aka Jing Wu Ying Xiong

• Directed by Gordon Chan and Woo-ping Yuen
• Written by Lan Kay Toa and Kwong Kim Yip
• Starring
  • Jet Li
  • Chin Siu-hou
  • Billy Chow
  • Yasuaki Kurata
  • Shinobu Nakayama
• Produced by Jet Li

I had all the wrong channels in my childhood, it seems. That’s not really hard; living in eastern Canada, I had exactly TWO channels — CBC (the government-sponsored slightly-more-commercial-than-PBS station) and CTV (which cobbled shows from all three American networks). Neither one was given to showing kung-fu movies Saturday afternoon. The upshot is that I never became a kung-fu fan.

Hey, they’re good movies and all, but I don’t have the from-the-cradle background that others do. Which is why my review of Fist of Legend will seem hopelessly basic to true Fu-philes.

What I do know of the background to this movie was garnered from other reviews (notably the one at Stomp Tokyo.) It’s a loose remake of Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury (released erroneously in the U.S. as The Chinese Connection — go to a bigger Fu-phile to get the titles explained to you), set in the 1930s when Imperial Japanese forces had invaded Shanghai.

One thing I would have noticed (even if Stomp Tokyo had not pointed it out) is that the filmmakers go to great lengths to avoid the “Japanese=evil” plot device that would have been so easy to fall into. (Into which it would have been so easy to fall? Whatever.) In fact, our establishing shot is in Kyoto, Japan in 1937, and the first people we see are Japanese students on a university campus, protesting the occupation.

Naturally, there are also rabid supporters of the Imperial troops, and a throng of these burst into a mechanical engineering class to pull out a single student: Chinese exchange student Chen Zhen (Jet Li). He’s a mild-mannered type, as most mechanical engineering students are, but the ruffians manage to draw him out by breaking the professor’s glasses and insulting his Japanese girlfriend Mitsuko. Open the first can of whoop-ass. (And if you don’t know the difference between whup-ass and whoop-ass, I wouldn’t be able to explain it to you.)

As the fighting breaks up, Mitsuko’s uncle Fumio makes his appearance. He’s the karate sensei to the hoodlums, but not much of an Imperialist himself; in fact, upon learning Chen’s identity, he apologizes both for the attack and for what he read in the paper that morning — that Chen’s own teacher, Master Hwa of Shanghai, had been killed in a bout with a Japanese fighter.

Stunned, Chen returns to Shanghai to the Jing Wu school. Things are in a shambles; Hwa’s son, Ting-en, is a nice enough guy and a good martial artist, but he’s not able to hold the place together. And speculations are running rampant that Hwa was somehow “compromised” before the fight — a speculation that Chen confirms by finding Hwa’s killer, Akutagawa, and defeating him without breaking a sweat. (Yes, that is the second can of whoop-ass.)

Chen manages to arrange a disinterment and autopsy of Hwa, proving he was poisoned before the fight. In the meantime, we the audience find out the secret: the poisoning had been ordered by the lantern-jawed mean-ass Japanese general to further demoralize the Chinese. And just to further his nefarious schemes, he kills Akutagawa effortlessly and returns his corpse to his own dojo, with a note pinned to his chest proclaiming that Chen had done him in.

Akutagawa’s cronies (the Noguchi clan, if you must know) come to Jing Wu looking for blood. With Chen out on a jog, they attack whoever they can find, which means the third can of whoop-ass is opened between the Jing-Wu’s and Noguchi’s, until Chen and the police arrive almost simultaneously, and Chen is taken into custody. All seems lost — until a sudden alibi shows up for Chen: Mitsuko enters the courtroom and proclaims that she and Chen had been, uh, otherwise occupied all night.

So the immediate crisis has been averted, but the tensions have been drawn:

• Ting-en feels inferior to Chen, as if his place in the school is being taken from him. (The fact that he’s in love with a prostitute secretly on the side isn’t helping.)
• The Jing-Wu’s aren’t going to accept Mitsuko, even though she essentially gave up her heritage to save Chen.
• The Noguchis still want to smush the Jing-Wu’s.
• The lantern-jawed general just wants to cause as much pain as he can in whoever he meets.

As you can imagine, it all plays out with another six-pack of whoop-ass being opened in all quarters. (A side note: A six-pack of whoop-ass is the preferred beverage to accompany half a loaf of kung-fu.) And I don’t think it’s any giveaway to say that the final kegger of whoop-ass is spilled between Chen and Lantern-Jaw, in a battle that tears up both combatants and most of the decor.

It’s a fine movie. Jet Li is in fine form, with minimal wirework and only subtle undercranking necessary to enhance his skills. (By the way, the scene that they show on the Blockbuster in-house TV show is the single most chop-socky one in the movie; I find that more than a little annoying.) And as approvingly noted, inter-character tension doesn’t run solely along the simplistic lines of national animosity.

But there are a couple of glaring flaws. The chop-socky bout is one, in which Mitsuko’s uncle Fumio tests Chen’s limits; the combat veers dangerously close to cartooniness, which deflates much of the tension that should be present two-thirds of the way through the movie. The other false step is the relationship between Ting-en and the prostitute, which never really contributes much, at least in the American version; I always suspect that problems of this sort are more the sins of the distributors than the producers. (And hey, she’s really nice to look at, so I shouldn’t complain.)

Naturally, we can’t wrap up the movie with a perfect happy ending, simply because it’s a matter of historical record that the Japanese occupation of Shanghai wasn’t ended by Jet Li’s whoop-ass. But it’s a movie with both a) great martial arts and b) a social conscience, which is more than most kung-fu flicks can boast.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0