The Man with the Iron Fists (2012)

The Man with the Iron Fists (2012)

Starring: RZA, Russell Crowe, Lucy Liu, Rick Yune, Byron Mann, Jamie Chung, Dave Bautista, Cung Le, with cameos from Pam Grier, Gordon Liu, Andrew Lin, Chen Kuan Tai, Leung Kar Yan, and Daniel Wu
Director: RZA
Action Director: Corey Yuen Kwai

There’s no doubt that the American rap group The Wu Tang Clan likes kung fu movies. I mean, it’s in the name. All throughout “Enter the Wu Tang” you have songs that sample dialog from movies like Shaolin and Wu Tang and The Five Deadly Venoms. And that aesthetic continued into their later albums and many of their members’ solo albums. I suppose it was only inevitable that at some point, one of them would try to make his own kung fu movie. I suppose the RZA, who had the most clout—he’s a producer, composer (including for movies, like Ghost Dog), rapper—and is a legitimate martial artist, was the one most likely to go forward with such an endeavor. The question is: would his years of kung fu fandom translate into making a good kung fu movie?

Somewhere in China during the Qing Dynasty is a place known as Jungle Village. The place is home to a number of kung fu clans: like the Lion Clan, the Hyena Clan, and the Wolf Clan. The clans are frequently at war with each other, no matter how much the supporting characters try to tell us otherwise. The Lion Clan is currently being led by Gold Lion (Chen Kuan Tai, of The Killer Constable and Iron Monkey). Gold Lion has received orders from the provincial governor to help safeguard a gold shipment that will be passing through the area. Unfortunately, talk of gold excites greedy minds and Gold Lion is assassinated. That leaves the clan in the hands of Silver Lion (Byron Mann, of Street Fighter and Belly of the Beast) and Bronze Lion (Cung Le, of Bodyguards and Assassins and Dragon Eyes).

News of Golden Lion’s death reaches his son, Zen “The X Blade” Yi (Rick Yune, of The Fast and the Furious and Die Another Day). Zen Yi leaves his lover, Chi Chi (played by the appropriately-named Zhu Zhu, of “Marco Polo” and Cloud Atlas), behind and heads to Jungle Village for some good ol’ fashioned revenge. Silver Lion sends assassins out to stop him, but to no avail. So, he brings out the big guns in the form of Brass Body (Dave Bautista, of Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy), a hulking giant whose invincible armor technique allows him to transform parts of his body into brass, rendering him invulnerable to attack. Brass Body is given the order to kill Zen Yi as soon as he arrives in town.

And what of our main star, the RZA? Well, he plays a character named Thaddeus Smith, although everybody refers to him as simply “Blacksmith.” Thaddeus is a former slave who fled the States after accidentally killing a guy who refused to recognize his free papers. He now works as a blacksmith, producing all sorts of gnarly weapons for the rival clans. His dream is to save up enough money to buy the freedom of his favorite prostitute, Lady Silk (Jamie Chung, of Dragon Ball: Evolution). Silk works at a brothel subtly called The Pink Blossom, run by Lucy Liu (of Shanghai Noon and Charlie’s Angels).

While initially aloof from the main action, Thaddeus gets dragged into the conflict when he rescues Zen Yi from an assassination attempt. While Lady Silk is nursing Zen Yi back to health, Thaddeus is found out by the Lions, who slice off his arms when he refuses to reveal Zen Yi’s whereabouts. He is rescued by Captain Jack Knife (Gladiator’s Russell Crowe), an Englishman who’s in village presumably to smoke opium and bang as many prostitutes as he can, although he does have ulterior motives. Jack and Thaddeus’ assistants forge a pair of iron arms for the latter, and together with Zen Yi they team up to take down the corrupted Lion Clan.

In its general contours, The Man with the Iron Fists feels like something that would have been produced by the Shaw Brothers back in the late 1970s. The film is teeming with references to old school kung fu movies and even contemporary Hong Kong cinema. During a sequence set at a Peking Opera, you can hear a female singer (Triple Threat’s Celina Jade) crooning Sally Yeh’s song from The Killer[1]. The iron arms angle is sort of an inversion of Sun Chien getting iron legs in The Crippled Avengers. Dave Bautista’s “brass body” technique is a fairly common trope, having been used in movies like Shaolin Martial Arts; Invincible Armor; and Born Invincible, among many others. Rival clans fighting each other for mastery is standard wuxia procedure. Cameos by Chen Kuan Tai, Leung Kar Yan (playing the head of the Hyena Clan early on), and Gordon Liu (playing a Shaolin abbot) drive the whole “kung fu movie homage” angle home.

I have read in different places that the movie had about four hours or so of usable footage before being edited down to its final length of 95 minutes. That would explain how some characters seem important, only to disappear early on (ex. Zen Yi’s lover, Chi Chi). It would also explain why RZA would go through any trouble to get Pam Grier to play his mother, only for her to show up onscreen for a couple of seconds. The closing credits suggest she had a bigger role, but I’m guessing it ended on the cutting room floor. I also take it that much of the action was also cut, which is strange, considering this is a kung fu movie. But we’ll discuss that in a moment.

Where the story tends to falter is how unimportant the titular character is to the story itself. You could have written out the Blacksmith from the story and the movie still would have made a fair amount of sense. The Blacksmith spends much of the film aloof from the main external conflict, and it isn’t until an hour in that he becomes the titular fighter. Moreover, there is not much time dedicated to showing us how a fugitive (freed) slave might become a kung fu dynamo. We see some of his time at Shaolin, but there are no training sequences to show us how he might throw down with powerful opponents later on. Like other aspects of the movie, those scenes might have been filmed, only to be cut from the final product.

While the film looks pretty good and boasts solid production values, there are a number of aesthetic choices that I have to question. The fact that the Lion Clan strut around town with poofy lion mane hairdos is silly, considering that the film is set in the Qing Dynasty. Queues were the law, folks. They would be put to death for breaking that law. The Wolf and Hyena clan members look refugees from a Chinese cave man movie, rather than something you might see in 19^th century China. And just wear does the RZA find a black leather jacket just a few minutes before the climax begins? The juxtaposition of rap music and orchestral movie scores is especially jarring here. Go for one, or go for the other. I love the Wu Tang’s music. But remixing “Shame on a N****” to an orchestral score while two characters have a bloody fight scene is just…sorta odd.

I’m glad that the RZA got some Hong Kong talent for the action, namely Corey Yuen. Sadly, Core Yuen’s work has been very hit or miss since the start of the 2000s and here it’s largely miss. I’m not sure how culpable he is, however. As I understand it, lots of fight footage did not make it into the final product. Moreover, this might have been the decision of producer Eli Roth (Hostel and Cabin Fever), who wanted to emphasize the gore instead of the fighting. While it makes sense that Roth would want the balance in that direction, it sure makes the movie disappointing from a fight perspective.

Of the fights that made it into the film, the only one that really comes close to working is the one between the Gemini Twins (Blacksheep Affair’s Andrew Lin and Cold War’s Grace Huang) and the Lion Clan. Those two play a pair of sword-wielding assassins who fight in tandem—Corey copies liberally from City Hunter and Half a Loaf of Kung Fu—and do all sorts of moves together. They even wield special swords that can join together at the tips so the two can perform crazy wire stunts. That fight is pretty cool and is a high point of the action. Other action sequences tend to suffer too much from the usual villains: shaky cam, too many cuts, and in this case, bad lighting. I’m not sure if I should blame cinematographer Chan Chi-Ying (The Bullet Vanishes; Detective D) or editor Joe D’Augustine (Death Proof and the Kill Bill movies) for the action looking as disappointing as it does.

I’m also not sure who to blame for the finale being as underwhelming as it is. It certainly looks good on paper: an army of hookers in black leather armed with chainsaw-esque silk scarves fighting off an entire clan while Rick Yune fights Byron Mann in a hall of mirrors, Enter the Dragon style and the RZA fights a brass-skinned Dave Bautista. That should be one of the greatest fight scenes, ever. It is not. Part of the reason is that too much is going on, so it ends up as less than the sum of its parts. The Yune-Mann fight is less of a real fight and more a quickie rip-off of other, better movies. For all his real-life training, the RZA shows off little actual kung fu. And photography/editing during the hooker portion of the finale is just too chaotic. Once again, there might have been more and better action in the original cut, but as we’ll probably never get a Director’s Cut, I’ll have to declare it a major FAIL for everybody involved. In the end, fan cred and good intentions do not a good movie make.

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[1] - The Killer is mentioned by name in the dialog that precedes the song “The 7^th Chamber” on the Wu Tang Clan’s first album. Dialog from the movie is also sampled several times in Raekwon’s first solo album, “Only Built for Cuban Linx.”

The Trigonal: Fight for Justice (2018)

The Trigonal: Fight for Justice (2018)

Starring: Ian Ignacio, Rhian Ramos, Sarah Chang, Gus Liem, Monsour Del Rosario, Paul Allica, Christian Vasquez, Jeffrey Quizon, Vincent Soberano
Director: Vincent Soberano
Action Director: Sarah Chang

 

I wonder if movies like this and Maria are signs that Filipino genre cinema is due for a mainstream comeback. That would certainly be encouraging, considering that the Thai revolution died with Panna Rittikrai and Tony Jaa mainly just takes thankless roles in Hollywood and Hong Kong movies now. Indonesian cinema seemed poised for greatness, but Gareth Evans, who started it with Merantau and The Raid films, has now moved past that phase while actor Iko Uwais, like Tony Jaa, seems to be cast in mediocre Western projects.

Actually, Filipino cinema is a complex creature. There have been several “strains” of cinema over the decades. One would be Tagalog cinema, which has been around the longest. Then, around the 50s and 60s, there shot up a parallel industry whose business model consisted of making genre and exploitation films for international consumption. These included horror movies, like the infamous “Blood Island” movies and Terror is a Man (1958); martial arts movies, like T.N.T. Jackson and some of Ron Marchini’s films; “women in prison” fare; and even sci-fi adventures starring people like Patrick Wayne. Roger Corman often found himself producing movies in the Philippines, often alongside his opposite number there, Cirio H. Santiago.

In the 1990s, the Philippines became the place for once-bankable Hong Kong action stars to make movies and pay the bills. This included Shaw Brothers actor Philip Ko Fei, Cynthia Khan, Yuen Biao, and Yukari Oshima, the latter of whom went by “Cynthia Luster” there. In fact, Miss Oshima has a huge following in the Philippines to this very day, as evidenced by a FB group consisting of mainly Filipino people (many of whom are younger than yours truly). Concurrently, with the stateside success of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, Roger Corman and Cirio Santiago also kept making martial arts movies there in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including a plethora of films starring Jerry Trimble. As the 1990s drew to a close, Filipino cinema largely fell off the map. And this is where movies like The Trigonal come in.

The movie tells the story of Jacob Casa (BuyBust’s Ian Ignacio) an MMA fighter—he usually refers to himself as a karate master—with a dojo in the Philippines. His wife, Annie (the beautiful Rhian Ramos), has recently announced her pregnancy and Jacob is sincerely overjoyed at the prospect of becoming a father. But any chance of nine months of blissful baby preparation is flushed down the toilet by a number of problems. For one, as popular as the dojo seems to be, it isn’t making enough money to pay the bills, including the initial loan that was taken out to open it. Moreover, Annie is growing increasingly weary with her hubby’s attempts to complement his income with professional bouts, especially now that fatherhood is on the horizon.

Those issues, however, pale in comparison with what’s to come. Urban legends in the martial arts community have floated of a tournament known as “The Trigonal,” a no-holds barred, fight to death series of matches for only the most elite fighters in the world. Well, one day some Filipino gangbanger types led by Allen (Christian Vasquez, who overacts so miserably he threatens to sink the entire production) show up at the dojo with an invitation to The Trigonal. Before Jacob has a chance to think over the proposition, Annie kicks the men out of the dojo. This, my friends, is where things go south.

When Allen reports his failure to his boss, the elusive drug lord Henry Tan (Gus Liem), Allen gets such a chewing out that he returns to town madder than hell. So, he and his flunkies show up at Jacob’s dojo while the latter is having drinks with one of Tan’s Jezebels and beat his assistant instructor Dodoy (Jeffrey Quizon) to death. Unfortunately for Annie, she’s also at the dojo and gets herself raped and beaten for her troubles. They also leave his school in shambles, but that’s really the least of Casa’s problems, isn’t it?

Jacob initially doesn’t know that Allen is behind the attack—and that he wasn’t working on Tan’s orders when he did—but the chance to make a million dollars American is enough to convince him to participate in the elimination round. After all, he now has his debts and his wife’s medical bills to consider. He finds out that Tan’s specialty is a super-steroid called “Green Dragon” and that most of the participants in the elimination round are hopped up on the stuff. What he doesn’t know is that Tan has prepared an even stronger new drug, “Buddha Gold,” and that the Trigonal is less a tournament and more of drug exhibition show for potential buyers and dealers.

Most commentaries of this movie compare it to 80s and early 90s martial arts films, like Kickboxer and Bloodsport. In a lot of ways, that is apt. The Filipino setting of the tournament brings to mind the 1995 Albert Pyun film Heatseeker, which was also set there. The use of weapons in the tournament brings to mind rip-offs of those films, like American Samurai and Shootfighter. The fact that the founder of the tournament of is a drug dealer with his own private island is very much Mr. Han of Enter of the Dragon.

Sadly, the film also mimics Enter the Dragon in that the tournament has no sensical structure to it. I can understand the preliminary round in order to enter the Trigonal itself. But the Trigonal consists of four parallel matches between an “outside” fighter and one of Tan’s fighters. No quarterfinals. No semi-finals. Just four separate matches. That wouldn’t be a problem, but then how do you determine the champion? The movie says that the champion will walk home with a million-dollar prize…so if all four of the incoming fighters won their respective matches, how do you determine the winner? In theory, you would do semi-finals and then a final bout. Here, two incoming fighters win their respective matches, but Jacob is declared the champion. What? And the other guy?

The action was choreographed by Chinese-American wushu stylist Sarah Chang, who shows up as a Chinese kung fu expert who assists Jacob. Chang has spent much of limited career in Asia, mainly focusing her work in the Philippines and Taiwan. She doubled for Celina Jade in the Mainland Chinese blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2 and is now set to have a role in Scott Adkins’s Accident Man 2. There are not many female fight choreographers there; the only other one I can think of is Shaw Brothers actress Yeung Ching-Ching, who assisted Tony Ching Siu-Tung on the Royal Tramp movies and Legend of the Liquid Sword. So I’m glad to see Chang pave the way for future female action directors.

Unfortunately, her work is almost completely ruined by bad editing and photography. The cinematographer uses mainly medium shots for the action, which is okay for punching, but too close for the footwork. Moreover, the fights are often shot from angles that do the fighters no justice. For example, when a character performs a jumping spin kick, do you want to film it from behind the guy on the receiving end? No, because the guy’s body will obscure the move. But they do that here and quite a lot. Some of the fights suffer from Shaky Cam syndrome, notably an emotionally-charged bar fight between Jacob and Alan.

When you can see the action, it’s pretty much 90s style choreography with MMA ground fighting thrown in for good measure. It is what you might expect from a martial arts movie made in 2018. Director Vincent Soberano, who also plays a policeman, has a fight with a drug chemist that is very close-quarters and economical, like what you might see in The Raid or any modern spy movie. The Trigonal Fights have a weapons round and an open hands round. As a result, we get to see fighters duke it out with kali sticks, knives and double-edged spears. Once again, the weapons choreography is very Hollywood 90s, think American Samurai. There’s a pretty good fight between Choy Li Fut’s Mekeal Turner, playing a Brazilian capoeira stylist, and UFC fighter Li Jingliang during the Trigonal segment. Be on the lookout for Filipino action veteran Monsour del Rosario (Tough Beauty and Sloppy Slop and Lethal Panther 2) as Jacob’s teacher: he gets to disarm and take down some baddies at the climax. I’d suppose that Ian Ignacio’s escrima duel with Australian actor Paul Allica (who trained under a member of Jackie Chan’s Stuntman Association) would be the highlight of the action.

Now that we’ve established that the action is decent, albeit hampered by bad camerawork, how does the rest of the movie fare? Not very well. The dialog is inane, with there being way too many F-bombs in place of anything thoughtful. It gets silly after a while. There is also a bad bit of “tell, not show” where Jacob mentions that Sarah Chang’s character is helping him integrate kung fu into his fighting style, but we never actually see it. Bad writing, folks. The acting ranges from pretty decent to laughably awful, with Christian Vasquez’s scenery-chewing performance as Alan making Yu Rong-Guang’s overacting in My Father is a Hero look restrained in comparison.

The Trigonal: Fight for Justice had the potential to be good, but the script needed another revision, and they needed a Hong Kong team on hand to shoot and edit the fights. I do hope that Sarah Chang goes on to bigger and better things as time passes. Finally, what is up with Filipino movies and their little people? We have a random dwarf show up as one of the fight announcers. Amusingly enough, he gets kicked by a drug-addled Paul Allica at the climax…RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST A DWARF!!!

Unrivaled (2010)

Unrivaled (2010)

 

Starring: Hector Echavarria, Steven Yaffee, Nicholas Campbell, Jordan Madley, Ashleigh Hubbard, Al Sapienza, Keith Jardine, Rashad Evans, Ryan Robbins, Nathan Marquardt, Desmond Campbell, Tig Fong
Director: Warren P. Sonoda
Action Director: Hector Echavarria

A year or so ago, my book was cited in an article at the South China Morning Post. The author referred to me as “martial arts expert Blake Matthews,” which is a bit of a stretch. However, that was enough to get me away from writing a book about Japanese giant monster movies that nobody would read and have me focusing on the niche of martial arts cinema. Not that I would ever become good enough to be an expert, but I could at least try.

In order to be an expert, I guess I should be willing to dig around the corners that I never did as a teenager when I was renting A Better Tomorrow or Hard Boiled for the fifth time. Man, to imagine how many films I would have on my “Watched” list had I not found The Undaunted Wudang interesting enough for a third rental. Well, that was back in the late 90s. Now we’re in 2022, and up until this evening, I had never seen a Hector Echavarria movie. While Maximum Risk was sort of the first mainstream movie to really try to bring ground fighting into the usual martial arts hokum, I think it was Echavarria who really tried to build a film career and business model off of the growing popularity of MMA and UFC.

According to his Wikipedia article—which I assume was written by him or someone from his native Argentina, considering all the grammar errors in the text—Echavarria was born in Argentina who started learning taiqi quan as a way of treating his asthma. By the time he reached his teenage years, he had already mastered the art, plus judo and jiu-jitsu. So, he added tae kwon do and karate to his résumé as well. He had a successful professional fighting career, accumulating 11 world titles in kickboxing. Concurrently with his fighting career, he also started acting in his native Argentina, headlining in a highly-successful film Los Extermineitors and its sequel.

In 2001, Echavarria started his American career alongside Michel “Tong Po” Qissi and his brother, Yousef, in Extreme Force. Although the film has a low rating at the IMDB (3.8/10), the reviews concede that Echavarria is indeed a skilled martial artist. After a couple of other movies, including a small role in the Jet Li flick Cradle 2 the Grave, Echavarria was ready for the spotlight with Confessions of a Pit Fighter. He quickly became notorious for low-budget MMA films that bordered on softcore pornography. Tonight’s film, Unrivaled, follows that trend.

We open with our hero, Ringo Duran (Echavarria), getting ready for a small-time MMA bout. His opponent, Luca “The Brute” Popoff (“Strikeforce” welterweight champion Nathan Marquardt), is a dirty cheat and beats him into submission with a makeshift brass knuckles that the ref is too stupid notice. A humiliated Duran leaves the match and heads to the strip club where he works as a barista. There, we learn a few things: 1) Duran sort of has a crush on his co-worker, Kara (Shark City’s Jordan Madley); 2) Duran has a $20,000 debt with a loan shark named Sergio Ponzo (prolific character actor Al Sapienza); and 3) Echavarria and director Warren P. Sonoda love the female body. While strip club scenes often provide the movie with background breasts with the occasional close-up for red-blooded males, this movie practically shows entire routines.

Ponzo gives Duran a month to pay off his debt, which considering his losing fight record and strip club barista salary, is a hard order. Adding insult to injury is arrival of a jerk-off bruiser named Alonso Scott (Keith Jardine, who had a role in Logan) at the gym Duran trains at. Scott is an arrogant a**hole who belittles Duran every chance he gets. Must be hard to know that you’re about to die a “never-was.”

Things change when MMA champion Apollo Creed Christopher “The Pressure” Holland (The Ultimate Fighter heavyweight winner Rashad Evans) decides to hold a special amateur tournament with the promise of the winner going pro…against Chris himself. Unbeknownst to Ringo, his groupie and training partner Link (Steven Yaffee) has signed him up for the tournament. Although Chris Holland is against the idea of a never-was like Ringo participating, his company’s CEO likes the underdog angle (shades of Rocky) and brings him in. Now Ringo has a shot at the big money, not to mention the opportunity to give his career a modicum of dignity. But this particular road to success will have more than its fair share of bumps.

To use a Stallone analogy, Unrivaled is two parts Rocky and one part The Party at Kitty and Stud’s. Seriously, I haven’t seen this much female flesh in a martial arts film since Lethal Panther, but it comes close to matching Challenge of the Tiger in terms of quantity. The thing is that you have a decent little underdog sports movie in here, but the first act is so distracted with the boobs and pubic hairs of the strip club’s employees that it cheapens the movie’s attempt at real drama later. And I was honestly feeling for Ringo’s plight at the end, so there is a good movie hiding behind bare buns and breasts. I’m sure that Hector Echavarria had progressed enough as an actor by this point—he’s no Tom Hardy in Warrior, but he suffices for a DTV effort—that he could have sold this film on the drama and his own martial prowess. He didn’t need the filler that would please drunken frat boy UFC fans.

The action, choreographed by Hector Echavarria himself (and with the other professional fighters in the cast serving as “Fight Consultants”), is disappointing. Let’s put it this way: the camera lingers on the strippers’ nipples longer than it does the combatants. The editing is hyperactive, with an average one punch per cut. That gets annoying very quickly. The characters take more face punches than your average real-life MMA fighter could take, but as this is a film, I’ll cut it slack there. But since we’re applying movie logic here, I would have hoped that there’d be more flashy kicks to break up the monotonous Mississippi haymaker punches that compose the bulk of the fights.

As a fan of tournament fights, I was disappointed that Alonso Scott’s first fight in the tournament wasn’t given the onscreen treatment. I mean, this is a 4-fight tournament: Semi-finals, Finals, and then a final fight with Holland. In a 108-minute movie, you can easily squeeze in what the characters describe as an 11-second fight into the running time. Instead, we see two seconds of the fight on a TV screen and that’s it. Bad action direction here, folks.

The other problem with the fights is a story point, but it is an issue for me. The whole gambling debt subplot bleeds into the main story when Sergio the loan shark decides to get in on the racket. What it means is that one combatant is paid to take the fall during the tournament. So, the one fight that arguably had the most emotional resonance to it is largely a one-sided affair because of this specific subplot. It makes sense from a storytelling POV, but as a fight junkie, I can’t help but feel gypped.

I’m really not going run out and comb all the failing video stores (or the Brazilian equivalent to Ebay) to look for DVDs of Echavarria’s other films. If I want MMA in my movies, I’ll content myself to Donnie Yen’s contributions. This one had promise, but was spoiled by the unnecessary amount of T&A. His films before this look like they don’t even have that initial promise…