1970s kung fu movies have never exactly been known for outstanding (or comprehensible) plot. So, if you're anything like me, you were expecting this movie to be like the rest of Jackie Chan's early career: silly, unrealistic, and largely nonsensical, but fun nevertheless just because of Jackie's sheer force of personality. And, of course, his incredible stunts and fight scenes.
Unfortunately, New Fist of Fury fails even to meet that modest standard. The entire first half of the movie is apparently dedicated to the development of the plot. Bad move on the filmmakers' part. A kung fu movie is about kung fu, not lots of boring... *talking*. Jackie doesn't even start to learn kung fu until the movie is nearly over, for pity's sake! This would be forgivable, I guess, if the resulting plot were at all interesting. No such luck. Besides which, most of it simply becomes irrelevant by the second half of the movie, when everything hinges around a straightforward martial-arts-school showdown. As for the ending... well, I don't want to give anything away, but let's just say it's incredibly abrupt and surprising. And not in a good way.
This isn't to say there aren't fight scenes. There are several of them pointlessly interspersed throughout the tedious plot development, and one big one at the end that *almost* makes the rest worthwhile. But when the fights do break out, even when Jackie is actually involved, this isn't the almost cartoonish, balletic violence we see in his other movies. Rather, it's fierce and bloody -- the actors in the final fight scenes chomp down fake blood capsules like M&Ms -- and seems to hinge around the frequent use of kicks to the groin. (The guys kicked in the groin, inexplicably, are all given lingering closeups.) The fight scenes are still incredibly cool, of course, but not worth sitting through two hours of cheesy dreck.
In brief, this movie is too ridiculous to work in terms of plot, and its fight scenes are too nasty and spaced-apart to redeem it.
A few particularly ridiculous things to look for, if you watch this movie anyhow:
1. The high-pitched whoops and screeches during the old kung fu teacher's speech. (I don't know if that was a loon being tortured to death, or the cries of agony from one of the groin-kick victims.) 2. The old kung fu teacher's leaping-and-shouting related death, and the fact that his body still stands there looking annoyed afterwards. 3. The Japanese army captain's dubbed-over voice. "Weaselly" is a vast understatement here. 4. Jackie's Fist of Fury technique -- described on the back of my VCR tape case as "a new and deadly art, never before revealed on the screen" -- which involves waving his arms up and down slowly during funky 70s hypno-music. Deadly indeed.
