|
Reviewing martial arts movies of various sorts is turning into almost a monthly thing for me now. Be sure to also check out my review of Kung Fu Hustle, a movie which you should NOT avoid.
This month was a two-fer. First of all, there was "Duel to the Death." This movie sounded pretty cool. It was about a duel held every 10 years between the best Chinese fighter and the best Japanese fighter to prove which country had the superior fighters. However, this year the competition is rigged! The two best fighters find out about it and team up to take down the corrupt officials and save China's best fighters.
Uhm... guys? You're supposed to be teaming up!
Seriously. They never really teamed up. It was more like they both found out about the corruption and separately beat up the same group of ninja. Yep, that's right, ninja. There was NO mention of ninja in the description of this movie. If there had been, I never would have rented it. Ninja screw up just about every movie they're in, with the exception of The Last Samurai (which had its own problems that had nothing to do with ninja).
Ninja are the biggest problem with this movie. Every time you think you've seen the most ridiculous ninja-related idea this movie can come up with, they throw in another one.
First, there were the exploding kamikaze bear hug ninja.
THEN there was the 20 foot tall ninja.
But wait! The 20 foot tall ninja split into about 8 separate ninja! And just when you're thinking "By golly, that one ninja sounds like a girl," said ninja jumps into the air, spins around, and rips off all of her clothes! She IS a ninja chick! The elderly Shaolin monk who is being attacked has no choice but to avert his eyes and say "Buddha be praised!" (because isn't that what every man says when faced with a hot naked ninja chick?). Then she whips her sword in his direction and a net flies out of it and traps him.
When you're finally done giggling about this, the movie has to throw something else at you. So we cut to this grey-haired barbarian type guy with a huge sword who was going to attend the fighting competition. He's walking along through the night, when the camera pulls back, and what do we see in the sky above and behind him? Kite-ninja! There's like 3 ninja each gliding along on a rectangular bamboo frame with a bed sheet loosely stretched across it. When the barbarian guy beats the crap out of the 3 ninja, we again look to the sky and see DOZENS of these kite-ninja gliding along to dispense their ninja doom.
At this point, one is forced to continue watching the movie out of sheer morbid curiosity. What other ridiculous ninja hijinks can ensue? Of course, in between all of this ninjariffic action, we're being treated to other ridiculous plot elements. There's the ever-popular beautiful young woman disguising herself as a man. Except this is the WORST disguise ever. Every Chinese girl knows that the best way to disguise yourself is to wear a hat. This girl not only eschews the traditional hat, but her clothing looks nothing like any outfit I've ever seen any man wear in a martial arts movie, and she does her hair up all girly-like and never disguises her voice. THEN she wonders how both of the main characters realize she's a girl.
Actually, I could spend all day listing the ridiculous things in this movie. The stupid way the girl dies, sending the Chinese swordsman who loves her on the path of revenge. The fact that her father supposedly is missing his legs from the knee down, yet apparently has these awesome realistic prosthetics that allow him to do martial arts normally without anyone ever noticing. The ridiculous scene with all the Chinese martial artists hanging from cords in the basement. The whole "We're kidnaping all the best Chinese fighters for some obscure reason" plot.
But mostly, it's the ninja. Near the end, there's this big fight between the good guys and the ninja. The vaguely good Japanese swordsman (all Japanese people in this movie are 1: played by Chinese actors and 2: assholes) dukes it out with the ninja leader. Finally, he chops off the bad guy's head and it flies through the air, getting impaled on a branch through the ears.
That would lead you to think that he was dead, right? But nooo. He keeps talking! He says something like "You'll never succeed!" or "You're doomed!" and then... and then... his head explodes! Seriously! BOOM! A shower of pyrotechnics and fake-looking head chunks. This was one of the simulatneously stupidest and funniest things I have ever seen. I laughed so hard, while constantly exclaiming "WHAT THE HELL?" Actually, come to think of it, that kind of sums up the whole movie.
There's more, though. After they get done beating up the horde of ninja, there's still the matter of the duel. The Japanese guy wants to fight. The Chinese guy doesn't - he just wants to take his injured Shaolin monk master back to the monastery. So the Japanese guy cements his image as an asshole by cutting down the monk from behind, killing him and invoking the traditional Chinese "You killed my master, now I must get revenge" ire.
At last the "Duel to the Death" advertised in the movie title! After a quick change of scene (because an open field isn't dramatic enough for a final fight scene, they had to move to a sea cliff), Japanese guy draws his katana, Chinese guy draws his Tai Chi sword, and they go at it! Stabbing, slashing, jumping in the air... hanging from their very obvious wires. Seriously, the wires are SO obvious that you keep expecting one of the guys to cut the other guy's wires and send him plummeting to his death. I can honestly say that with all the martial arts movies I've watched, this was the first one with obvious wires.
Amazingly, a few people who I've told about this movie now actually want to see it. I guess they can't believe that a movie could really be that bad. Or they want to see the kite-ninja in action. I will warn you that if you choose to watch it, it will be an hour and a half of your life that you NEVER get back. About the only thing you'll take from it is the desire to say "Buddha be praised!" next time you see a naked woman.
If you're looking for a Chinese/Japanese crossover type movie, you'll be much better off with "Deadend of Besiegers." While not a great movie, the martial arts scenes were much better, the characters were more likable, and the Japanese character is not an asshole (although he's still played by a Chinese actor). It also has pirates instead of ninja!
And then, on the other hand, there was "The Avenging Fist" which I saw towards the end of the month. When I read the description, I asked my husband "Why did you rent this?" It sounded like a stupid, bad sci-fi/martial arts blend, and that's exactly what it was. It turns out that he rented it because it had two of our favorites (Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao) in it, but even these two martial arts greats, combined with younger Chinese pretty-boys, couldn't save this movie.
I won't go into as much detail on this as I did on "Duel to the Death," mainly because I have several other columns to write this month. However, I will point out that "The Avenging Fist" feels like some sort of video game or comic book adaptation, possibly because it's brought to us by the same man who did "StormRiders" and "A Man Called Hero" (both based on Chinese comic books). This movie is however, inferior to those two movies. "StormRiders" was an awesome, crazy, really long movie with cute young Chinese guys with weird colored hair beating the crap out of everything. "A Man Called Hero" was also a pretty cool movie, although the disk that I got was broken so we never got to see the last 10 minutes.
The fight scenes in "The Avenging Fist" are OK, but mostly full of bad special effects. Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung are both wasted on small parts. Sammo spends the entire movie wearing a really stupid looking silver fedora, for Pete's sake! And the two main male characters, going by the names of Nova and Iron Surfer, look like a couple of rejected Final Fantasy character concepts. Iron Surfer even spends the entire movie wearing a pair of yellow goggles on his forehead. For the last 10 minutes of the movie, my husband kept saying "I want to see him wear his goggles!"
Then there's the main female character, Belle, who can burn people. This would be TOTALLY AWESOME if she could do martial arts, but she can't. Occasionally she burns someone, but she spends most of the movie knocked out or kidnaped or otherwise in some sort of typical feminine peril. The secondary female character isn't even worth mentioning, she's mostly there to look cute and give Nova someone to love.
Then there's the villain, some crazy Chinese guy in a Nazi-esque costume. The amusing thing is that since all of the names are translated from Chinese, his name is "Combat 21". Now, I'm sure that this name sounds really cool and villainous in Chinese, but in the subtitles it just looks silly. At first, I thought Combat 21 was some organization or military division, but then I discovered it was actually one crazy man.
My main pet peeve with this movie, besides the fact that it was kind of boring and sucky all around, was that it's built around the erroneous belief that human beings only use 10% of their brain. For more information on this myth, see http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percnt.htm . Considering the fact that the movie's super psychic powers are all based on this myth, it was kind of lame. On the other hand, I did think it was cool that the movie was recent enough to mention the completion of the Human Genome project and use that research as the basis for some of the scientific advancements in the movie.
Nonetheless, I really can't recommend the movie. The martial arts are sub-par, the acting is fine, but the story is downright silly.
However, you really SHOULD watch Kung Fu Hustle... but that's the topic of my OTHER review :)
|