A cinematic folk parable embodied by Bruce Lee and Jet Li in past films, Chen Zhen gets his second reconstruction this year, after the far higher Ip Man 2 , in Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen . Helmed by Andrew Lau, this ultimate incarnation of the patriotic ass-kicker is played by Donnie Yen, the same actress and esteemed free-for-all choreographer who played Zhen in the Ip Man series. A overwhelming earthy entertainer when since sufficient room by Lau and his periodic cinematographer Ng Man-ching, Yen comes barreling out of the embankment from the commencement of the film, successfully accomplishing nothing reduction than saving his crew from the stinking Germans by using their own bayonets on themlike Changdao blades. Afraid that his past might follow him, he earnings to Shanghai beneath the name of a depressed ally and rapidly creates good with local bar owners and tycoon, Master Liu (the great Anthony Wong).
Getting shut to Liu is Zhen's outline to obtain shut to the Japanese, as he explains to his comrades in the resistance. Soon enough, he is a renouned tie at The Casablanca Club that is, in reality, a nest of Japanese spies seeking after renouned British, American, and French allies of the Chinese. At the club, he romances the continually shitfaced chanteuse, Kiki (the poetic Shu Qi), and hobnobs with the clientele, but in the streets, he takes on the identity of the Masked Warror, a blithely self-reflexive motion picture hero, and spends his time safeguarding pro-unification intellectuals and dispatching Japanese ruffians with impassioned prejudice. The Japanese, led by a mad colonel (Ryu Kohata) who spends a great treat of his time practice his secret service, allege nevertheless, and even the resistance's express decimation of the Japanese army domicile -- a great coming after punctuated by moments of woe that wouldn't be entirely out of place in a Saw movie -- can't end their imperialistic forge. Only Chen Zhen stands in their way.
The fetishizing of ! mafiosi type isn't the usually thing that interests Lau in conditions of American filmmaking. Having already done his name with the glorious Infernal Affairs trilogy, the executive is no foreigner to updating and upending genre stereotypes, but here, he merely imitates the worst kind of American action mechanics. Replete with dull, without doubt dialogue, average thespian performances, shoal characters, clumsy slo-mo scenes, cluttered side-plots and twists that are entirely predictable, Legend of the Fist 's descent seems reduction in the artery of Bruce Lee and Jet Li and more in line with Jerry Bruckheimer and Edward Zwick. The set-up would make for developed lampoon of the patriotic biases regularly attributed to action films, but Lau isn't personification that game: His endgame here seems to be nothing more than an old-fashioned, stylized martial arts crack with lots of spin-kicks to spare.
Despite its faults, Legend of the Fist does come after in gift a monument in stream action films: The disturb of a plain-old free-for-all coming after done well. The whole movie truly feels similar to a wind-up to the wild one-man-army ass-kickathon that Chen Zhen disperses amongst the colonel and his men, after you have watched the Japanese cling to Zhen's friends, kill in cold blood the he swore to protect, and even rape his younger sister. But even this coming after isn't scarcely as egotistic or suspenseful as the consultant work done in Ip Man , to say nothing of the fantastic work done by Li and Lee in their movies. The fights are as well short and spaced out, whilst the the theater is an complete bore, creation Lau's movie small more than an exercise in watchful to mount still.
AKA: Jing wu feng yun: Chen Zhen
No comments:
Post a Comment