John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

Killer’s killer John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is still attempting to somehow defeat the killer cult hierarchy known as the High Table, after begging for his life didn’t really work out for him in the third movie. Because he’s murdering goons and higher-ups like nobody’s business, the new Marquis (Bill Skarsgård) is trying to get rid of him with particular enthusiasm (and while speaking with a dubious accent that’s apparently meant to be French). This guy’s even less subtle than his predecessors, so destroying Winston’s (Ian McShane) hotel because he didn’t betray John well enough in the last film, and murdering Charon (Lance Reddick, who will be missed in real life around here) is only the beginning of what will turn out to be sending yet more hordes of goons after John.

Goons, as well as John’s old friend, the blind assassin Caine (Donnie Yen), in what is probably supposed to be an attempt at psychological warfare. John for his part might just stumble upon a plan of his own. Don’t worry, it involves the only thing he’s really good at.

I was really nonplussed with the pointless circle jerk plot of the third John Wick, and didn’t particularly enjoy most of the action in it either, so I didn’t go into Chad Stahelski’s sequel expecting much of anything from it. My low expectations were considerably exceeded, and this very long, probably final for now, part of the franchise turned out to be very good fun for me. Even its rather excessive length doesn’t really keep this one down: while it might be cut by fifteen, twenty minutes, for most of the time, the epic length of any given action set piece in here is rather the aesthetic point.

For this is a movie that’s burning to make you see every single moment of choreography, every movement stuntmen make, every improvement the effects crew makes to their imperfect humanity, so it’s showing you all of it, not caring one whit if the audience becomes as exhausted as our protagonist. Camerawork and editing often feel genuinely influenced by arthouse cinema of the Slow Cinema style, Stahelski finding a nice angle and then slowly panning through the action, or rising towards the ceiling – in this case probably not to say something philosophical about the nature of humanity but to show off as much as possible in what I’m tempted to call Slow Maximalism. In many of the set pieces, the feeling of physical forward momentum comes exclusively from what stunt people and actors and post-production achieve. The camera’s just there to watch. That this works out for the film as well as it does is a compliment to everyone involved in these departments, and that Stahelski makes it work demonstrates an astonishing absence of directorial ego (which in this context may have something to do with his roots in stunt work).

At this point, the series has also become adept at filming around  Keanu’s specific weaknesses as a screen fighter, and often make him look as good as the earlier films in the series said he is.

Otherwise, this has some of the most fun archetypes of the series. The great Donnie Yen’s joyfully played morally complicated blind assassin is the obvious stand-out here, but Rina Sawayama makes a much better action heroine than you’d expect from a pop star, and Shamier Anderson’s backpacking tourist-styled tracker with a dog is also simply fun to watch interacting with the rest of the cast.

Add to this the film’s moments of genuine weirdness – like Scott Adkins in a fat suit as a German gangster who gets it in pretty bizarre nightclub fight – and it’s pretty difficult to resist the charms of John Wick, Chapter 4.

Iron Monkey (1993)

aka Iron Monkey: The Young Wong Fei Hung

Original title: 少年黃飛鴻之鐵馬騮

A provincial town in Northern China is hard-pressed by the shenanigans of corrupt officials – turns out nine concubines get costly on a governor’s salary – whose corruption does of course trickle down to potentially okay but weak men like the local captain of the guard Master Fox (Yuen Shun-Yi). As the film tells it, corruption is absolutely endemic in China at this point, too, so there’s no higher authority to apply to for recourse.

A masked kung fu master calling himself the Iron Monkey (Yu Rong-Guang) is doing his best with a bad business, and spends his nights stealing from the corrupt – and therefore rich – and giving to those in need in a thoughtful and effective manner that avoids what British highwayman/philosopher Dennis Moore would call the “lupine problem”. By day, Iron Monkey is actually local doctor Yang, who applies the same principles in his medical work, assisted by his kung fu disciple, nurse and friend, the former prostitute Miss Orchid (Jean Wang Ching-Ying). Things become rather more difficult for our hero when a former shaolin disciple and doctor arrives in town. Wong Kei-Ying (Donnie Yen) does of course come with his son – and martial arts disciple – Wong Fei-Hung (Angie Tsang Sze-Man, who is a little wonder here, in one of their only two movies), and finds himself pressed into service against Iron Monkey, with his son taken as a hostage.

Further complicating things is the arrival of a group of royal investigators. These charming people are even more vile and corrupt than our cartoon evil governor (James Wong Jim), for they are parts of the traitors responsible for the burning of the shaolin temple, and therefore corrupt, murdering rapists who also happen to be really great at kung fu.

Even though it may sound like it, Yuen Woo-Ping’s Iron Monkey is not a plot-heavy film. As it befits one of the comparatively small number of films (though some of those films were rather important for the development of the genre) directed by one of the greatest and most influential martial arts choreographers, every bit as important as his compatriots Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan for the post-Shaw Brothers style of kung fu movie, this is a film very much all about the martial arts fights. There’s some humour and character work outside of these scenes, because Yuen clearly understands you need some of that to give your fights emotional resonance beyond the “that’s awesome!”, and it’s more than enough to hang a film on.

Or at least it is when you belong to Iron Monkey’s assumed audience and understand much of the characters’ backgrounds and motivations through other stories about them, other movies, martial arts folklore and popular history. When the burning of the Shaolin temple only leaves you to shrug helplessly and when seeing a young Wong Fei-Hung relate with his Dad and kicking ass leaves you cold and a little confused, this might not be the film for you. Rather, Yuen made this one with everyone knowledgeable or better steeped in this part of Chinese popular and folk culture in mind. As someone who isn’t an expert but has at least seen his share of martial arts and wuxia films taking place around and featuring some of these characters and these settings, the film gains a lot of emotional resonance, rather like a Marvel movie of the here and now does when you’ve seen everything else belonging to the universe.

That the martial arts sequences are absolutely fantastic, so fantastic I would even have been rather happy with the film without its resonance with other parts of martial arts culture, needs barely to be mentioned, I believe. Yuen drives his highly capable – in fights and in tear-jerking – cast through every type of martial arts fight imaginable, with quite a bit of the physical humour you’ve come to expect from this line of martial arts cinema and the also very typical imaginative use of props and gimmicks. The fights start out light and increase in bloodiness and brutality once the evil monks arrive. There’s little repetition of moves and staging, instead what feels like a never-ending dance of utmost elegance and precision filmed with a mind on keeping as much as possible of it visible to the audience while still keeping the camera part of the scene. It’s a joy and a wonder.

Three Films Make A Post: Like a sudden, terrifying scream… Suspense shatters the Screen!

Foreign Intrigue (1956): Well, suspense certainly didn’t shatter my screen when watching Robert Mitchum’s European vacation as directed by Sheldon Reynolds, what with the total absence of suspense from the film. This certainly wants to be a Hitchcockian or Third Man style type of film, showing Mitchum travelling all over Europe to find out the secret of his deceased employer, but in practice, this is way too comfy an affair for that. Mitchum strolls through Europe amiably, kissing the girls and sometimes punching the guys, but Sheldon never manages to build up much actual suspense. From time to time, the director hits on an atmospheric shot or two, but the script is never bothering with making the mystery Mitchum chases actually interesting, leading to a slow and comfy kind of Eastman Colour chase. For certain moods, there’s something to be said for a leisurely amble, of course, just don’t expect much of an actual movie going in.

Mulan (2020): Of course, there’s slow and kinda likeably boring like that old Mitchum vehicle, and then there’s this remake of the Disney animation based on the Chinese tale as directed by Niki Caro. It’s slow, lacking in charm and visual imagination and does nothing better, or even just as well, as even a proper Chinese, Taiwanese or Hong Kong wuxia from the third line of that genre (let’s not even speak of the good ones), wasting Donnie Yen, Gong Li, Jet Li, and so on and so forth on things they could do in their sleep.

This is also a good example that simply throwing money at your blockbuster doesn’t necessarily make it watchable. Even in the highly commercial arena of the big loud film for international audiences, you need creative vision. If you don’t have that, you get a very loud version of what my brain does when my feet are falling asleep, or, as Disney called it, Mulan.

Congo (1995): Let’s not end this trilogy of films of dubious quality on a positive note this time around. Instead, let’s talk about Frank Marshall’s supposed love letter to the classic adventure movie and its serial siblings based on the insufferable Michael Crichton. It’s got a talking ape in it, and I’m half convinced it was also written by one (sorry to all talented writing gorillas out there). What it doesn’t have is dramatic tension, a script that’s more than a long string of nonsense, action sequences worth their name, or any enjoyment factor. I do appreciate that somebody involved in the production at some point (this is one of those films with a million script versions by dozens of writers, none of whom is in the credits, because US unions are weird about crediting the people doing the actual work) tried to update some classic adventure tropes, giving us Ernie Hudson as a tough and at least semi-competent leader, and Laura Linney getting to be a two-fisted adventurer.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film is still terrible, featuring mawkish sentimentality next to badly staged action sequences and dialogue I can only ascribe to a gorilla.

Past Misdeeds: Wu Xia (2011)

aka Swordsmen

aka Dragon

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


China, 1917. Liu Jin-Xi (Donnie Yen) lives a peaceful life with his wife Ah Yu (Tang Wei), her son from a first marriage Liu Fang-Zheng (Zheng Wei) and their son Liu Xiao-Tian (Li Jia-Min) in a country town, working in a paper mill. Shadows of a different man Liu Jin-Xi once was begin to emerge when two martial artist villains try to rob the mill.

Liu Xiao-Tian kills the men in what on first look seems like a series of exceedingly lucky accidents, making him the hero of the village. But Xu Bai-Jiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), the detective investigating the villains' death, has his doubts regarding Xiao-Tian. How, after all, should one hapless butcher's son be able to "accidentally" kill two of the meanest martial artists around? Some of the physical evidence Xu Bai-Jiu finds tells a different story, too, and the detective is soon convinced Xiao-Tian must be a masterful martial artist and experienced killer who is just using this identity to hide himself from the law.

Even though Xiao-Tian must be a changed man from whoever he was before, Xu Bai-Jiu can't help himself but go after him, sniffing and asking questions and even accommodating himself at Xiao-Tian's place. Xu Bai-Jiu's own past has him convinced that his natural tendency to compassion is a weakness before the spirit of the law that needs to be purged, so he treats his sense of empathy as an illness that keeps him unable to practice the martial arts; not surprisingly, he also doesn't believe a man can ever truly change, so Xiao-Tian becomes an obsession and a riddle for him to solve.

Xu Bai-Jiu's investigation has other consequences than those he intends, too, for once it has reached a certain point, the people that made Xiao-Tian the man he once was (Jimmy Wang Yu! Kara Hui!) learn where their old friend now is, and they very much want him back, not realizing that some men do in fact change.

Peter Chan Hoh-San's Wu Xia is one those films from Hong Kong that makes me doubt the truth of the old-fartish refrain of "things in Hong Kong cinema are just so bad now" I and many other long-time fans of the city's cinematic output have been singing for about a decade now, for how bad can a regional cinema truly be if it still can produce fantastic movies like this?

In time-honoured fashion, Wu Xia mixes elements of the mystery genre with elements of the wuxia (a real surprise given its title, surely), to form a meditation on the possibility of change in people, the usefulness of suppressing impulses, and even the old question about nature and nurture that may remind some of Cronenberg's A History of Violence, just with the difference that Chan's film - unlike that of the Canadian - is not a comedy. (To digress for a parenthesis, yes, I am that weird guy who really thinks Cronenberg's film is not just a black comedy, but is also meant to be one rather than as the bloody drama most viewers seem to see when watching it; I'll only point at the nature of the sexual role-play between Mortensen and Bello as an obvious hint at that film's true nature.)

Unlike Mortensen's Tom Stall, though, Xiao-Tian isn't only truly alive when he is a monster, and his family life with Ah Yu and the children never has the feeling of somebody going through trained motions without any actual emotions; Xiao-Tian may have only locked away the monstrous parts of himself, but what's left is not an automaton, but an actual human being.

The movie's first two thirds are in large parts about exploring its two male main characters (with Tang Wei getting a handful of scenes that flesh her out as a character more than I would have expected from a film with this set-up and structure - it sure helps how much the actress is able to express with just a few looks) as mirror images of each other: Xiao-Tian as a man who has locked away everything destructive and monstrous about himself to become a human being, and Xu Bai-Jiu who has locked away his most human traits - compassion and empathy - to become a better agent of the Law. The former is a man who will not use his martial arts abilities because they are so closely connected to his worst nature, the latter unable to use his because his best nature cost him his abilities. I can't imagine what the Chinese censor thought about the film's treatment of compassion and the Law, especially since the film treats Xu Bai-Jiu as being in the wrong with his priorities; it's nice to still find Hong Kong films that dare to argue for humanist values being more important than the jackboot. Interestingly, the film also seems to express that it's easier to suppress one's worst impulses than one's best. Of course, both of Wu Xia's main characters will have to accept parts of what they've kept closed up to become fully functional human beings, possibly even heroes.

I was a bit surprised by how well Donnie Yen is able to sell his character's complexities. I do of course love the man and his generally motionless or scowling face, but he always has been a better martial arts actor than an actor, and this is a film that needs him to express himself outside of fight scenes quite a bit. Yen is still using more body language and posture than facial expression (though he has developed a surprisingly pleasant ability to smile over the years), but he is doing that very well, selling the inner changes his character goes through without having to talk about them.


The well handled philosophical discourse alone would be more than enough to recommend Wu Xia, but there is so much more to love here: there are the fantastic fight scenes - of course choreographed by Yen - that dominate the film's final third; Chan's curious yet effective decision to treat Chinese village life of the early 20th century as a peculiar mixture of naturalism and bucolic idyll and still have martial arts be more than a little magical instead of "realistic"; the relatively small but important roles of Jimmy Wang Yu and Kara Hui who feature in the film's two most intense fight scenes; the way the film uses Kaneshiro's traditional Chinese science and medicine as the base for some CSI-inspired scenes and makes that work too without things becoming ridiculous; how Chan's direction handles action, near-mythical dramatic family conflicts, human-level emotions and moments of peace with the same assured sense of rhythm and pacing as well as a deep understanding of their importance. In Wu Xia, it's all good.

On WTF: Wu Xia (2011)

aka Swordsmen

aka Dragon

From time to time, Hong Kong cinema still produces films to delight even the most jaded of viewers. Case in point is Peter Chan's wonderful, complex and exciting Wu Xia, a film that plays fast and loose with genre tropes, discusses philosophy and still finds time for some inspired action scenes where Donnie Yen can strut his stuff.

Read more excited rambling about the film in my column on WTF-Film!

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,reviews,wuxia,peter chan hoh-san,donnie yen,takeshi kaneshiro,tang wei,jimmy wang yu,kara hui,other places

In short: Satan Returns (1996)

Original title: 666 Mo Gwai Fuk Wut

aka Devil 666

aka Satan's Return

aka Shaolin vs. The Devil's Omen

Hong Kong, 1996. A guy and host of a demonic entity subtly named Judas (Francis Ng) is desperately looking for Satan's daughter. He only knows that she must have been born on the 6th of June 1969, so he wanders around the city, "testing" the devilishness of women with the appropriate birthdate by cutting their hearts out. Satan's daughter, you see, would live on without one.

Fortunately, even the HK movie police realizes that the killings are the work of a serial killer, so they put the homicidal cop Nam (Donny Yen) and his band of incompetents on the case. Because she has grown up as an orphan under the tutelage of the Catholic church, internal affairs officer Chan Shou-Ching (Chingmy Yau) who was just starting an investigation into the dubious human rights record of Nam, is helping out on the case, which turns out to be especially useful when Judas activities begin to concentrate on her.

During the course of the investigation, Chan starts to suffer first from oh-so-mysterious nightmares, then from personality changes, and then begins to have little chats with the off-screen voice of Satan, who seems quite positive that she's his daughter and will soon awaken to her heritage. And he just might be right.

What happens to Chan does of course mean that the whole murder series the film's plot is based on makes no sense at all, and that all Satan's forces would need to do to win the day would be to just wait until their big daddy's daughter comes into her own, but what can you expect from a script written by Wong Jing? "Written" seems like a very strong word for this thing anyway. I suspect that the scriptwriting process consisted of Wong Jing taking the scripts of Seven and one or two of the movie's rip-offs, and those of a few Omen-style horror films, ripping out random pages, throwing them in the air and then randomly stacking them together again, adding scribbles like "add Donnie Yen's showcase #1 fight here", "add tit joke #353 here" and "needs more incompetence". On the positive side, he forgot to add his trademark rape jokes.

So yes, Satan Returns is hardly what one would call coherent (or, if one has a grumpy day "a movie"), but just a random conglomeration of crap that just happened to land in the same script and then got directed with distractible nervousness by a directorial non-entity named Lam Wai-Lun (who seems pretty excellent at self-sabotage and even manages to ruin Yen's two and a half theoretically awesome fight scenes by more obfuscating than staging them).

Fortunately for my mood, some of the crap the film consists of is pretty funny - I always love the HK interpretations of Christian theology - and/or so merrily insane that it's impossible to argue with the film's will to entertain. I mean, how many serial killer/satanist movies are there in which one of the cop's plans fails because they're distracted from watching a colleague playing decoy by the aftereffects of painful flirting attempts over the decoy's hidden microphone and the following shouting match with a colleague (I said these people are incompetent, right?). Plus, the grand finale has Donnie Yen crucifying the enthusiastically scenery-chewing Francis Ng. And if that's not a reason to watch a movie, I don't know what is.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,horror,action,chingmy yau,donnie yen,francis ng,wong jing