Starring: Donnie Yen Chi-tan, Shu Qi, Anthony Wong Chau-sang, Huang Bo Director: Andrew Lau Wai-keung Category: IIB (Cantonese, Japanese and French)
The fists aren't nearly as furious as the simplistic anti-Japanese rhetoric in this lavish but puerile action saga.
From a technical standpoint, kung fu whiz Chen Zhen has come a long way since Bruce Lee created the fictional character in Fist of Fury (1972) and Jet Li donned the mantle in Fist of Legend (1994). But even the martial arts skills of Donnie Yen (who previously essayed Chen Zhen in ATV series Fist of Fury in 1995) is powerless when confronted with the facile dramatics and roster of one-dimensional stick figures brought to the screen by director-cinematographer Andrew Lau Wai-keung.
The major culprit is the scenario, a pastiche that imposes elements from the Bruce Lee picture with bits of his gig as Kato in American TV series The Green Hornet, incongruously centring the proceedings in a pseudo-Shanghai-style Rick's Cafe, appropriately named Casablanca. The ingredients aren't bad, but the recipe is heavy-handed in its xenophobia, choppy in the editing, and light in character development.
It's a disappointment coming from producer-co-scriptwriter Gordon Chan Kar-seung, whose Fist of Legend was one of the genre's most intelligent entries, and director Lau, whose Infernal Affairs trilogy appears to have exhausted his acumen towards intrigue.
The pre-title sequence sets the tone, a based-on-fact vignette transformed into a violent comic book featuring Chinese labourers drafted to the first world war battlefield of 1917 France. Chen Zhen (Yen, above) literally flies through the air and single-handedly decimates a German battalion, the editor's shears and computer-generated effects so furious that the expertise of Chen (and Yen) is lost, along with much sense of the hero as a flesh-and-blood human being.