Yuen Woo-Ping's rabidly fun and cameo-packed wuxia opens with a note informing viewers that the setting is China, 1861: "It is a turbulent time." When you have a villain with armor scales grown into his skin and a hero who trains with invisible gods in a drunken stupor, yes, it's safe to say that things are turbulent. This turns out to be good for the audience, less so for many of the people on-screen.
The film certainly starts out turbulently, with a pair of shaven-headed brothers -- Su Can (Vincent Zhao) and Yuan (Andy On) -- fighting with an army which is trying to rescue a prince from, well, some bad guys in red. After a nighttime battle involving lots of flipping in the air off of rope bridges and precarious ledges, the triumphant brothers go their separate ways. The humble Su Can goes back home to study his wuxia and become a master, while the reckless and prideful Yuan is made a governor.
Cut to five years later, and Yuan shows up at Su Can's dwelling to prove his villainous bona fides. He's only Su Can's half-brother, you see, and Yuan's never gotten over the fact that not only did Su Can's father kill his father for his evil ways before adopting Yuan, but that Su Can later married Yuan's sister, Ying (Xun Zhou). Yuan proves difficult to beat, as he has apparently perfected his dad's dreaded "Five Venom Fists" move (his hands can exude a toxic smoke and inject blackening poison into an opponent's body). Also, in a novel twist, Yuan has crafted a unique body of armor, with metal scales grown right into his skin that bounce an enraged Su Can's fists off as though they were made of rubber. After a confrontation by a raging river in which Yuan kills several of his own men out of sheer annoyance, Su Can and Ying escape but without their little boy, who is kidnapped by Yuan.
The middle part of True Legend is in some ways its most interesting. Although initially the standard martial-arts retaining sequence where the hero readies himself for the final confrontation with his seemingly unbeatable nemesis, it turns more inward and relationship-focused. Su Can dives into drink and self-doubt. His training, such as it is, involves battling a martial-arts god (played with serene humor by Jay Chou from The Green Hornet) who might actually exist only in his imagination. Su Can and Ying's time on their remote mountain top drags a bit, but all that is forgotten once it's time for Su Can to face down Yuan.
True Legend isn't the sort of thing that will appeal to many outside of the core martial-arts audience. The plot is too arbitrarily sketched-out for many to follow, the bone-crunching nature of its sleek fight choreography might be wearying for the non-aficionados, and Su Can and Ying's kid is just plain whiny. However, this remains one of the best wuxia films to receive a decent American release in years. Instead of the genre's standard look, glossy but sloppy, the gleaming, epic camerawork is mindful of recent Chinese costume epics. (Cinematographer Xiaoding Zhao is a longtime Zhang Yimou collaborator, shooting House of Flying Daggers and other lavish entertainments.) Director Yuen edits the film with a graphic novel punch, and studs his scenes with some sharply attuned, if too brief, cameos from Michelle Yeoh and David Carradine.
This is a film that could have used some more originality in a few key moments. Su Can's adoption of a drunken boxing style plays to many of the same punch lines that Jackie Chan made his own decades ago, and a climactic fight in a gambling den cribs from every other period wuxia that used decadent Europeans as its villains. Of course, it's hard to remember a fight scene where one man claws iron scales from another's chest as though he were skinning the bark off a tree. One tends to remember things like that.
aka Su Qi-Er
The film certainly starts out turbulently, with a pair of shaven-headed brothers -- Su Can (Vincent Zhao) and Yuan (Andy On) -- fighting with an army which is trying to rescue a prince from, well, some bad guys in red. After a nighttime battle involving lots of flipping in the air off of rope bridges and precarious ledges, the triumphant brothers go their separate ways. The humble Su Can goes back home to study his wuxia and become a master, while the reckless and prideful Yuan is made a governor.
Cut to five years later, and Yuan shows up at Su Can's dwelling to prove his villainous bona fides. He's only Su Can's half-brother, you see, and Yuan's never gotten over the fact that not only did Su Can's father kill his father for his evil ways before adopting Yuan, but that Su Can later married Yuan's sister, Ying (Xun Zhou). Yuan proves difficult to beat, as he has apparently perfected his dad's dreaded "Five Venom Fists" move (his hands can exude a toxic smoke and inject blackening poison into an opponent's body). Also, in a novel twist, Yuan has crafted a unique body of armor, with metal scales grown right into his skin that bounce an enraged Su Can's fists off as though they were made of rubber. After a confrontation by a raging river in which Yuan kills several of his own men out of sheer annoyance, Su Can and Ying escape but without their little boy, who is kidnapped by Yuan.
The middle part of True Legend is in some ways its most interesting. Although initially the standard martial-arts retaining sequence where the hero readies himself for the final confrontation with his seemingly unbeatable nemesis, it turns more inward and relationship-focused. Su Can dives into drink and self-doubt. His training, such as it is, involves battling a martial-arts god (played with serene humor by Jay Chou from The Green Hornet) who might actually exist only in his imagination. Su Can and Ying's time on their remote mountain top drags a bit, but all that is forgotten once it's time for Su Can to face down Yuan.
True Legend isn't the sort of thing that will appeal to many outside of the core martial-arts audience. The plot is too arbitrarily sketched-out for many to follow, the bone-crunching nature of its sleek fight choreography might be wearying for the non-aficionados, and Su Can and Ying's kid is just plain whiny. However, this remains one of the best wuxia films to receive a decent American release in years. Instead of the genre's standard look, glossy but sloppy, the gleaming, epic camerawork is mindful of recent Chinese costume epics. (Cinematographer Xiaoding Zhao is a longtime Zhang Yimou collaborator, shooting House of Flying Daggers and other lavish entertainments.) Director Yuen edits the film with a graphic novel punch, and studs his scenes with some sharply attuned, if too brief, cameos from Michelle Yeoh and David Carradine.
This is a film that could have used some more originality in a few key moments. Su Can's adoption of a drunken boxing style plays to many of the same punch lines that Jackie Chan made his own decades ago, and a climactic fight in a gambling den cribs from every other period wuxia that used decadent Europeans as its villains. Of course, it's hard to remember a fight scene where one man claws iron scales from another's chest as though he were skinning the bark off a tree. One tends to remember things like that.
aka Su Qi-Er
