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.

Rattlesnake Kung Fu (2015)

Rattlesnake Kung Fu (2015)
Aka: The Apprentice and the Master; Rattling Demon Staff
Chinese Title: 響尾伏魔棒
Translation: Rattle Tail Magic Wand

Starring: Cao Shuai, Xu Xiangdong, Tong Yang, Wang Xin-Hai, Luan Tianyou, Ocean Hou You-Sheng, Guo Chen, Xu Shi-Jing, Wei Jin-Tao, Zhang Yixin, Li Yu
Director: Liu Xinyi
Action Director(s): Zhang Jintao, Zhou Shao-Yan

Song Dynasty. Circa A.D. 1086. Luan Tianyou (Wang Xin-Hai, of The Lethal Weapon and The Raging Angels) is a government official working in Kaifeng, the capital of the empire. Tianyou is a righteous man and has a beef with another official Cai Jing, who is a bully and a tyrant in the making. Tianyou has made a list of all of Cai Jing’s crimes and has prepared an affidavit to deliver up to the Emperor in order to get Cai Jing kicked out of court. He even gets a number of his fellow officials to sign the affidavit. Righteousness prevails, right?

Well, no. Cai Jing (Golden Dart Hero’s Wang Jie) is a crafty little bastard. He quickly makes his way to the Emperor and accuses Luan Tianyou of all sorts of mischief. Although the Emperor knows Cai Jing is lying, he cedes to some extent and has Tianyou demoted and exiled to Nanjing, along with his family. Meanwhile, Cai Jing rises to the post of head minister, while all those officials who signed the affidavit remain silent. One of them, Liu Jin (Xu Shi-Jing) is even promoted. Someone must have informed Cai Jing of the affidavit, but who?

Such is the backstory of Rattlesnake Kung Fu, an adaptation of one of the chapters of The Water Margin novel, which revolves around one of the lesser-known characters. That character is Luan Tingyu (Cao Shuai, of Kung Fu Hip-Hop and Hero of the River), the son of Luan Tianyou. When we meet Tingyu, he is a child who is both a good scholar and the mischievous type who spies on martial arts schools in order to teach himself. By the time he has reached adulthood, he has passed the public exam and is a pretty good fighter, too. As per an agreement with daddy, Tingyu will be allowed to formally study martial arts—and not just skulk around stealing manuals—as a reward for his scholarly successes.

The teacher his father has hired is “Iron Arm” Zhou Tong (Xu Xiangdong, of A Battle of Wits and Holy Robe of Shaolin Temple). Zhou Tong gets that nickname from his mastery of the “Rattling Demon Staff” (the subtitle in the version I saw called it the “Rattling Voodoo Staff”), which he wields like an extension of his own arms. This is where things start to get complicated. You see, Tingyu has taken the opportunity to invite all of his father’s old official friends from Kaifeng to attend the master-apprentice ceremony. Seems like a lot of pomp for something rather intimate, right? Well, Tingyu has an ulterior motive: he wants to use this opportunity to publicly berate and guilt-trip the guests for their complacence and cowardice back when daddy was getting false accused. Tingyu even goes so far as to produce what he claims is the original affidavit with their signatures on it as he’s dragging the old bastards across the coals.

Once you get past the embarrassment that the episode causes the elder Luan, there is another consequence that the young and inexperienced Tingyu did not anticipate. You see, Luan Tianyou never did figure out who the mole who ratted him out to Cai Jing was. That means that one of the men who was getting berated was most likely present at the party. And he’s going to tell Cai Jing. And now that Cai Jing has an even higher post than before, so he can easily send soldiers out to apprehend the Luan family…which he does. And he starts having the other officials assassinated. So it isn’t long until the Luan family, plus the Li family, including Tingyu’s fiancée, Shiru (Tong Yang, of Lop Nur Mysterious Event), are on the run…

Rattlesnake Kung Fu appears to be a prequel of sorts to the Zhu Family Village arc of the famous Chinese novel The Water Margin, which comprises chapters 47 – 50 of the book. I have not read the novel, nor do I know anything about what happens in that arc, but a visit to the Wikipedia shows that Luan Tingyu is a character that shows up in that arc. And it confirms that he is a master of the staff, which is an important part of the film. I guess Tingyu is a martial brother of Sun Li, one of the 108 Bandits of the Marsh. But the bandits themselves do not figure into this particular film.

That would go some way to explain why the characters are talking about how evil Cai Jing is, but the only appearance he makes in the movie is in flashback. When I watched it, it felt like an incomplete narrative. It was only while writing this that I looked him up, found how that he as both a historical personage and an antagonist in the novel, at which point I learned that the film on the whole was an adaptation of sorts of the novel itself.

The film on the whole tells the story of a talented, but naïve and impulsive young individual who wants to do the right thing. However, his lack of experience in how the world works means that his efforts will bring dire consequences to both him and those around him. In that way, Luan Tingyu reminds me a lot of of Donnie Yen’s portrayal of Hung Hey-Kwun (Hung Shi-Kwan) in the TVB series “The Kung Fu Master” – the impulsive hero who matures through tragedy and training.

The movie has the feel of an early 1990s Hong Kong wire-fu film, especially The Tai Chi Master. I wonder if this was a TV movie, or if the movie was simply filmed at 30 frames per second, giving it that American soap opera look. It also has a very blah and unremarkable soundtrack, which hurts the film because it frequently fails to underscore any of the movie’s more emotional moments. Even worse is the awful CGI, used for flying projectiles—stones, staves, etc—and things like a character kicking one of those wooden prisoner cages and the logs flying off in all directions. It’s bottom-of-the-barrel sub-Asylum level digital effects, and frequently took me out of the film.

Much better was the action, staged by Zhang Jintao and Zhou Shao-Yan. Neither men have a particularly notable filmography, having spent their career in lower-budgeted Mainland films like Inn on Fire; The Solitary Man; and The Lethal Weapon. I haven’t seen any of their other films, so I have no idea how it stacks up to those. But they do a credible job with the fighting. There is a lot of fighting with ample wire assistance, some of which is a bit awkward. Both Luan Tingyu and Zhou Tong use the staff in their fights—the infamous “Rattling Voodoo Staff” is hollow and filled with shifting metal balls, allowing to change the weapon’s center of gravity and strength. The staff fights, much of which are one-on-many skirmishes, are very reminiscent of the group fights in Jet Li’s The Tai Chi Master. So, if you like Jet Li’s work in that, you’ll probably enjoy the fights in a similar fashion. The hand-to-hand is okay, although not always photographed well, and occasionally ruined by bad undercranking.

In the end, Rattlesnake Kung Fu is an interesting film, but not really great. I guess this would be more interesting to fans of the source material and maybe people who liked 1990s wire-fu, although the CGI threatens to derail it at every turn.

Close Range (2015)

Close Range (2015) Aka: Dust Up

Starring: Scott Adkins, Nick Chinlund, Caitlin Keats, Madison Lawlor, Tony Perez, Jake La Botz, Anthony L. Fernandez, Randy Hall, Scott Evans, Jeremy Marinas, Ray Diaz, Jimmy Chhiu, Bryan Cartago

Director: Isaac Florentine

Action Director(s): Jeremy Marinas, David Wald

Close Range was Isaac Florentine’s next film after the well-received Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, which also starred Scott Adkins. I’m pretty sure that the hopes were high for another classic martial arts opus from these two geniuses on either side of the camera. Although Florentine brings his eye for action to this film, giving it a unique “modern Western” feel, people expecting another Ninja or Undisputed sequel will be disappointed. But don’t let that stop from enjoying this short-but-sweet action thriller.

The film opens in Hermosillo, Mexico—where my paternal grandmother’s mother hailed from—at a building that houses members of the infamous Garcia Cartel. A white guy, later identified as Colton MacReady (Scott Adkins, of Undisputed II and Triple Threat), enters the building and goes through the metal detector without a problem. Once in the elevator, he slips a small knife from behind his belt buckle and stabs the two men in the elevator to death. Once on their floor, the proceeds to slice everybody on that floor to pieces as he searches for a kidnapped girl. That would be Hailey Reynolds (Madison Lawlor, of Rise of the Valkyrie and The Axe Murders of Villisca), MacReady’s niece. He rescues Hailey and kills the cartel bigwig, Victor (Ray Diaz), who had her holed up. He pockets the key to Hailey’s handcuffs, not noticing (or maybe he does) the flash memory stick hanging from the same keychain. The two then make a break for it back to Arizona.

Obviously, the head of the Cartel chief, Fernando Garcia (Latin Dragon’s Tony Perez), is not very happy about this. First of all, Victor was his nephew. Even more important (to Garcia), is that the flash memory has all of the details to his operation on it. Losing it would be bad enough. If it fell into the hands of the DEA, then the results might be outright catastrophic. Garcia calls in a favor to Sheriff Jasper Calloway, who represents the law in the county where Hailey lives with her mother, Angela (Caitlin Keates, who had a small role in Kill Bill Vol. 2), and her asshole stepfather, Walt (Jake La Botz, Rambo and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter). 

Long story short: Walt is a mule for the Garcia cartel. On one transport, he decided to keep a kilo for himself. Bad move. Victor and his men kidnaped Hailey and held her hostage. Although Walt returned the coke, Vic had took a liking to the girl and kept her longer—probably hoping that she would succumb to Stockholm Syndrome at some point. A desperate Angela contacted her brother, Colton, now a military fugitive, to help her. And now we got this mess, which is a handful of cadavers and a missing McGuffin. 

Fernando asks the Sheriff and find Colton and keep him around until Fernando and his “soldiers” can come and handle him (and get the McGuffin back). Although Jasper is on the take and thus indebted to Garcia, he knows MacReady from the ol’ days and knows that the man is really the wrong dude to screw with. It doesn’t take long before the film becomes Rio Bravo-with-martial-arts.

Scott Adkins feels like he’s in cruise control in this, with limited dialog and emotional range. His Colton MacReady is an ex-military badass, but the film mainly requires him to be angry or in active ass-kicker mode. Nick Chinlund, who looks like a discount Fred Ward, fares better in the acting department. Madison Lawlor mainly looks scared and afraid. Caitlin Keates gets to jump back and forth between “worried mother” and “mother who will protect her family at all costs.”

The bad guys are Mexican Cartel types. They run around shooting AK-47s and look intimidating. A few of them even know martial arts. Showing more range than them is Jake La Botz (looking like a discount Robert Patrick circa 1999) as the jerk-off stepdad, who is the cause of all this confusion: if he hadn’t tried to steal the flour, none of this would have happened. And man, that dude will throw anyone under the bus if it means saving his own skin.

Casual action fans will probably enjoy this a lot, although fighting afficionados may place this a bit closer to “above average.” A lot of the action is gunplay, some of it standard and some of it stylish. We do get some nice bloody bullet wounds and squibs, including a nasty head wound from one of the main characters. The gunplay is very much standard “stand-off” shooting until it’s time for someone to die.

The fight scenes were staged by Jeremy Marinas, who plays Cruz, the cousin of Victor (the cartel lieutenant who gets offed in the first scene). Marinas actually has a strong résumé as a fight choreographer, which includes The Beekeeper; John Wick 4; Silent Night; and xXx: The Return of Xander Cage. He honestly does a good job and should get more recognition among fight choreographers than just the aging Hong Kong guard, Kenji Tanigaki, and Tim Man.  The fights are a nice mix of complex knife fighting, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and Adkins’s trademark kicking skills.

The showstopper fight—Scott Adkins versus Marinas himself—represents the film’s greatest strength and weakness. The fight occurs at about the halfway point of the film and is a nice exchange of punches, kicks, arm locks, throws, ground fighting…the whole she-bang-a-bang. The choreography and rhythm are perfect and stands up to anything made in Hong Kong at the time. As expected from an expert like Florentine, the camera work and editing complement the fighting and never detract from it.

The problem is that this is the best fight in the film. There is a brief two-on-one at the end between Adkins and two cartel enforcers: Zavala (Jimmy Chhiu, who choreographed the Shazam! sequel and the Rebel Moon films) and Montez (Bryan Cartago, who has been a stuntman on lots of Hollywood films). The fight looks good, and ends on a particularly brutal note, but it is very short and never feels like Adkins will lose. It would have been better for the fight with Marinas to have been the last one, as it is the best fight, the hardest fight, and the most emotionally-significant fight, given that the Cruz character is fighting for revenge. Both Cruz and Victor were apparently high up on the cartel hierarchy, so it would have made more sense for him to be the final boss, fight-wise. Zavala and Montez looking intimidating, but Cruz as the main baddie would have carried more weight. This misjudgment of fight placement makes this “good,” maybe “very good,” but not “excellent,” much less “a classic.”