Legend Of The Fist: The Return Of Chen Zhen
Andrew Lau
The story: In turbulent 1920s Shanghai, Qi Tianyuan, a wealthy entrepreneur, emerges out of nowhere and soon becomes a partner in the city’s hottest nightspot, Casablanca. He is none other than the legendary fighter Chen Zhen (Donnie Yen) under an assumed identity. Chen was presumed dead after he avenged his mentor’s death by wiping out the members of a Japanese dojo (training school) several years ago. This time he is part of the anti-Japanese resistance movement.
Donnie Yen is a highly skilled martial arts exponent who plays a key role in a patriotic movement. Is this: (a) Ip Man (2008), (b) Bodyguards And Assassins (2009) or (c) Legend Of The Fist: The Return Of Chen Zhen?
The answer is: all of the above.
The characters’ names and the specifics of the plot change, but it sometimes seems that Yen just keeps playing variations of the same role.
He has even played Chen before, in the 1995 Hong Kong television series Fist Of Fury. And, yes, the title is the same as the seminal big-screen Fist Of Fury (1972), in which action superstar Bruce Lee played Chen.
It explains why, in the big showdown, Yen suddenly emulates Lee’s yelps and whelps as he dispatches an entire school of Japanese martial arts students. But the homage is clumsily handled and it skirts close to parody instead.
Yen is not the only one repeating himself in this film. The languorously sexy Shu Qi played a smoky-eyed nightclub singer in Blood Brothers (2007) and gets a chance to be slinky on stage here again.
The fact that roles echo one another would not be a problem if they were memorable and well-crafted. Unfortunately, this is not the case here.
This is both the fault of Gordon Chan’s patchy script and director Andew Lau, who co-directed the masterful thriller Infernal Affairs (2002). Here, he flounders. He does not have a firm grasp of the tone, which lurches from overly dramatic to unintentionally funny.
The swelling music score at key moments feels intrusive, the injection of comic relief with Huang Bo as a bumbling cop feels out of place and Chen turning into a one-man Nazi killing machine in the opening sequence set in France during World War I is just too much to take. Oh, and later in Shanghai, he randomly ends up as a masked crusader.
What is also objectionable is the push-button jingoism that film-makers reach for in film after film from Ip Man to True Legend (2010). If you want a movie about Japanese villainy in China, watch Lu Chuan’s harrowing City Of Life And Death (2009) instead.
Given the expectations one has of a Donnie Yen movie, perhaps the most glaring misstep in Legend Of The Fist is that the final fight is an anticlimactic affair.
Martial arts fans need not fret. With at least six more action flicks in the pipeline, they will not have to wait long for the return of Donnie Yen.
(ST)