The Sorcerer and the White Snake (2011)

The Sorcerer and the White Snake (2011) Aka: Madame White Snake Chinese Title: 白蛇傳說 Translation: Legend of the White Snake

Starring: Jet Li, Wen Zhang, Raymond Lam Fung, Eva Huang, Charlene Choi, Vivian Hsu, Jiang Wu, Miriam Yeung, Chapman To Man-Chat, Lam Suet, Song Wenjia, Angela Tong Ying-Ying

Director: Tony Ching Siu-Tung

Action Director: Tony Ching Siu-Tung, Wong Min-Kin

I think a lot of us fans were…well…not necessarily “excited,” but intrigued when Jet Li said in early interviews that this was his most tiring movie experience. He commented that he was directed to do so many fights that he was just exhausted by the time filming was over. Although I don’t think we were expecting Fist of Legend levels of action, we might at least get more than, say, War or Forbidden Kingdom. Yeah…that wasn’t the case. I think by this point, Jet’s hyperthyroidism was at its peak and he just couldn’t keep up with even the basic wire-fu without getting winded.

As an adaptation of the Madame White Snake legend, this film hits most of the expected beats. We open with the Monk Fahai (Jet Li, of Shaolin Temple and Once Upon a Time in China 2) and his bumbling assistant, Neng Ren (Wen Zhang, of The Guillotines and Gone with the Bullets), on a mission to defeat an Ice Harpy (The Accidental Spy’s Vivian Hsu in a cameo). Neng Ren gets his dumb ass frozen, but Fahai’s kung fu and magical skills are more than enough for the monster (whom we learn has been targeted for freezing the men she has been seducing).

Meanwhile, Xu Xian (Raymond Lam, of Badges of Fury and New Kung Fu Cult Master) is a poor herbalist looking for medicinal plants on a mountain. He is spied by a pair of snake spirits, Susu (Eva Huang, of Dragon Squad and Iceman 3D) and Qingqing (Charlene Choi, of Twins Effect and Twins Mission). Qingqing is a bit more mischievous and decides to give the young man a scare, showing up as a green snake and scaring him into the water. Unfortunately, Xu Xian doesn’t know how to swim, so Susu goes to his rescue. She kisses him and breathes her vital energy into his mouth, thus saving him.

Some time later, Susu and Qingqing take on human forms in order to find Xu Xian in town, which is celebrating a festival of sorts. At the same time, Fahai and Neng Ren have shown up at town looking for a Bat Demon, who has been killing the locals, vampire style. Neng Ren befriends Qingqing, who warns him against pursuing the demon. He ignores her and engages the monster, defeating his sexy bat minions but succumbing to a vampiric bite to the neck. Fahai steps in and gets in a magic battle that ends in a lava chamber(!). At the same time, Xu Xian meats Susu (with the help of Qingqing in serpent form), who reveals herself to be the woman who saved him before.

The two fall in love and are married in a quick ceremony presided over by Susu’s animal spirit friends (cameos by Miriam Yeung, Chapman To, and Lam Suet). So, Xu Xian and Susu start living together and make lots of sweet love, but fate is to intervene in short order. The town of Hangzhou is subject to a plague, which Xu Xian has difficulties curing. Susu infuses his medicine with some of her vital energy—which would have the effect of shortening her life—while Fahai figures out that the culprits are a band of sexy Fox spirits (led by dancer Song Wenjia) and defeats them. While that is going on, Nen Reng is transforming into a bat demon and is assisted in the transformation by Qingqing, who has taken a liking to him.

Fahai figures out that Xu Xian’s medicine has been infused with magic and confronts Susu about it. In his mind, spirits (or demons) and humans should not intermingle, no matter how much the former claims to love the latter. His reasoning is that all humans have a set destiny (time of life, time of death, etc.) and physical union with a spirit will gradually deprive him of his life force and distort his destiny. They have a brief duel of sorcery and Fahai promises to let her go on account of her benevolence on the condition she quickly leave her husband. She doesn’t, however, and Fahai returns with his monks to force her to leave. This results in her reverting to her regular form, resulting in Xu Xian accidentally stabbing her with a spirit dagger.

Wounded and dying, Susu retires to a cave to spend her last moments in the company of Qingqing. One of Susu’s spirit friends, a mouse spirit, informs Xu Xian (who has accepted the fact that his wife is a snake spirit) that she can be saved via a mystical herb being held at the Liu Feng Pagoda at Fahai’s temple. In a Harry Potter-esque scene (which is also a gender inversion on the original story), he steals the herb (which can multiply into many herbs with tentacle-like roots) and saves her life, but at cost of releasing the imprisoned spirits and getting possessed. Fahai and his monks act quickly to exorcise them from his body, but when Susu and her sister show up at the temple demanding his release, things are going to take a turn for the tragic.

I actually enjoy this adaptation, despite its flaws (which I’ll discuss in a little bit). Fahai is less of a hypocritical asshole than he was in both Love of the White Snake and Green Snake, being motivated an honest concern for Xu Xian’s well-being. Moreover, he makes it clear that said concern is based on a belief in predestination, and since meddling in predestination is not a good thing, his actions are partially justified. The other incarnations of Fahai were of the belief that humans and demons shouldn’t mingle, but seemed to oppose mainly on general principal. Without any real explanation as to why that is a problem, it makes them come across as a bunch of jerks. And the fact that they are willing to lie and interfere in individuals’ moral agency to that end, they end up becoming the villains. In this film, you want the young lovers to stay together, but Fahai’s reasoning at least can be defended to a certain point.

Interestingly enough, making Fahai a more relatable character contributes to the finale having an flipped moral stance if you look at it. In other versions of the tale, Xu Xian’s imprisonment in the temple amounts to little more than outright kidnapping, so it almost feels right (or somewhat justifiable) that when the Snake sisters show up and start threatening the place with floods, they are in the right. In this film, Fahai is actually trying to save Xu Xian’s life. This means that when Susu and Qingqing show up threatening to raise hell, they come across as less justified because Fahai is in the right. And the more Susu doubles down on her stance, even after Fahai is seriously injured, the less sympathetic we are to her cause, even if she simply just wants her husband back.

Sadly, the version that I have is the 93-minute US cut that is missing about 10 minutes of footage (presumably to quicken the pace and emphasize the fantasy action aspects of the film). Those ten minutes include the faux wedding, which is entirely played for humor (the joke being that the animal spirits pretending to be Susu’s parents are not very good at playing humans). Susu and Xu Xian’s love scene is also truncated, although in the original cut, it wasn’t any more explicit than that of your average James Bond film. But what I really missed the most was the subplot of Nen Reng becoming a demon and his friendship with Qingqing. Many of those scenes are gone, which were at times even more compelling than the main romance.

The film hinted at the possibility of a bittersweet ending: the man/spirit relationship is doomed to failure, but maybe the spirit/spirit relationship is allowed and comes to fruition. But without the scenes showing Qingqing and Nen Reng together, the final tragedy of Qingqing becoming hardened and cynical after seeing the fate of her sister and leaving Nen Reng doesn’t hit hard like it should. Nevermind that even in the complete cut of the film, Qingqing goes from “You’re my best friend” to “I don’t think you’ll be a good monster, let alone a human” is rather sudden and jarring. In any case, these cut scenes relegate Charlene Choi’s role—one of my personal favorites—to little more than a glorified cameo.

Being a Ching Siu-Tung movie, you can expect this to have more than your fair share of effects-laden action. After all, Ching did the landmark Hong Kong fantasy A Chinese Ghost Story, was the to-go guy for 1990s wuxia, and did the effects-heavy sequences in Shaolin Soccer. Something like this should be up his alley. There is a little bit of actual martial arts, with Jet Li swinging around his monk’s scepter in fights with the Ice Harpy (who wields a gwan dao) and the sisters (who fight with swords). But don’t expect anything better than even the short sequences in, say, The Heroic Trio. The rest is wires and CGI blasts and magical attacks. The fact that all this left Jet Li tuckered out is just a testament to his health at the time.

The digital effects are uneven. I actually didn’t mind them in the early scenes, especially when we see Susu and Qingqing in the spirit realm with their half-snake bodies looking down on Xu Xian from afar. The CGI in some of the magical battles was also okay, if a little childish. It is mainly during the third act that the filmmakers bite off more than they can chew with cartoonish giant snakes, CGI floods, CGI buildings falling apart, and CGI snake attacks. I think that was all too much for what a Hong Kong movie’s budget would allow for whatever the time frame was and the effects quality approaches the badness of direct-to-video Anaconda sequel, if you catch my drift. I mean, it doesn’t quite get as bad as, say, Malibu Shark Attack, but it’s certainly not as good as Python and Boa. Picture that on the tree of woe.