LEGEND OF THE FIST: THE RETURN OF CHEN ZHEN
Directed by Andrew Lau
Produced by Gordon Chan & Lau
Written by Gordon Chan, Cheung Chi Sing, Lui Koon Nam & Frankie Tam
Released by Well Go USA/Variance Films
English, Mandarin & Cantonese with English subtitles
Hong Kong/China. 106 min. Not rated
With Donnie Yen, Shu Qi, Anthony Wong, Huang Bo, Kohata Ryuichi, Shawn Yue & Ma Yue
 

When future archaeologists ponder the decline of America and the rise of China, they will just need to find a DVD player—if they’re still around—and pop in a Donnie Yen movie. A huge star in Hong Kong, Yen is best known for Chinese kung fu movies with a nationalist bent, like the great Ip Man (the only indispensable modern martial arts movies), the much less great Ip Man 2, and the turgid and barely watchable Bodyguards and Assassins. His brand of xenophobic brawlers show a country almost hysterically obsessed with past humiliations at the hands of foreign powers. But they’re also so unabashedly, gosh-darn patriotic they almost make you wish you were part of a country so uncritically sure of itself.

A sort of sequel to the 1972 Bruce Lee film Fist of Fury (which launched a spinoff ’90s TV show that starred Yen), Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen is essentially a kung fu Casablanca—right down to the scene at a club where an imperialist song is drowned out, heroically, by a British tune. Legend begins with superhero martial arts master Zhen (Yen) returning to Shanghai from fighting in World War I, only to see his country abandoned by its erstwhile allies and brought low by the Japanese, who are staging an invasion in slow motion. The demoralized, divided country is crawling with imperialist agents, led by Colonel Takeshi Chikaraishi (Kohata Ryuichi), a man of Darth Vader-levels of wickedness who thinks nothing of killing his own men when they fail him. By day Zhen works as a club manger for Liu Yutian (Anthony Wong), a cynical but patriotic tycoon who runs a club named—what else?—Casablanca. By night, Zhen dons an outfit that looks like the one Kato wore in The Green Hornet and fights the Japanese. The get-up is a nod, of course, to Lee. There are others, too, designed to please genre fans, like Zhen’s caterwauling yowls and some nunchuck combat at the end.

True to its roots, Legend has its doomed love affair, between Zhen and Kiki (Shu Qi), a hostess and singer at the club, whose loyalties are divided between the patriots and the invaders. By love affair, I mean Zhen promises not to kill her, which is about all you can expect from this guy. Yen is an amazing athlete, of course, and a charismatic screen presence, and Qi is as pretty as a doll. But Bogart and Bergman they ain’t.

Part of Legend’s problem is that nothing really lives up to the gonzo opening scene, where an unarmed Zhen single-handedly takes out an entire squad of German soldiers. You’d think the WWI setting would clash with the wire fu fighting nonsense, but it’s actually pretty amazing. It put a big dumb smile on my face that only started to fade once the plot set its creaky joints into motion. In fairness, the movie hearkens back to another period of cinema. It throws everything at you and hopes something sticks: national politics, fight scenes, song and dance numbers, romance, and cheesy special effects.

It’s directed with yeoman-like competence by Andrew Lau. His Infernal Affairs (better known through its American remake, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed) left me cold. He filmed it like a hyperactive kid who forgot his Ritalin; the camera never kept still. But here he reins it in, and the fights—choreographed by Yen—are excellent, although nothing you haven’t seen before. But a good cook puts a personal touch on a favorite recipe; he doesn’t throw it out. So you should expect that at the “boss fight,” Chen Zhen can only win after he gets his second wind, and in deference to the chivalry of the audience, an ethically questionable female must be dispatched by someone else—so Zhen doesn’t have to dirty his hands beating up a woman.

Luckily for us, those hands are largely shown doing what they do best, smacking down thugs in a graceful, almost delicate flurry of rapid blows. In his movies, Yen has become famous for scenes where he takes down roomfuls of combatants with the poise and precision of a dancer. Legend has one such brawl, a rain-soaked melee where Yen attempts to rescue a Chinese general from Japanese assassins, that’s for the ages.

Timing is everything, though. Legend was released last year in China, but it couldn’t come at a worse moment here. As I write, workers are still trying to contain a radioactive leak at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, damaged during last month’s earthquake. Thousands of people remain missing. I can’t imagine audiences will have much stomach for cheering Japanese deaths. Brendon Nafziger
April 29, 2011