I was expected. There is a very tense sequence where the men are kept at bay by a sniper (Kyle Shapiro), which is followed by an almost-equally tense scene where Wu Jing tries to chase him down. But once the stand-off between the parties devolves into men running through the woods firing at each other, the action becomes less interesting. Even my father-in-law, who was watching this with me, was surprised that the mercenaries did not pose that much of a threat to the soldiers, especially given the lethal efficiency of their introduction. Sometimes, filmmakers, pro-nationalist propaganda needs to take a backseat to good storytelling: don’t establish the villains as intimidating and then have your heroes take them out without breaking a sweat.

The movie feels like the climax of First Option (1996) with Michael Wong dragged out to 90 minutes. But that film actually took time to breathe from time to time. This one never stops to develop any of its characters or external conflicts, and still manages to be just average in its action scenes.