All posts tagged donnie yen

ENTER THE FAT DRAGON (2020) review

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Not a remake of Sammo Hung’s 1978 action comedy despite sharing a title and rotund lead with it, Kenji Tanigaki’s Enter the Fat Dragon follows Fallon Zhu (Donnie Yen), a well-meaning but slightly unhinged cop who becomes overweight after suffering a break-up from his longtime girlfriend, TV actress Chloe (Niki Chow), and a demotion to the archive room of his precinct. He jumps at the opportunity to get back to the field with a mission to escort a Japanese suspect back to Tokyo, where Chloe is coincidentally staying at the same time, hoping to expand her career to the Japanese market. But when the suspect is murdered by none other than the shady businessman (Go Hayama) sponsoring Chloe’s Japanese experience, and the inspector in charge (Takenaka Naoto) proves to be corrupt, Fallon teams up with a former undercover cop turned restaurant owner (Wong Jing) to bring them to justice.

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by LP Hugo on February 7, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on February 7, 2020

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2020/02/07/enter-the-fat-dragon-2020-review/

IP MAN 4: THE FINALE (2019) review

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Eleven years after his career was both boosted and defined by the resounding success of Wilson Yip’s Ip Man, Donnie Yen is back for a final time as the grandmaster of Wing Chun. Following the death of his wife, Ip Man is diagnosed with head and neck cancer; his son Jing wants to become a martial arts master himself, but Man wants him to attend university instead, and sensing his end approaching fast, he travels to San Francisco to get him enrolled in a university, hoping the expatriation will teach him independence. There, he meets his former student Bruce Lee, now a revered teacher himself, but frowned upon by the more traditional kung fu masters of Chinatown for daring to instruct non-Chinese in the ways of Chinese martial arts. Chief among these traditionalists is Tai Chi Master Wan (Wu Yue), the head of the Chinese Benevolent Association, whose recommendation is crucial in getting Ip Jing accepted into university. Masters Ip and Wan butt heads over the issue of spreading Chinese martial arts to the West, but a common enemy soon emerges: racist Marine instructor Barton Geddes (Scott Adkins) who deeply resents the attempts by American-born Chinese soldier Hartmann (Vanness Wu) to have Wing Chun included to Marine training, and sends Karate master Collin (Chris Collins) to Chinatown in an attempt to humiliate Chinese martial arts.

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by LP Hugo on December 16, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on December 16, 2019

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2019/12/16/ip-man-4-the-finale-2019-review/

ICEMAN: THE TIME TRAVELER (2018) review

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Law Wing Cheong’s Iceman 3D was, at the time, the most ambitious project of Donnie Yen’s rejuvenated career as a leading man; a remake of Clarence Fok’s cult classic The Iceman Cometh, with a hefty – for the Chinese film industry in 2014 – budget of 33 million dollars, it was conceived as a one-off, until a spiraling budget (Hong Kong’s Tsing Ma bridge had to be rebuilt as a set for a quarter of the film’s budget when permission to shoot on the actual one was refused) and the necessity for ever more reshoots led to the decision to release the film as a two-parter. But Iceman 3D had more scatological jokes than fights, and a shoddy grasp of its time-traveling concepts, puzzlingly eschewing the simple, pulpy pleasures of Clarence Fok’s original for something both more ambitious and less thrilling. It underperformed on release, and now four years later comes Iceman; The Time Traveler, with solid journeyman Raymond Yip taking over the helm from Law Wing Cheong.

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by LP Hugo on January 6, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on January 6, 2019

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2019/01/06/iceman-the-time-traveler-2018-review/

BIG BROTHER (2018) review

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The production partnership of Wong Jing and Donnie Yen cannot be accused of a lack of variety: after the gangster epic Chasing the Dragon, and before the fatsuit comedy Enter the Fat Dragon, here comes the inspirational school drama Big Brother, directed by recent Wong favorite Kam Ka Wai (iGirl, Colour of the Game, Queen of Triads). Yen is Henry Chen, an ex-military who after a traumatic war experience and a period of soul-searching and traveling, turns up at his old secondary school of Tak Chi, now struggling amid funding cuts and real estate scheming, and asks to be a teacher of liberal arts, despite a lack of credentials in the field. The school is direly understaffed and so the principal (Dominic Lam) quickly accepts. But Henry Chen’s students are an unruly bunch, the rejects of the flawed Hong Kong school system, and unwilling to listen to him. The new teacher will have to get their attention, inspire them, and in some cases, rescue them from dangerous situations.

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by LP Hugo on August 29, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on August 29, 2018

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2018/08/29/big-brother-2018-review/

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY (2016) review

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Making a sequel to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon always seemed both natural and foolish, audacious and misguided. The 2001 film was adapted from one in a series of novels by Wang Du Lu, thus lending itself naturally to follow-ups; but it was so acclaimed that it made for a tough act to follow. There was then a interesting challenge to shooting a second film, but at the same time the absence of Ang Lee or someone with a similarly strong vision at the helm did not bode well, Yuen Woo Ping having always been hit-and-miss as a director. The film’s production was troubled, its release pattern controversial (it premiered on Netflix in the West, prompting many IMAX chains to refuse to screen it in the US), and its English soundtrack head-scratching. But those factors weren’t in and of themselves indicative of failure, especially with so much talent behind and in front of the camera.

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by LP Hugo on February 26, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on February 26, 2016

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2016/02/26/crouching-tiger-hidden-dragon-sword-of-destiny-2016-review/

CRYSTAL HUNT (1991) short review

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Shot in Thailand and probably back-to-back with 1992’s Cheetah on Fire which has the same cast and crew, Hsu Hsia’s Crystal Hunt opens on a short and brisk action scene featuring Leung Kar Yan and Gordon Liu (who do not appear again afterwards) that has nothing to do with the plot and serves only to pad out the film’s short runtime. Which tells you everything you need to know about its ambitions. Carrie Ng is the daughter of a terminally ill businessman, whose last hope is a legendary healing crystal hidden deep in the Thai jungle. With her boyfriend (Ken Lo), she tasks a scientist (director Hsu Hsia) with finding the crystal. But the scientist is apprehended by a team of mercenaries (headed by Donnie Yen’s gweilo collaborators John Salvitti and Michael Woods), and soon his daughter (Fujimi Nadeki) goes looking for him with the help of two cops (Donnie Yen and Sibelle Hu). Despite an impressive lack of narrative competency, Crystal Hunt is never boring thanks to a healthy serving of action choreographed with budget-defying skill by Donnie Yen’s team. And everybody in the cast is playing within their comfort zone : Carrie Ng is domineering and slightly insidious, Donnie is badass and a bit puerile, Sibelle Hu is a cute woman of action, Ken Lo is a tool who kicks high… It’s all quite familiar and comforting, if mediocre and unchallenging. **1/2

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by LP Hugo on September 12, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on September 12, 2015

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2015/09/12/crystal-hunt-1991-short-review/

AN INSPECTOR CALLS (2015) review

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Considered a true classic of 20th-century English theatre, J.B. Priestley’s three-act play An Inspector Calls has been brought to the stage countless times since it was first performed in 1945, and it’s been a fixture of the BBC’s TV and radio programming (with yet another mini-series in preparation for 2015, starring David Thewlis) but it has comparatively been the object of few big screen adaptations. In fact, Raymond Wong and Herman Yau’s film is the first time the play is adapted for theatrical release since Guy Hamilton’s (of Goldfinger fame) 1954 adaptation. And surely it’s the most unexpected iteration of the story since the 1979 Soviet mini-series Inspector Gull. Screenwriter Edmond Wong transposes the setting from the North Midlands of Great Britain in 1912 to Hong Kong in 2015, but follows J.B. Priestley’s narrative pretty closely : the mysterious inspector Karl (Louis Koo) pays an unexpected visit to the rich Kau family’s estate. Mr. and Mrs. Kau (Eric Tsang and Teresa Mo) are in the final preparations for their daughter Sherry’s (Karena Ng) engagement party as she is soon to marry a handsome young businessman Johnny (Hans Zhang), while their son Tim (Gordon Lam) looks on in contemptuous bemusement, and clearly annoyed at his own girlfriend, socialite Yvonne (Ada Liu Yan). Inspector Karl informs them that a young woman (Chrissie Chau) from Mr. Kau’s factory has been found dead from what appears to be a painful, protracted suicide by disinfectant ingestion. As he starts to interrogate each member of the family in turn, it appears everyone of them was linked to the deceased woman, and everyone may have played a more or less active role in her eventual demise.

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by LP Hugo on April 11, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on April 11, 2015

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2015/04/11/an-inspector-calls-2015-review/

CIRCUS KIDS (1994) short review

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Wu Ma’s last film as a director (though he kept on appearing in films for twenty more years), Circus Kids stands out simply by being the only time – so far – that martial arts greats Yuen Biao and Donnie Yen have been in the same film. Both were about to experience a unfortunate career wane in the second half of the nineties, and indeed Circus Kids is not up to their talent. It follows the various misfortunes of a circus troupe (led by Wu Ma himself and including Yuen Biao) during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai around 1910. Forced to move and take up jobs at a factory when their tent is destroyed in a Japanese bombing, they are thrust in the middle of political machinations and opium trafficking, but find an ally in a constable (Donnie Yen) who has feelings for the troupe’s trapeze artist (Irene Wan). Much of the goings-on in Circus Kids are tedious, thinly-written melodrama, which coupled with the film’s short running time and fairly low budget, don’t allow it to develop any kind of epic sweep or even dramatic poignancy. It is also fairly light on martial arts, with Donnie Yen and Yuen Biao only trading blows for a few seconds. Still the film’s stunning final fight, which sees Yuen take on fearful kicker Ken Lo (who the same year fought Jackie Chan in Drunken Master 2‘s unforgettable finale), is worth the wait, and a welcome relief from the mediocrity that precedes it. **

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by LP Hugo on January 14, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on January 14, 2015

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2015/01/14/circus-kids-1994-short-review/

KUNG FU JUNGLE (aka KUNG FU KILLER) (2014) review

Kungfu Jungle Official Poster Ever since his excellent turn in Peter Chan’s superb Wu Xia in 2011, martial arts spearhead Donnie Yen’s career had been a bit underwhelming, with films either overdosing on special effects (The Monkey King), lacking in any kind of script to tie the amazing fight scenes together (Special ID), getting lost in juvenile comedy (The Iceman 3D) or worse, casting him as a romantic leading man named ‘Cool Sir’ (Together). Kung Fu Jungle, as I’m happy to report, is a definite step up in quality. Donnie is Hahou Mo, a martial arts master who is first seen surrendering himself to the police after killing another master (a barely glimpsed Bey Logan). Three years later he’s peacefully nearing the end of his sentence but a TV report of the murder of a Kung Fu master sends him in a frenzy to contract the inspector in charge of the investigation (Charlie Yeung). He understands the motives of the killer, a demented fighter (Wang Baoqiang) who overcame a leg defect and is challenging all the greatest masters, to the death. But when Hahou Mo is allowed to get out of prison and assist the inspector, it becomes obvious that he has a hidden agenda, part of which involves his girlfriend (Michelle Bai Bing).

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by LP Hugo on October 13, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on October 13, 2014

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2014/10/13/kung-fu-jungle-2014-review/

ASIAN COP: HIGH VOLTAGE (1995) review

The second half of the nineties can in a way be considered Donnie Yen’s “dark period”; Yen had earned a reputation as a difficult actor to work with, and alienated himself from the Yuen clan, mainly his mentor Yuen Woo-Ping. Thus, he turned to TV (where he found success with the Fist Of Fury TV series), and to alternate Asian film industries, such as Taiwan or the Philippines. It is in the latter country that he shot Asian Cop: High Voltage (henceforward High Voltage), under the direction of Andrew Kam. In the film, Yen plays Chiang, a headstrong cop (just like he does in most of his contemporary-set films) who gets sent to the Philippines to ensure the safety of an important witness who is the only one who can testify against bla bla bla… There he is partnered with Edu (Edu Manzano), a by-the-book Filipino cop who doesn’t approve of his methods bla bla bla… But Chiang discovers that crazed gangster Dick (Roy Cheung) is involved in the whole affair, and you see, Dick killed Chiang’s wife. So Chiang, who was already a bit of loose cannon, in now an even looser cannon.

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by LP Hugo on April 8, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on April 8, 2012

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2012/04/08/asian-cop-high-voltage-1995-review/

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