Friday Night Fu Review: Fearless

Fearless ★★★★½ 

Though he disappointed me awhile back with The One, I decided to give Jet Li another chance. He'd never let me down before, after all. I needed to wash the lingering taste of 2001 out of my mouth and move on.

Fearless (2006) was a palate cleanser of the best ilk. It was directed by Ronny Yu, but I was convinced it had to be Wilson Yip's work. Yip directed 2008's artful Ip Man and its even more artful sequel, and that franchise and Fearless are reminiscent of each other in multiple ways. Both are historical Chinese biopics, but the similarities go far beyond that. I wouldn't say Ip Man is derivative, but I'd be surprised if Yip hadn't been influenced by Fearless.

But on to the story. Fearless is the dramatized biography of Huo Yuanjia, a real-life Chinese Wushu Master. He starts the story as a charmingly feckless, bullied child, maturing into a kick-ass fighter, young widower, and father, whose cockiness and party-boy habits lead him to great trouble and tragedy, in the form of his remaining family being slain in revenge for his careless disrespect toward another local Master. Nice character arc from invincible to reckless to ruined to reborn and redeemed.

Oh, Tanaka… sigh.

There's also a great thread involving Yuanjia's lifelong best friend, a businessman who stands by him through his terrible mistakes and ultimately funds his participation in some exciting bouts against various non-Chinese challengers (much encroaching colonialism, though not as demonized as that in Ip Man). There's also a nice little understated romantic subplot involving the charming actress, Betty Sun. The villains in this story were handled exceedingly well—very human, unlike Ip Man 2's monstrous but cartoonish Mr. Twister. So, the movie was already great…then add to it the special bonus called Shidô Nakamura, a Japanese kabuki actor and major fox who played the highly thrustable anti-villain of the final showdown fight, Tanaka. Unh. Unh on you and your most honorable sword, Tanaka.

So, I highly recommend Fearless. Oh crap, and I haven't even mentioned the actual fighting, which was tremendous. It's hard to find a truly original fight scene in the Kung Fu genre, in choreography or setting, but this film had some real gems. But the best thing of all was that the fighting and the story and the execution of the film were all equally strong. If Ong Bak hadn't set the bar so didonkulously high for this feature, Fearless would've been a five-star Kung Fu flick for me. Here's one of its many kick-ass fight scenes…I normally don't care much for weapons, but whoever did the sword choreography for this film was nuts. So good. Go find the whole movie on Instant Watcher.

Friday Night Fu Review: Ip Man 2

Ip Man 2 ★★★★ 

This is one of those rare cases when the sequel surpasses the original. I didn't actually do a formal review of Ip Man, but it was a good movie. Beautifully filmed and choreographed and starring the super talented Donnie Yen, and yet…it didn't light me on fire. Certainly not the way Ong-Bak did. In my opinion, it was lacking a certain amount of charisma and fun, though there's no doubt is was a solid Kung Fu film.

Ip Man 2 (葉問2:宗師傳奇, 2010) on the other hand, was really exciting. Both films are biographical, telling the story of Ip Man, founder and Grandmaster of the Wing Chun style of Kung Fu, and Bruce Lee's mentor (though Bruce doesn't turn up until the very end of the sequel, in an obnoxious bit of heavy-handed foreshadowing). The second film follows Ip Man's struggles to start his own Kung Fu school in 1950, in the wake of the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong depicted in the first installment. Ip Man is opposed by a bullish collective of established masters in the area, and must win their respect and acceptance if he's to realize his calling and provide for his vulnerable family.

Xiaoming, you are getting

so thrusted on next week…

Amid all this drama, colonial tension is also brewing. The British are causing unrest in Hong Kong with their blustering imperialism, and this manifests itself in the form of Mister Twister. Twister is an über-thug English boxer (played by Mancunian martial artist Darren Shahlavi) who scoffs at Kung Fu and its pint-sized practitioners. Of course this unites the city's schools, and Ip Man has the chance to prove himself a true and worthy master if he can rise to challenge the British brute and avenge the Chinese fighters who have been injured and even killed in the ring.

I thought this movie was really solid, and far more fun than its predecessor. It loses a star for the hyper-precocious Bruce Lee reveal (which could have been so much cooler if handled with a wink instead of a sledge hammer), and some unnecessarily over-the-top Crouching-Tiger-style stunts, which felt out of place in an otherwise passably realistic biopic. But it gets a solid four stars from me, especially since it's got Huang Xiaoming, who is a FOX!

Here's the kick-ass trailer:

Thrusty Thursday: Darren Shahlavi

Think of Darren Shahlavi as Zachary Quinto on steroids. Not to say that the Iranian-English martial artist / actor's physique comes from anything other than hard work, as far as I'm aware. But those eyebrows, that subtly evil glint in the squinty eye…a more feral, jacked, hairy-chested Quinto. Definitely.

I know Shahlavi solely from the 2010 film Ip Man 2 (which I'll be reviewing next week) a sequel that surpassed its equally beautiful but less exciting predecessor. Shahlavi plays a thoroughly hateable "foreign devil", an English prize fighter who bullies, mocks, and grievously injures the local Kung Fu practitioners of Hong Kong in this movie set in 1950. Colonial tension, you can has!

Shahlavi was born in Manchester, England in 1972, and he's been training in a variety of martial arts since he was seven. He's been a gazillion and one movies of varying quality, most of them martial arts related. Without further ado, a man-tage from the film: