The Legend of Zu (2001)

The Legend of Zu (2001)

Aka: Zu Warriors
Chinese Title: 蜀山傳

Translation: Legend of Shu Mountains

Starring: Ekin Cheng Yee-Kin, Louis Koo Tin-Lok, Cecilia Cheung Pak-Chi, Kelly Lin Hsi-Lei, Zhang Ziyi, Jacky Wu Jing, Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, Lau Shun, Patrick Tam Yiu-Man, Wu Gang

Director: Tsui Hark

Action Director: Yuen Woo-Ping

I would go on a limb to say that The Legend of Zu represented the first fruits of the international success of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. A costume fantasy? Check. An acclaimed director? Check. Yuen Woo-Ping directing the action? Check. A member of CTHD’s cast showing up for a paycheck? Check—in this case, it was Zhang Ziyi. 

For this particular effort, Tsui Hark, hot on the heels of Time and Tide, convinced investors to foot the bill for a big-budget remake of his own groundbreaking fantasy epic, Zu: The Warriors of Magic Mountain. Both films were based on the novel Legend of the Swordsmen of the Mountains of Shu by Huanzhulouzhu, although this film is almost completely unrecognizable from the earlier film, save for Sammo Hung wearing the same get-up he did that, and a brief moment where see Cecelia Cheung dressed in the same blue dress Brigitte Lin wore in the earlier film. Everything else is a bloated, incomprehensible CGI mess that is more exhausting to watch than anything else.

The film starts with some title cards and a narration informing us that the Shushan, or Zu Mountains, in the Sichuan province (bordering on Tibet) are the home to lots of legends and mysticism. The narrator informs us that the peaks of the mountains have become home to a race of demi-gods who train in the martial arts and use the region’s mystical energies to lead them into a constant state of rebirth, thus guaranteeing them immortality in this world. I guess the difference between that and the birth-rebirth cycle of regular mortals that is described in Buddhism is that the inhabitants of the Zu mountains who are reborn often do so as adults and can access their old memories from previous lives with enough meditation and martial training. So it feels less like living a new life than it is continuing an old one in a new body.

All of that puts the film into Xianxia territory, which is different from wuxia in terms of storytelling mechanics. Wuxia pian involves itself with the Wulin (i.e. The Martial World) and the Jianghu (i.e. the swordsman and martial artists who inhabit it) and although some of the esoteric martial arts styles may be outright supernatural, they are still people fighting against other people. Xianxia delves deeper into the fantasy genre, where the characters are often what sources call “Cultivators,” people who try to achieve immortality based on magic and supernatural powers, which are rooted in Taoism. Stories that involve conflict between heavenly, mortal and demon realms fall into the Xianxia genre. And The Legend of Zu ticks all of those boxes.

The film opens the Kunlun Peak in the Zu mountains, where Dawn (Cecelia Cheung, of The King of Comedy and Running on Karma) is passing her final teachings to her student, Sky King (Ekin Cheng, of The Storm Riders and Heroic Duo). Apparently, Dawn should be indestructible, but she has allowed her feelings for Sky King to keep her from reaching her potential. At that moment, a swarm of CGI skulls (referred to as “evil spirits”) show up and destroy Dawn. But she leaves her signature weapon, the Moon Orb—a large crescent blade that can fly around according to the user’s thoughts—to Sky King.

Some time later, the Ormei School, led by Whitebrows (Sammo Hung, of The Millionaire’s Express and Filthy Guy), is prepping its students to fight against the evil spirits, who are under the control of a powerful demon named Insomnia. There is a huge battle of CGI effects between Insomnia, Sky King, and Red (Louis Koo, of Paradox and Warriors of Future), who is Whitebrows’s senior student. The fight drags on quite a bit and, at one point, both men are forced to fight their clones. Whitebrows is ultimately able to defeat Insomnia, but a piece of him is broken off and flees into the Blood Cavern.

Our heroes can’t use their powerful weapons in the Blood Cavern, lest they get absorbed by the locale’s magic. So, Whitebrows leaves Red to watch over the entrance to the cavern while he reconvenes at the Ormei school to consult with Buddhist priest Master Transcendental (Lau Shun, of Swordsman and A Chinese Ghost Story Part II) as to how to defeat Insomnia. They come to the conclusion that the Heaven and Thunder swords can be combined to create a superweapon surpassing all limits. 

But to combine them requires something resembling a Dragon Ball Z level of fusion between their respective holders—Enigma (Cecelia Cheung again) and Thunder (Patrick Tam, of The Duel and A Chinese Tall Story). For the record, Enigma is, as you guessed, a reincarnation of Dawn. The two Ormei students attempt the fusion for the good of the universe. Thunder hesitates (or gets distracted or something) at the last second while attempting the fusion and blows up. 

Whitebrows and Transcendental are able to reincarnate Thunder in adult form as Ying (Jackie Wu Jing, of Wolf Warrior and The Wandering Earth). However, it will take time for him to re-learn his martial arts skills and become “illuminated,” which will allow him to remember his previous life. Whitebrows retreats from the Zu Mountains and leaves Sky King in charge of Ormei. Sky King tries to help Enigma recall her previous life as Dawn—and almost burns himself to death trying to transfer the ownership of the Thunder sword to himself. Meanwhile, Red is just chilling at the mouth of the Blood Cavern and befriends a little pixie named Amnesia (Kelly Lin, Fulltime Killer and Running Out of Time 2). She turns out to be a minion of Insomnia and possesses Red, transforming into an evil angel. Plus, there soldiers who fight with razor-sharp vertebrae swords, mystical blue flames, new weapons, a giant monster made of CGI blood, and Zhang Ziyi thrown in for good measure!

Watching The Legend of Zu is a frustrating experience. The movie has that same breakneck pacing that a lot of Hong Kong films, especially 1990s wuxia pian, have, but almost nothing resembling real exposition. The film depends on one’s familiarity either with the source material, of Chinese wuxia and fantasy tropes in order to understand the story. And even then, there are enough characters, powers, and secret weapons that there is no time to explore any of it. It almost feels like an RPG in which the dungeon master was just making up lore as he went along…or perhaps a particularly-involved hard fantasy novel series in which Tsui Hark adapted Book Five (of Seven) and left out all the backstories and magic mechanics described in earlier entries. It’s simply impossible to developing any feelings for the characters amidst the deluge of fantasy plot tropes thrown at the viewer at dizzying speeds and CGI miasma assaulting one’s senses.

The Miramax trailer for the 2005 straight-to-DVD release was rather dishonest. Zhang Ziyi was still basking in her fame from CTHD; Rush Hour 2; and Hero (“presented” by Quentin Tarantino) when this finally reached American shores. So the trailer was cut and narrated to make it sound like she was an integral part of the story: the human warrior who must team up with a god (Ekin Cheng) in order to save the world from Evil. Anyone who expected much from her was surely disappointed. Zhang Ziyi plays the daughter of a mortal general stationed in the lower heights of the Zu mountains who travels to the peaks in order to join the Ormei school. But she really does not contribute anything to the actual story and the resolution of the external conflict. It is mainly an extended cameo by someone who was really popular at the time.

Viewers who were hoping for Yuen Woo-Ping to give us more of his wire-fu magic like in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon will be sorely disappointed with The Legend of Zu. All of the action is CGI nonsense. Louis Koo’s Red is a little neat in that his initial form has him fighting with razor-sharp metallic wings like X-Men’s Archangel. But yeah, mainly “swords” that are manifested as beam weapons and stuff like that. The only real martial sequence is a brief sword fight between Zhang Ziyi and Wu Jing, which is not related to the actual narrative. It’s like the filmmakers said, “We have this martial arts actor and this actress that people think knows martial arts, we should probably have them fight…for some reason.” The choreography in that scene isn’t bad, but it is far from enough to satisfy fight fanatics. And to think that the entire film needed three action directors—assisting Yuen is his protégé, Ku Huen-Chiu, and Tsui Hark regular Yuen Bun—just boggles the mind.

Tsui Hark would follow this disappointment with Black Mask II and Era of the Vampires (aka Tsui Hark’s Vampire Hunters). It wouldn’t be until 2005 that Tsui Hark would get his touch back with Seven Swords, which was him doing for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and those films what his own The Blade had done for movies like the Swordsman trilogy and Butterfly and Sword. Frankly, he should have stuck making loopy Jean-Claude Van Damme action vehicles than a lot of these films. Heck, I would have liked to have seen a JCVD film choreographed by Yuen Woo-Ping.

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.

The Wandering Earth (2019)

The Wandering Earth (2019)
Chinese Title: 流浪地球
Translation: Straying Earth

 

Starring: Jacky Wu Jing, Ng Man-Tat, Jin Long, Qu Chu-Xiao, Li Guangjie, Zhao Jinmei, Mike Sui Kai, Qu Jingjing, Zhang Yi-Chi, Yang Haoyu
Director: Frant Gwo
Action Director: Yan Hua, Hao Zhenjie
SPFX Director: Ding Yanlai, Eric Xu, Zhao Haoqiang

 

I find the trajectory of Wu Jing’s career endlessly fascinating. He stepped onto the scene at age 18 with the lead role in Yuen Woo-Ping’s Tai Chi 2, made about two years after wire-fu films set in period had stopped being profitable. Despite being touted as having graduated from the same wushu school that had given us Jet Li and Zhao Wenzhuo, it was clear that, at least in Hong Kong, audiences were already satisfied with the Jet Li they had and didn’t need another one—Vincent Zhao could have told them that. Anyway, after that film was a flop, Jacky Wu tried his luck on TV, which had been a better fit for Zhao.

Wu Jing got another chance at the big time in 2001 when he was given an important supporting role in Tsui Hark’s big-budget CGI fantasy The Legend of Zu. I’m sure that Tsui brought him onboard at Yuen Woo-Ping’s insistence, considering that YWP was that film’s main action director. Although that failed to make him The Next Big Thing, Wu Jing kept at it. His next attempt at the big leagues was the starring role in Drunken Monkey, which was Lau Kar-Leung’s last directorial effort and another attempt for the Shaw Brothers to reclaim their past glory. That film was also a flop and appears to be the final attempt at filmmaking from the once-illustrious Shaw Brothers Studio.

Fortune came knocking at Wu Jing’s door when he took on a supporting role in Wilson Yip’s Sha Po Lang (released in the States as Killzone), a Donnie Yen crime thriller that promised to return Hong Kong cinema back to the action heights of the 1980s. Wu Jing played the knife-wielding cop killer “Jet,” and his fight with Donnie Yen in the alleyway is one for the ages. The film was enough of a success around Asia that it transformed Donnie Yen into Asia’s hope for martial arts cinema and gave Wu Jing’s career new life, usually in supporting roles in Benny Chan movies.

Things really took a turn in the second half of the 2010s, when Wu Jing returned to the Mainland. His first film there was an action movie called Wolf Warrior, which featured British Bootmaster Scott Adkins and was similar in tone and style to the Hong Kong action hit First Option. The movie was enough of a success that a sequel was greenlit with a higher budget. Filming in Africa, Wu Jing made Wolf Warrior 2, which simply blew away box office records in both the People’s Republic of China and on the international market.

The Wandering Earth was Wu Jing’s next “big” film, which he helped fund when the studio’s budget ran out. The film was almost just as successful as Wolf Warrior 2 and currently sits on number 5 on the top Non-English Language Films of all time. The movie itself, if I were to be glib about it, resembles an odd mixture of Ishiro Honda’s Gorath and Michael Bay’s Armageddon. It has the former’s faith in humanity’s ability to set aside petty differences when a problem of global scale presents itself, while wallowing in the latter’s tendency toward emotional manipulation and treating every single set piece as an “all or nothing” climax.

The set-up is that by the middle of the 21^st century, the sun has started to expand, causing all sorts of calamities on the Earth. In about a hundred years, the sun will be so big as to make the Earth completely uninhabitable. To save the planet, the nations of the world have formed a single government and have come up with the plan to build motors all over the world that will fly Earth out of its orbit on a 2500-year journey to Alpha Centauri. Cities will be bult beneath these engines with a housing capacity of 3.5 billion, leaving the other half to perish by the tsunami’s caused by a second set of engines meant to keep the Earth from rotating, or simply freeze to death once the planet gets far enough away from the Sun. Also, there is a new International Space Station built with the intention of assisting the Earth in navigating its way through space.

The movie proper begins with an astronaut Liu Peiqiang (Wu Jing) spending time at the beach with his dad (Ng Man-Tat, of Royal Tramp and Heroes Among Heroes) and son, Liu Qi. Peiqiang’s status as an astronaut has guaranteed him two non-lottery passes into the underground city beneath Beijing, which he gives to his dad, Han Ziang, and son—his wife is sick and would not be allowed into the city.

Seventeen years later, the Earth is approaching Jupiter. Part of the Wandering Earth Initiative is to enter Jupiter’s gravity pull and use it to slingshot out of the Solar System at a higher velocity. Things don’t go as planned. A gravity spike from Jupiter pulls the Earth into a collision course of the two planets, with the force of the larger planet’s gravity pulling the Earth’s tectonic plates apart, resulting in earthquakes that disable a third of the Earth Motors. Liu Qi (now played by Qu Chuxiao, of The Yin Yang Master), Han Ziang and their adopted family member, the adolescent Duoduo (Zhao Jinmai), get roped into effort after getting arrested for “joyriding” in a stolen transport vehicle on the Earth’s frozen surface[1]. The three join forces with the military to transport a reactor core to the Earth motor in Hangzhou, near Shanghai.

Meanwhile, Liu Peiqiang is still on the Space Station, coincidentally on the last day of his sojourn in space. While trying to contact his family, whom he now knows is travelling across the icy wasteland that is now the Earth’s surface, the space station’s A.I. computer, called MOSS, pulls a fast one on him and forces him into hibernation. Apparently, the Earth government has a contingency plan for the possible failure to repair the motors and get Earth away from Jupiter, one that even Peiqiang doesn’t know about it. And when Liu’s hibernation is interrupted and he refuses to go back to sleep, MOSS is going to go all HAL on his ass.

Once the Jupiter issue is introduced at the end of the first act, about twenty minutes or so into the film, the movie is a rather dour affair. Much like Armageddon, every single move made by our heroes—the Liu family, some half-Chinese kid named Tim, and the soldiers (whom we’re supposed to care for, but barely even learn their names)—turns into a mini-climax that results in the death of one or more characters. The second act ends with the seeming victory of the inhabitants of Earth quashed by the reality of their situation, so even as they are struggling to put a last-ditch effort into saving their planet, there is an overhanging feeling of despair, with people random killing themselves and stuff like that. The film lacks the typical inclusion of crass Michael Bay humor needed to balance out the seriousness of the predicament, or at least Mimi Leder’s constant feeling of hope that kept Deep Impact strong. The hopelessness introduced at the twenty-minute mark is tangible throughout, only dissipating in the last ten minutes or so.

That said, the action is frequent and well staged, with Donnie Yen collaborators Yan Hua and Hao Zhenjie in charge of the stuntwork. There’s a neat bit where the transporter enters a canyon in the remains of Shanghai, in which the plateau is actually made up of water that froze in between the buildings. To continue their journey, they enter a building and ascend an elevator shaft to reach the top of the “plateau.” I thought that was pretty cool. Moreover, the FX work is quite good all around, boasting the talents of WETA Workshop (The Lord of the Rings films); Pixomondo (Hugo; the Star Trek franchise and Game of Thrones); and More VFX, a Chinese studio that did Double World and The Island. The only effects that I thought were unconvincing, personally, happened at the end following an explosion in Jupiter’s atmosphere when you see a sort of POV shot of thousands of flaming projectiles hurtling toward Earth. But beyond that, the film looks quite good.

My main complaint about The Wandering Earth is that it feels longer than it is. The movie is a good thirty minutes shorter than Armageddon but feels just as long. I think it has a lot to do with the placement of the emotionally-manipulative flashbacks that pop up whenever a character is about to bite the dust or make an important decision. While giving some backstory into the lives of said character, it draws out the scene far more than it needs to. Moreover, every set piece has about three or four things going wrong simultaneously that different characters will need to put themselves in harm’s way in order to address or correct. That means that the movie often has its action scenes wearing out their welcome, no matter how good the FX are or how well the stunts are mounted. A few cuts here and there could have done wonders for the pacing. It’s kinda funny when you think about it: about three to five minutes of well-placed cuts could have made a really good sci-fi blockbuster, as opposed to merely a pretty good one.

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[1] - This leads to an amusing bit where Ng Man-Tat tries to bribe the guard into letting his grandson and adopted granddaughter go free using vintage porn...by vintage, I mean porn made in the 2010s, when the film was made. Cue the next scene with Ng-Man-Tat sitting in the cell with them.

Tai Chi 2 (1996)

Tai Chi 2 (1996)
aka Tai Chi Boxer; Tai Chi II
Chinese Title: 太極拳
Translation: Tai Chi Chuan

 

Starring: Wu Jing, Yu Hoi, Sibelle Hu, Christy Chung, Billy Chow, Mark Cheng, Lau Shun, Darren Shahlavi, Gai Chun-Wa
Director: Yuen Woo-Ping
Action Director: Yuen Woo-Ping

 

 By 1996, movies like Tai Chi 2 were already an anachronism. The wire-fu period pieces that had covered the Hong Kong cinematic landscape during the first half of the 1990s had already fallen out of favor, the big nail in the coffin being the colossal failure of Tsui Hark’s deconstructionist wuxia film The Blade. From 1995 onward, Hong Kong filmmakers were looking increasingly outward to international audiences, making action movies in the mold of Hollywood blockbusters, while some stars and directors were trying to set themselves up in Hollywood itself. Jet Li took something of a temporary leave from the period pieces that made him famous to make a fairly unsuccessful (at least in Hong Kong) bid at being a modern action star. Donnie Yen, still not the household name in Hong Kong that he is now, tried his hand at directing with a few low-budget projects. There just wasn’t much room in Hong Kong for period pieces, and when they did come back, they were a completely different creature than they had been before.

Obviously that didn’t stop a few brave cineastas from trying to resurrect the otherwise dead genre. Yuen Woo-Ping had built his career on old school chopsockeys and then had been ignored by critics whenever he tried to make a modern-day action film during the 1980s. However, once Tsui Hark had brought the genre back in 1990, starting with The Swordsman, Yuen Woo-Ping found himself getting more work and the critical acclaim he had failed to garner during the previous decade. It isn’t surprising that he’d keep on trying to make the sort of kung fu movie that had been so good to his career before, even when audiences ultimately proved to be indifferent to his efforts.

The movie begins with the retirement of a famous tai chi master named Yeung (Yu Hoi, of Shaolin Temple and Ninja Over the Great Wall). Yeung wishes to get away from the so-called “Martial World” in order to dedicate himself to raising his son, Hok-Man (who’ll be played by Wu Jing of SPL and Fatal Move—the original subtitles refer to him as “Hawk Man”). Hok-Man knows his father is a martial arts bad-ass, and yearns to be one to, but has been forbidden by dad to learn kung fu. Instead, he spends most of his youth locked up in a room with his queue tied to the ceiling reading Chinese literary classics with his cousin, Ah Sang (Tam Chiu). Of course, being the mischievous sort, Hok-Man and his cousin have actually been studying martial arts in secret, encouraged by Hok-Man’s feisty mother (Girls n’ Guns veteran Sibelle Hu, who has never looked more beautiful than she does here).

One day Hok-Man and Ah Sang sneak out of the house to go see the world around them. While performing a lion dance at a local village ritual, Hok-Man sets his eyes on Rose (Christy Chung of Bodyguard from Beijing), the Westernized daughter of local official Tsao (Lau Shun of Once Upon a Time in China 3 and Blade of Fury). Rose is engaged to another official, Wing (The Peking Opera Blues’ Mark Cheng), but her modern education puts her at odds with the local tradition of arranged marriages. Hok-Man immediate falls head over heels with her and gets involved with Rose’s efforts to promote democracy and protest against the British selling opium to the locals. That quickly gets him trouble with the law, with the unscrupulous British opium dealers (led by Darren Shahlavi of Ip Man 2 and Alien Agent), with his own dad, and with one of his dad’s former rivals, the Northern King of Kicks (Billy Chow, of Fist of Legend and Tough Beauty and Sloppy Slop). Thank goodness all those years of reading martial arts manuals has made Hok-Man almost as good as his dad, not to mention the whole business of having his queue tied to the ceiling has transformed his pigtail into a deadly lash weapon with its own Spider Sense. No, I’m not making that last part up.

Robert Tai, the Taiwanese action director best known for giving us ninjas on tarantulas and Alice Tseng’s naked breast fu in films like Ninja: The Final Duel and Shaolin Dolemite, once criticized Yuen Woo-Ping as being all out of good ideas and thus becoming increasingly repetitive in his action design. I can see that to some extent; most of his 1990s films contained at least one homage to one of his old school chopsockey movies. In Tai Chi 2, we have several homages to numerous films of his. The whole queue-as-a-weapon bit had already been done by Yuen Woo-Ping in the obscure John Woo movie Fists of the Double K and then again in the 1993 Donnie Yen film Heroes Among Heroes. Gai Chun-Wah (Kids from Shaolin and New Legend of Shaolin) is essentially playing Iron Head Rat from Drunken Master. The finale is a sort of low-rent rip-off of the climax to Once Upon a Time in China, which Yuen’s brothers had choreographed. There’s a moment in the finale when Wu Jing delivers three consecutive over-the-shoulder kicks to a guy’s head, which Donnie had done in Yuen’s In the Line of Duty IV. So yeah, people familiar with Yuen Woo-Ping’s work will no doubt feel a bit of déjà-vu while watching this movie.

That said, the actual martial arts action is pretty spectacular, aside from the wire-fu stunts in the finale, which are the sloppiest that Yuen Woo-Ping has orchestrated in his career. The tai chi on display in the fights—and unlike Jet Li’s The Tai Chi Master, there’s a lot of tai chi in this film—is simply top notch and Yuen shows us once more that no director is better at portraying the style on film than he is. Yuen also makes an effort to give each set piece its own personality. When Billy Chow fights Yu Hoi at the beginning, the fight begins with them having a verbal duel, calling their moves out and then declaring what they’ll do to counter the other’s attack. Later, when Chow challenges Wu Jing, the two have a wire-fu fight in a bamboo forest, which is impressive. There’s an extended fight on roller skates midway through the movie, not to mention a mantis fist kung fu fight between Wu Jing and Yu Hoi, too. Let’s not forget the tango sequence that ends with Wu Jing performing some wushu-enhanced break dancing. As derivative as the finale may be, one must give it credit for it allowing Billy Chow to be heroic for once. The action is good enough that it more than makes up for a lead who tries to channel Jackie Chan from Drunken Master but without the natural charisma and a script full of plot holes (how exactly does a British opium dealer become a better kung fu fighter than nearly every member of the kung fu-savvy cast?). Heck, I'll give the movie a pass simply for having a romantic subplot that actually goes somewhere, as opposed to all that unrequitted love crap that we've been getting since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.