Xanda

Xanda is the story of Qiang (Weilin Sang), a countryside kung fu master who moves to a big city to pursue his dreams. There he gets introduced to Xanda, or Sanda as it is more popularly known, a modern Chinese fighting style developed in the early 1900s. And of course he gets pulled in and eventually gets a shot at the crown title match.

What this film lacks is a red thread running throughout it all. Its story is hard to follow and is generally all over the place. At first we don't even know which characters are alive and which are not because the film keeps jumping back and forth in time so much. Eventually we figure out that this character is supposed to be dead and because of that this character acts the way they do, but it's much too little much too late.

It's also very... Rocky Balboa -ish. Like, this whole film is basically Rocky I in modern China. It's not quite beat for beat, but it's uncomfortably close. Sure, the Rocky film are the quintessential boxing films, but you still can't copy them quite this blatantly and not expect to be called out on it.

All that being said, this film had its moments, mostly whenever it didn't try to be a martial arts sports film.