Wing Chun (1994)

Wing Chun (1994)
Chinese Title: 詠春
Translation: Wing Chun (or Yongchun in Mandarin)

 

Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen Ji-Dan, Waise Lee Chi-Hung, Kingdom Yuen King-Tan, Catherine Hung Yan, Norman Tsui Siu-Keung, Cheng Pei-Pei, Chui A-Fai, Xu Xiang-Dong
Director: Yuen Woo-Ping
Action Director: Yuen Woo-Ping, Yuen Shun-Yee, Donnie Yen

 

As I always like pointing out, the unwritten rule of kung fu movies during the early 90s wire-fu craze was that they either were a) remakes of Shaw Brothers films or b) about a Chinese folk hero. Most of the time, Wong Fei-Hung or any of his contemporaries sufficed for these movies. Of course, semi-legendary figures like Fong Sai-Yuk and Hung Hey-Kwun also got their fair share of representation. Interestingly enough, not many female martial artists got their due during this period, even though the concurrent wuxia films were brimming with beautiful women on wires.

I suppose that has something to do with the dearth of female Chinese folk heroes to tell stories about. There is obviously Hua Mulan, whose story hadn’t become well known in the West during this time, and who hadn’t been the subject of a Hong Kong film since the 1960s. There is a Fu Hao, a famous female military officer and concubine to the Shang Emperor who lived in the 13^th century B.C. There is also Fang Qiniang, the founder of the Fujian White Crane style, whose story was sorta told in the 1979 film The Crane Fighters. And let’s not forget Ma Suzhen, who was the subject of a handful of kung fu movies in the early 70s, and had gotten a PRC wushu film about her in the late 1980s. But for some reason, none of these women inspired Hong Kong filmmakers in the 1990s.

Perhaps the reason was that by 1990, there weren’t enough bankable female martial arts stars to pull off this sort of movie. Mainstream actresses like Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung and Brigitte Lin (and their stunt doubles) were getting lots of roles, but they had mainstream crossover appeal. The Girls n’ Guns movement was quickly losing steam: Moon Lee was working more and more for television, Yukari Oshima was more active in the Philippines, Kara Hui Ying-Hung was mainly getting supporting roles, as was Sibelle Hu. There was Cynthia Khan, who seemed to find steady work in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan, and on TV. I’m not sure why she wasn’t cast for any of the roles above.

The most bankable actress with martial arts cred in the early 1990s was Michelle Yeoh, who’d made her triumphant comeback to the big screen in Police Story 3: Supercop, and was soon appearing in all sorts movies: kung fu films, wuxia pian, superhero fantasies, and more. To my knowledge, she was the only woman who headlined a 1990s kung fu film, which was about one of the most famous female martial artists of all time: Yim Wing Chun.

Our film opens with the righteous (if cheap and a smidge lecherous) Scholar Wong (Waise Lee, of Zen of Sword and A Better Tomorrow) visiting some village in Southern China, telling his assistant about how he needs to do something about the local bandit army who’s terrorizing the region. They stop at some establishment where Wing Chun (Yeoh) and her sharp-tongued aunt, Abacus Fong (Yuen King-Tan, of Fight Back to School and Future Cops), are hanging out. The bandits show up and Wing Chun drives them way, manipulating Scholar Wong’s body so as to make it look like he beat them (stealing a gag from Yuen’s own Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow).

A few days later, the bandits show up at a local festival, trying to kidnap a young woman, Charmy (Catherine Hung of Death Melody and Black Wind Inn). The unfortunate young lady has arrived in town with her sick husband looking for a cure for the latter’s illness, and now has a bunch of bandits trying to rape her! Wing Chun once again drives off the bandits, much to the chagrin of the local martial arts masters. In order to win back face, those masters show up at the Yim Family Tofu Shop the next day and challenge Wing Chun to a duel. This is Michelle Yeoh we’re talking about here, so obviously she kicks their representative’s ass and sends the whole lot packing.

It's at that time that Charmy’s husband has passed on and the ill-fated widow is now selling herself to pay for his burial. Abacus Fong and Wing Chun take Charmy under their wing while convincing Scholar Wong to pay for the burial. The newly-single Charmy becomes the store’s “Tofu Beauty,” and soon every man in the town is interested in tofu (apparently a euphemism in Chinese for “vagina”) and soy milk (a euphemism for “semen,” as I understand it). That would include Scholar Wong, who has given up his machinations to marry the tomboyish Wing Chun in favor of the more conventionally beautiful Charmy. At the same time, Wing Chun’s long-forgotten fiancé, Leung Pok-To (Donnie Yen), has also shown up in town looking to reconnoiter with his long-lost love. However, since mistaken identity subplots are as common in Hong Kong films as credited action directors are, Leung mistakes Charmy for Wing Chun and Wing Chun (who wears men’s clothes) for her lover. Shenanigans ensue! Plus, Wing Chun keeps fighting those pesky bandits.

While Yuen Woo-Ping worked on some generally serious kung fu movies in the 1990s, like The Tai Chi Master and Fiery Dragon Kid, this one is closer in tone to Last Hero in China (which he choreographed). While LHIC tended to mix parody and farce with the occasional moment of graphic violence, Wing Chun is mainly a situational romantic comedy, punctuated with frequent displays of martial mastery and effects-driven creativity. I think there are only two deaths in this film: the offscreen death of Charmy’s husband and one bandit whom their leader, Flying Chimpanzee (Norman Tsui Siu-Keung, of Bastard Swordsman and Tiger on the Beat), punches out of anger. The fight scenes, while often intense, are not very violent, keeping within the lightweight tone of the movie. Drama is limited to the occasional moment of self-introspection, which keeps the film from becoming outright sappy on the whole.

Much of the film revolves around the machinations of the male characters—Leung Pok-To, Scholar Wong, and a bandit called Flying Monkey (Chui A-Fai, of A Warrior’s Tragedy)—to get into Charmy’s knickers. In Leung’s case, it’s because he’s too dense to realize that Michelle Yeoh in men’s clothing is still smokin’ hawt Michelle Yeoh. At the same time, Abacus Fong is doing some maneuvering of her own, as she’s out for love and companionship, too. Actress Kingdom Yuen overacts a storm in this role, making for a memorable performance as a greedy woman who has no inhibitions in saying what’s on her mind, even if it offends everyone around her. She makes a great foil to Michelle’s more reserved and bemused Wing Chun and some of the funnier moments are just watching those two interact with each other.

Speaking of bemused, that is the best way to describe Michelle Yeoh’s super-confident approach to her fight scenes for most of the first half. Except for when she’s fighting Flying Chimpanzee, she tends to fight off her attackers with a perpetual amused look on her face while hardly breaking a sweat. It’s a testament to Michelle’s toughness that she’s able to pull off such physicality while not losing her cool. And she does it all here: flashy kicks, complicated handwork, weapons (saber, pole, butterfly swords), prop-fu, and more. I think this is a favorite Michelle film for a lot of fans and it’s not very hard to see why.

Yuen Woo-Ping’s action is heavily wired up (as was the style of the time), but still staged in a way that makes the most of the performers’ physical abilities, including Norman Tsui’s stunt double. He also makes sure that each fight is not a repeat of the one before. But you have one fight where Wing Chun uses Scholar Wong as a prop. Then a more conventional hand-to-hand/sword fight. Then a crazy sequence in which she challenges an opponent to smash a plate of tofu and then does all sorts of moves and furniture kicking to prevent that from happening—sort of an homage to the calligraphy fight from The Magnificent Butcher. Later on, she has a weapons fight with Flying Monkey while both are on horseback. In the last act, there’s another complex sequence in which she and Flying Chimpanzee fight while balancing on a large metal spear. It’s a testament to the Yuen family inventiveness that each fight has a distinct personality while never falling out of step with the tone of the film as a whole.

What you shouldn’t expect in this movie is a faithful retelling of the Wing Chun legend or an Ip Man-level workshop on the awesomeness of wing chun as a fighting style. I’m sure that that last part was much of the reason that Donnie Yen and Yuen Woo-Ping had a falling out during filming. Interestingly enough, when those two finally made a movie together years later, it was Ip Man 3, a movie about wing chun! The film only pays lip service to the events that led to Yim Wing Chun’s training and is set years afterward, so it’s totally an original story. And to see Yuen Woo-Ping’s expert action direction in a period piece bereft of evil Qing officials and equally-evil foreigners who are out to exploit China make the film even more refreshing.

This review is part of Fighting Female February 2023: The Month of Michelle. Click on the banner below for more reviews of her films.

The Heroic Trio (1993)

The Heroic Trio (1993)
Chinese Title: 東方三俠
Translation: The Three Heroes of the East

 

Starring: Anita Mui Yim-Fong, Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk, Damian Lau Chung-Yan, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, James Pax, Mimi Chu Mai-Mai, Yen Shi-Kwan, Paul Chun Pui
Director: Johnnie To, Tony Ching Siu-Tung
Action Director: Tony Ching Siu-Tung

 

Is there a name for the following phenomena? Back in the day, people might make mix tapes of songs they tape off the radio (or from other tapes, if their stereos had two tape decks). Or in the late 90s and early 00s, they would download random songs they liked from file-sharing sites like Napster and then burn them onto a CD. I’m guessing that with today, it’s done with HOURS worth of music on a flash memory stick, if not directly on the smart phone. In any case, with tapes and CDs, you often listened to things in the order they were recorded—you could shuffle it up on a CD, but why bother?

The thing is, with time, you mind would get used to the order of the songs on that tape or CD. And finally, you would come to associate one unrelated song with another, even years later. That’s how it is with me. One mix CD that my friend Huy recorded for me back in 2000 had a mixture of Chinese movie tunes and mainstream Occidental music on it. As a result, to this very day, I cannot listen to “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen without expecting Anita Mui’s award-winning theme song from The Heroic Trio, “Don’t Ask About Life”, to start playing immediately after. It doesn’t matter the context: karaoke, radio, random Youtube suggestion…as soon as I heard “Nothing really matters to me,” my mind starts to expect that the next thing that I’ll hear is “Sui wor sui wor sui chi kan, sheung sik kit hap liu wan nan.”

It is, to me, one of the most memorable movie tunes in all of HK cinema, ranking up there with “Naam yi dong ji keung” from Once Upon a Time in China and “Because of You” by Cass Phang from Peace Hotel. But that’s just me.

The movie opens with a policeman, Detective Lau (Damian Lau, of Duel to the Death and Holy Weapon) and his wife, Tung (Anita Mui, advertised on the Tai Seng VHS as “The Madonna of Asia”), doing checking out a run-down house in the boondocks of some Chinese City. If Egon Spengler were there, he’d probably say, “I think this building should be condemned. There's serious metal fatigue in all the load-bearing members, the wiring is substandard, [and] it's completely inadequate for our power needs…” However, Tung thinks the place has character and convinces her hubby that the place has “character” and they purchase the house, much to the surprise of the realtor.

The Madonna of Asia

It’s probably a good thing that the Lau family doesn’t have children yet, and that Tung herself is so willing to put in the effort to fix the place up, because Detective Lau has a lot on his place at work. For the past few months, babies have been disappearing all over the city, usually from maternity wards. No clues have been found at the site of the kidnappings, no terrorist organization has assumed responsibility for the crimes, nor have any of the families received any ransom notes. The authorities are completely in the dark as to what’s going on. Things really get intense when an invisible force shows up at the police station and informs the Chief (Paul Chun Pui, of Pantyhose Hero and Ameera) that his newborn son is next.

That’s enough to get most of the police force at the hospital. After all, if the culprit is so arrogant as to let the entire police department know where they’ll strike next, then maybe they are getting arrogant enough to let themselves get caught. That still doesn’t prepare them for what happens that evening. While the Chief’s wife (Chui To) is looking at her baby from the window in the nursery, it’s to her and the nurses’ horror that two babies—including her own—simply rise up to the air and fly through the window. The police gather on the outside to observe the floating babies, completely baffled at what’s happening in front of them. Suddenly, the city’s protector, Wonder Woman (aka Tung), arrives on the scene via running across the power lines to see what the commotion is about. She figures out that an invisible person is involved, as is able to wound them with one of her Batarang-esque darts. But one of the babies is the decoy and the invisible thief drops said baby, forcing Wonder Woman to rescue the falling baby while the thief gets away with the other child.

Asia's Top Action Actress (and Miss Malaysia 1983)

We learn that the invisible person is actually an Invisible Woman named Ching (Michelle Yeoh, billed on the VHS as “Asia’s Top Action Actress”). Ching is in the “employ” of a powerful Eunuch-sorcerer (Yen Shi-Kwan, of Dance of the Drunk Mantis and The Royal Tramp 2) who lives a strange netherworld beneath The City. His plan is to kidnap a bunch of babies with a special birthday and then, at the next Auspicious Day, choose one to become the next Emperor of China. I’m assuming said Emperor would raise up an army capable of smashing the CCP and start up a new (supernatural) dynasty. There you go.

The next variable in the mix is a mercenary named Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung, advertised on the VHS as “Former Miss Hong Kong”). After displaying her skills by capturing a bunch of robbers holding the employees of a chemical factory hostage, she makes a deal with the Chief to find his son in exchange for half a million in gold bullion. To that end, she herself stages a kidnapping at the hospital in order to ferret out the real culprit. Although that ultimately works, it also gets the attention of Wonder Woman. The ensuing fight between the three women at another condemned building tragically results in the death of the decoy baby. However, Thief Catcher learns of the kidnapper’s identity, at which point we learn that she herself used to be in the employ of the Eunuch before escaping and going to business for herself.

The 1983 Miss Hong Kong Runner Up and Miss World Semi-Finalist

There is a lot going in this film, as I haven’t mentioned the subplot involving Ching’s boyfriend (James Pax, the thunder god from Big Trouble in Little China), who is the scientist that invented the invisible robe. That particular subplot contributes a lot to Ching’s eventual change of heart in the third act before she joins forces with Thief Catcher and Wonder Woman to stop the Eunuch. Each of the three is given a character arc, although Wonder Woman probably undergoes the least amount of development because she’s already a righteous do-gooder. Thief Catcher has to make amends for the death of the baby and overcome her own materialism, while Ching is a villainess until her employment and love life come into violent conflict with each other. It’s a testament to Johnnie To’s skill that he’s able to keep it all together, especially in the drama department, despite having so much to keep track of, while never skimping on the action, either.

It helps that action director Ching Siu-Tung is such a pro at this sort of everything-goes narrative. As Scott Hamilton and Chris Holland of StompTokyo said in their review of A Chinese Ghost Story: “This kind of scattershot approach to movie making could be confusing, or tiring, or even worse, boring, but Ching Siu-Tung's amazing visual style holds the whole film together.” In the case of The Heroic Trio, it’s a combination of Ching’s imaginative action direction and the slick photography. Credit to the latter goes to cinematographers Poon Hang-sang (Peking Opera Blues) and Tom Lau (A Chinese Ghost Story), both of whom had worked with Ching before. Bruce Yu’s art direction is also distinctive, reminding one of A Chinese Ghost Story in the Netherworld scenes and Disney’s live-action Dick Tracy for the interior sets.

The action itself is a synthesis of everything that Ching Siu-Tung had been doing in cinema up to that point. By 1993, Ching had established himself alongside Yuen Woo-Ping as the king of wire-fu. In fact, his films were even more divorced from the laws of physics as we know them that Sifu Yuen’s efforts were. In addition to the complex wire stunts, we also get frequent bursts of balletic swordplay (see Butterfly and Sword and Dragon Inn); stylish gunplay (á la A Better Tomorrow 2); supernatural attacks (see The Swordsman trilogy); and even a brief stop motion sequence (see A Chinese Ghost Story). There is even some bullet time thrown in for good measure, which had gotten a lot of attention the year before in Full Contact. Of the seven film that Ching Siu-Tung contributed to in 1993, it was this one that got nominated for a Best Action Choreography Award, but lost to Corey Yuen’s Fong Sai Yuk.

Most of the individual action sequences aren’t especially long, but they are always fun to watch with some memorable visual at the end of each one. Whether it’s Wonder Woman running across power lines; the Eunuch’s enforcer (Anthony Wong, of Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome) killing hostages with a flying guillotine; or Maggie Cheung throwing dynamite sticks into oil drums and riding them through the air; or a fight with a stop-motion skeleton (á la The Terminator) there’s always something nutty going on in this movie. There isn’t much in terms of sustained martial arts: Michelle Yeoh has a brief exchange of punches and kicks with Anthony Wong and wields a mean chain whip throughout. Don’t go into this expecting a kung fu movie, it’s a superhero fantasy with some martial arts in it.

Finally, a note about releases. There are two main ones in the US that I’m aware of: the Tai Seng release and the Miramax one. The Tai Seng release is the full version, as far as I’m concerned. The Miramax cut, which, incidentally, is also the one that came to Brazil, has several scenes missing that would undoubtedly offend anyone not well-versed in Hong Kong filmmaking tropes. You see, in the West, there’s something of an unwritten rule about not killing children or putting them in danger in action movies. If you look at Leonard Maltin’s takes on films like Double Team and The Long Kiss Goodnight, you can see that he’s offended by the idea of putting children in the middle of violent action sequences. But in this movie, children are fair game. While the death of the baby is kept on the grounds that it’s an important plot point, the Hollywood distributors removed the throw away scenes of shanghaied children in the Netherworld being forced to subside on human flesh(!) and Thief Catcher ultimately killing them with dynamite because they’re already beyond saving. Moreover, casual tastelessness like Anthony Wong eating his own severed finger(!!) has also been excised. And when you consider that these scenes are juxtaposed with “beautiful” ones like Anita Mui walking through a residential area covered in bubbles because dozens of children are on the balcony blowing bubbles, you know you’re dealing with a Hong Kong film at its Hong Kong-iest.

This review is part of Fighting Female February 2023: The Month of Michelle. Click the banner below for more reviews.

Butterfly and Sword (1993)

Butterfly and Sword (1993)
Aka: Comet, Butterfly and Sword
Chinese Title: 新流星蝴蝶劍
Translation: New Meteor, Butterfly, Sword

 

Starring: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Michelle Yeoh, Joey Wong Cho-Yin, Jimmy Lin Zhi-Ying, Donnie Yen Ji-Dan, Tuo Tsung-Hua, Elvis Tsui Kam-Kong, Elsie Yeh Chuan-Chen, Lee Ka-Ting, Chang Kuo-Chu
Director: Michael Mak
Action Director: Tony Ching Siu-Tung, Ma Yuk-Sing, Cheung Yiu-Sing

As I’ve stated before, the general rule of making wuxia movies in the 1990s is that they had to be 1) based on the works of Gu Long or Louis Cha/Jin Yong (or some other famous tale or legend) and/or 2) previously adapted to film by the Shaw Brothers. In the case of Butterfly and Sword, both criteria apply. The source material is a novel by Gu Long called Comet, Butterfly and Sword (the Chinese term 流星 – Piyin: “Liúxīng”—can be translated as “comet”, “meteor” or “shooting star,” depending on the context). It had been adapted to film by the Shaw Brothers in 1976 as Killer Clans, which was the film that kicked off director Chor Yuen’s cycle of super-complicated wuxia films based on Gu Long’s novels, often starring Ti Lung.

I have yet to see Killer Clans, nor have I read the original novel, so I’m not sure how this film compares to either. I do know that it typical 90s wuxia manner, it tries to compress about 800 pages of source material into an eighty-minute narrative. That makes the movie a bit confusing to the uninitiated, especially given the breathless pace of Ching Siu-Tung’s action direction. Teenage Blake had to rent it three or four times from Blockbuster Video in the late 90s to understand the story—something similar happened to me with Kung Fu Cult Master, too.

Set in the Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644), the film opens with a high official who’s writing a letter to one of the clans. We’re not quite sure who he is, who he’s writing to, or why his letter is important, but someone does. An unknown assailant flies into his inner sanctum and slices off his face with a sword.

Cut to another location, where Sing (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, of Hard Boiled and Tokyo Raiders) is lying about in the trees waiting for someone. Sing is a super-powered kung fu assassin working for the Happy Forest Clan, led by Sister Ko (Michelle Yeoh). Sing’s quarry is a man named Lui Chung-Yuen (Kickboxer's Lee Ka-Ting), who has ties to a high-ranking official named Lee Siu-Tin. Sing defeats Lui’s men by firing himself from a bow and using the momentum to slice everyone in half. He captures Lui, who is later executed by Sister Ko after trying to escape and attack her.

We learn in the meantime that Sing is currently engaged to a beautiful young woman named Butterfly (Joey Wong, of City Hunter and A Chinese Ghost Story III). Butterfly grew up in the Martial World—hence her ability to perform all sorts of wire-assisted acrobatics—but left it because she was tired of watching her father kill people. Sing hasn’t told her what his real profession is—she thinks he’s an ordinary merchant—but plans on leaving the Happy Forest after his next mission.

Said mission was given to Sister Ko by her employer, an elderly Eunuch named Tsao (played by Wong Chung-Kui, of Flying Dagger and Wonder Seven). Tsao has informed Sister Ko that the aforementioned Lee Siu-Tin may be planning a rebellion against the Emperor, with the help of another clan, led by Suen Yuk-Pa (Tsui Kam Kong, of Girls Unbuttoned and Prison on Fire 2). Lee Siu-Tin has sent a letter to Lord Suen of his intentions. If Sister Ko can retrieve the letter as evidence, then the Eunuch will be able to arrest Lee Siu-Tin and put an end to his political machinations.

To this end, Sister Ko stages a fight in public between her, Sing and her right-hand-man, the drunken swordsman Yip Cheung (Donnie Yen, of Sha Po Lang and Dragon Tiger Gate). Ko and Yip “kill” Sing, which allows him to assume a new identity, not unlike James Bond in You Only Live Twice. Sing plays the role of a wandering swordsman and ingratiates himself to Lord Suen  Yuk-Pa by defending him from some random assassin at a public festival. Suen Yuk-Pa invites Sing to join his clan, which Sing accepts. There are few kinks in the plan: like how Lord Suen’s lover (Elsie Yeh, of White Lotus Cult and Sam the Iron Bridge) looks an awful lot like Ho Ching, Sing’s childhood friend who, like Sing, had been taken in by Sister Ko. Also, both Lee Siu-Tin and Eunuch Tsao may know a lot more than either of them are letting on…

Of course, this is only an outline of the main conflict. There’s also a love cube between our main characters. Although Sing and Butterfly are clearly in love, Sister Ko has pined for Sing for years, and all of the riches of her clan (not to mention her Michelle Yeoh beauty) isn’t enough to sway him to her bedside. Sister Ko also has an admirer in the form of Yip Cheung, whose love she regularly spurns, even though the two complement each other perfectly when it comes to kung fu killing. That leads to a funny scene where a drunken Yip tries to make out with a charcoal drawing of Michelle Yeoh, which is both goofy and just pathetic. The movie jumps back and forth between the characters’ personal lives and the mission at hand, which is why some viewers find the story both underdeveloped and full of filler. I personally found it all enduring and really felt for the characters.

Director Michael Mak is best known for another Ming Dynasty-set film, the infamous Sex and Zen. That said, I think his role here was similar to Gordon Chan’s role in Fist of Legend: just get the characters to the next piece. While FOL was largely Yuen Woo-Ping’s movie, this is definitely a showcase for the talents of Tony Ching Siu-Tung, who ruled the wuxia genre with an iron grip during the first half of the 1990s. The film is filled the brim with flowing silks, flying people, wire-assisted flips and twists, qi blasts, and all sorts of over-the-top madness. Most characters can’t even walk a few steps without breaking out into some super-powered, acrobatic, push-off-the-wall leap. And Ching Siu-Tung treats it all as a thing of beauty, an aesthetic that Tsui Hark was obviously trying to deconstruct in The Blade (1995).

There are a number of action sequences, all of them filmed in that over-the-top, quick-cut style that Ching Siu-Tung had been trying to perfect ever since The Swordsman (1990). Each of them has its own type of creativity, like Tony Leung firing himself out of a bow and reducing an entire squadron of fighters to mulch. Or an early attempt on Suen Yuk-Pa’s life features a bunch of assassins flying into his estate armed with blades that are spinning around like helicopter rotors. That ends with heads getting lopped off and limbless torsos being kicked against trees.

The first showstopper is a massacre set in a bamboo forest. Sister Ko and Yip Cheung show up to kill a bunch of fighters who are to be hired into Suen Yuk-Pa’s clan. Donnie Yen shows off a few of his trademark kicks—his patented jumping back kick and jumping double back kick—but that’s just small potatoes compared to the rest of the scene. This is the sort of sequence where Michelle Yeoh will slice a bamboo tree in half, slide down the middle while performing the splits, and then allow each half to skewer a wire-bound stuntman. Or Donnie Yen holding out his sword, slicing another sword in half, and causing the two halves to fly back into the owner’s chest. It’s wire-fu madness cranked up to eleven, ending with the dark image of dozens of people impaled on bamboo.

Then you get to the last ten minutes, and things really go into overdrive. I won’t spoil the story context of the final fights, but suffice to say that all of it is just pure insanity. Michelle Yeoh fights with a silk scarf that can function as a lash or a staff, like Donnie Yen in Once Upon a Time in China 2. Donnie Yen has an ultra-fast exchange of swordplay with another fighter that ends with a multiple blood geysers. The human bow-and-arrow idea gets revisited in a way that you won’t expect. Candle flames are used as bullets. Property damage is in the millions! Headless corpses decide that they don’t want to stay dead and continue fighting! It’s all pure lunacy, spoiled only by a few moments of unnecessary undercranking.

I think that once I came to terms with Tony Ching Siu-Tung’s brand of action direction—you rarely watch any of his movies to see a true showcase for the actors’ martial talents—this quickly became one of my favorite wuxia films of them all. It’s just so nutty and the characters are so endearing (and the women beautiful) that I can’t help but just enjoy the ride. And to top things off, the movie ends with a recapitulation of the all the action scenes, set to the song “Love is Like a Shooting Star,” sung by Michelle Yeoh herself! It’s just heaven for a Michelle fan like myself!

This review is part of Fighting Female February 2023: The Month of Michelle. Click the banner below for more reviews