Coweb (2009)

Coweb (2009) Aka: Ninja Masters Chinese Title: 戰無雙 Translation: Unmatched

Starring: Jiang Luxia, Sam Lee Chan-Sam, Eddie Cheung Siu-Fai, Kane Kosugi, Wanja Gotz, Chan Kwok-Pong, Mike Möller, Andy Taylor, Peggy Tseng Pei-Yu, Eskindir Tesfay

Director: Xiong Xin Xin

Action Director: Xiong Xin Xin

I’m pretty sure by early 2008, we fans of the genre were worried that the Girls n’ Guns sub-genre, and female martial arts cinema in general, was all but dead. It had been six years since So Close and things weren’t looking up all that much. The Twins—Charlene Choi and Gillian Chung—often paired themselves with talented people, but their movies were generally unwatchable outside of the fight sequences. Michelle Yeoh was in an exploratory phase of her career, still coasting on the international success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but reeling from the failure of her self-produced films, like Silver Hawk. Yeoh’s contemporaries were either marrying and settling down or retiring after years of zero-budget Taiwanese and Filipino fare. Hollywood action was in a rut, mainly because Jennifer Lawrence was barely graduating from high school. 

The first breath of fresh air came in 2008 with the release of the Thai film Chocolate. Tony Jaa was still captivating the minds of action fans worldwide and the promise of a female martial artist doing the same sorts of fighting and stuntwork Tony did was enough to make fans’ mouths salivate. And wuddiyaknow? Chocolate was every bit the genre classic that people hoped it would be. Sadly, lead actress Jeeja Yanin wasn’t able to parlay her initial success into a career worthy of her predecessors. Raging Phoenix has its share of supporters, but few people care for The Kick or This Girl is Badass. And beyond that, Yanin has mainly relegated herself to thankless cameos in other films.

A year after Chocolate, the Chinese Mainland—full of experienced wushu practitioners—finally gave us an action heroine to look forward to: Jiang Luxia. Jiang was born in 1986 in Inner Mongolia—the part of Mongolia that belongs to the People’s Republic of China, but which the Mongolians would probably want back. When she was twelve, she went to study kung fu at the Shaolin Temple, with Taiwanese child star Sik Siu-Lung (now acting under the name Ashton Chen) as one of her classmates. In 2003, she went to the Beijing Sport University, where she studied and majored in wushu. During her time there, she became a Shaolin boxing champion, a decorated wushu referee, and achieved “Martial Hero” status there (meaning she consistently maintained top 3 positions at the national championships).

Following her graduation, Jiang made videos for online platforms. Her videos quickly amassed more than a hundred million views, beating out the cruder and vulgar videos that were popular at the time. Jiang took in awards for Vlogging and Podcasting, and was a columnist for the CCTV Sports Channel. It was during this period that her career begin. I’ll assume that stuntman-turned-choreographer-turned-actor-turned-director Xiong Xin Xin brought her into the movie business, considering how he was brought up in the world of wushu as well.

Coweb has a premise that feels like a dry-run for the later Man of Tai Chi…or Michael Douglas’s The Game, but with kung fu. Jiang plays Nie Yi-Yi, a talented martial artist working as a security guard and as an instructor at her father’s school. The movie doesn’t make this clear, but other online reviews suggest that the school has been on the decline for years and the dad is desperate to reclaim his old glory. Sadly, he gets killed in a construction accident in the first five minutes, leaving Yi-Yi without much direction in her life.

Enter Chung Tin (Sam Lee, of Fist Power and Gen-X Cops), a former schoolmate of Nie’s—it is a running joke that she refers to him as “Fatty,” even though he’s grown thin over the years. Chung Tin is the assistant for a billionaire named Ho Kwun (Eddie Cheung, of Running on Karma and The Bare-Footed Kid). Ho’s trophy wife, Susan (Taiwanese actress Peggy Tseng), needs a bodyguard and Chung Tin knows Nie Yi-Yi has the talent for the job. It takes some coaxing, but she eventually accepts and flies out to Hong Kong to participate in a group “dynamic” to see which candidate is the best: she passes with flying colors.

It goes without saying that a disciplined martial artist like Yi-Yi is more than cut out the for the disciplined work of being a bodyguard. After all, I assume most of people in that profession spend most of their careers without ever seeing any action. But that’s really the way it’s supposed to be. In any case, Yi-Yi not only wins her principal’s trust, but Mr. Ho is also impressed with her steadfastness. But things go south soon enough. While Mr. Ho is having a meeting with another businessman (Chan Kwok-Pong, who played Ah So in the Once Upon a Time in China TV series), a bunch of men show up and try to kidnap Susan. Yi-Yi is ready to defend her, but there are too many thugs, including a burly Caucasian guy (German stuntman Wanja Götz), for her to fight. She dispatches them, but not before both Susan and Mr. Ho disappear. The only clue is a cell phone left on the premises with the message: “The game has begun…”

The big gimmick is that from that point on, Nie Yi-Yi is constantly being filmed as she goes from one place to another, getting in fights with random entities. Those fights are posted onto the internet for rich people to bet on. Like I said, this film does feel like the predecessor for Man of Tai Chi, where a young Chinese martial artist finds himself getting in fights for the amusement of the rich. Another film that did something similar was The Tournament, which had contract killers running around an entire city while their antics were filmed and played to the rich. This one feels a bit low-tech compared that film, where the organizers would hack into the city’s security systems so they could follow the participants’ movements. Here, we have a camera crew following her in public and cameras set up at the places she’s scheduled to fight. And like The Game, certain characters barge into the proceedings, but are ultimately part of the drama of what’s going on.

The fights come at regular intervals and are nicely staged by Xiong Xin Xin. Xiong’s history as an action director goes all the way back to Skinny Tiger and Fatty Dragon (1990), which he choreographed alongside Ridley Tsui. That was followed by a memorable stint as Ghost Foot Seven (or Clubfoot) in the Once Upon a Time in China films, which saw him also assisting Yuen Bun on the action duties. He later assisted in the choreography for Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Double Team and then choreographed its pseudo-sequel, Simon Sez. The [Conan O’Brien] YEAR TWO THOUSAND [/Conan O’Brien] saw him working with Tsui Hark on both Time and Tide and Seven Swords, plus the Hollywood film The Musketeer (at a time when Hong Kong wire-fu was all the rage). My personal thoughts on Xiong Xin Xin as an action director is that he’s good enough to get the job done, but rarely gives us any “all-time classics.”

Thankfully, he’s on his A-game in Coweb. I remember when this film came out on DVD and Mark Pollard of Kung Fu Cinema criticized the action for featuring too many needless spin kicks. I can see where he’s coming from: there a number of fights where the characters are often just trading kicks: throwing one, dodging another, throwing a second one, dodging  the next…rinse and repeat. I am willing to forgive this more “flowery” choreography mainly because the performers are so good at what they do. Plus, it is shown in nice wide shots without ruining it through too many quick cuts. So yeah, some of the fights feel like Sun Chien doing his thing circa 1979, but I can dig it.

There are a number of interesting mash-ups to be seen. The kitchen fight with Wanja Götz is a good one in that the guy is clearly her physical superior, but she doesn’t take him head on the whole time. She uses the restaurant kitchen, with its long metal counters and found objects like frying pans to her advantage. In the real world, she might not be able to beat a guy that big on pure technique alone, so she balances it out with clever use of environment and agility—not that I would have complained too much if she had beat him in a regular face down. The second fight is against female fighter inside a swimming pool at a nightclub—shades of Lionheart here. Later fights pit her against multiple opponents on a scaffolding and a pair of B-Boys (including German martial artist Mike Möller). 

The best is saved for last: Jiang Luxia versus Kane Kosugi. Kane Kosugi entered my radar back in 2004 when I first saw him in Blood Heat. The man displayed some MAD skills in that movie and I wondered if he would become the successor to Donnie Yen in the bootwork department. Everything pointed to the fact that he would, but for some reason, he never reached the height of fame of his contemporaries, like Scott Adkins and Tony Jaa. I just don’t understand: he speaks Japanese and English (fluently), he knows a multitude of styles (karate, aikido, wushu, Tae Kwon Do, etc.), he’s reasonably good looking, and he’s a badass. His fight with Jiang Luxia goes on for a while and is a great demonstration of bootwork from both performers. It doesn’t quite match the brutality of the finale of Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, but it is probably Kane’s second best moment. Great stuff.

For reasons that I cannot fathom, the film was given the generic (and inappropriate) title Ninja Masters when it came time for US distribution. I simply cannot fathom why they went with that title. What the hell, people? There are no Ninja Masters…or Ninja…unless you count Kane Kosugi, even though he was still “Son of the Ninja” in 2009. I thought the late 70s / early 80s level of cultural ignorance—like renaming Shaolin Prince as Death Mask of the Ninja—had gone away, especially after the Hong Kong revolution. I guess it goes to show that distributors are staffed by geographically-challenged morons distributing movies for people they assume are also geographically-challenged morons. How do you people sleep at night?

Anyway, watch Coweb, no matter how stupid the local retitling is. I bet Jiang Luxia could easily kick the collective asses of all the Hollywood starlets who’ve made hitwoman / spy movies in the past ten years.

This review is part of Fighting Female February 2025