Ten Hong Kong production companies and two dozen Hong Kong celebrities unite forces, for free, in All U Need is Love, an ensemble comedy shepherded by old hand Vincent Kok, for the benefit of local film industry workers painfully impacted by the Covid crisis. From these best of intentions emerges a scattershot collection of mediocre vignettes as we follow Hongkongers quarantined in a hotel: Eric Tsang and Tony Leung Ka Fai reprise their horny characters from Pang Ho Cheung’s classic Men Suddenly in Black, looking for a sexcapade within the hotel’s limited roster of young females; hotel manager Michael Hui grandstands while trying desperately to escape quarantine (one of his attempts is foiled by a random Jackie Chan appearance, in his briefest fight ever against Ken Lo), Julian Cheung and Louis Cheung trade threats but warm to each other as rival gangsters forced to share a room… There’s more, but nothing much worth mentioning. In 75 minutes the film hurries clumsily to the conclusion that love conquers all, but keeps dropping cameos (Louis Koo, Francis Ng, Raymond Wong, Yuen Qiu as – you guessed it – the landlady from Kung Fu Hustle…) because who would keep watching anyway? But it’s a benefit film, hurried into production under strained circumstances, so it’s hard to pounce on it too hard. It’s like 1991’s The Banquet all over again, only with much fewer stars. (no rating under the circumstances)
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ALL U NEED IS LOVE (2021) short review
Posted by LP Hugo on May 6, 2021
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2021/05/06/all-u-need-is-love-2021-short-review/
VANGUARD (2020) review
Originally meant as a Chinese New Year 2020 film but pushed back eight months in the time of the Coronavirus, Stanley Tong’s Vanguard follows Tang (Jackie Chan), the head of an international security company named Vanguard, tasked with rescuing the kidnapped daughter (Xu Ruohan) of a businessman (Jackson Liu) whose past has caught up with him. From London to “Africa” (which in this film seems to be the name of a country) to Dubaï, flanked by his elite team that includes Mi Ya (Miya Muqi), Lei (Yang Yang) and Zhang (Allen Ai), Tang butts heads with a dangerous mercenary organization, the Arctic Wolves.
Posted by LP Hugo on November 16, 2020
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2020/11/16/vanguard-2020-review/
THE MYSTERY OF DRAGON SEAL (aka THE IRON MASK) (2019) review
Who could have imagined that two of the most iconic movie stars in the world, Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, would one day share the screen not in a Hollywood buddy movie, but in a Russian-Chinese fantasy swashbuckling adventure vaguely derived from Nikolai Gogol, in which Arnie would play a British warden, and the two would have a swordfight? Now we want to see Sylvester Stallone and Chow Yun Fat arm-wrestle in a Polish-Vietnamese western indirectly adapted from Victor Hugo. Anyway, Oleg Stepchenko’s The Mystery of Dragon Seal is the sequel to Viy, a Russian fantasy adventure – Gogol-derived, as aforementioned – starring Jason Flemyng and Charles Dance, that found healthy international ancillary success after becoming the third highest-grossing Russian film in Russia in 2014. Conceived to work as a stand-alone film – thanks to a recapitulation of the previous episode – and geared towards the China market, this sequel has been a flop both there and in Russia.
Posted by LP Hugo on October 8, 2019
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2019/10/08/the-mystery-of-dragon-seal-aka-viy-2-aka-journey-to-china-the-mystery-of-iron-mask-2019-review/
THE CLIMBERS (2019) review
In 1960, Fang Wuzhou (Wu Jing) and Qu Songlin (Zhang Yi), members of the Chinese National Mountaineering Team, reached the summit of Mount Everest (known as Qomolangma in Tibetan) from the North Ridge, a perilous achievement that cost the life of their captain. Worse, it later went unrecognized by the international community: after losing their camera during the ascent, the Chinese climbers were unable to provide the necessary photographic proof of their exploit. Since then, Fang and Qu have lived in shame, considered frauds by most. So when an opportunity to renew the exploit arises fifteen years later, they set out to train a new team of climbers, including Li Guiliang (Jing Boran), Yang Guang (Hu Ge), and meteorologist Xu Ying (Zhang Ziyi), with whom Fang has long been in love.
Posted by LP Hugo on September 30, 2019
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2019/09/30/the-climbers-2019-review/
THE KNIGHT OF SHADOWS: BETWEEN YIN AND YANG (2019) review
In Yan Jia’s The Knight of Shadows: Between Yin and Yang, Jackie Chan plays an imaginary version of Pu Songling, the late 16th-century, early 17th-century author of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio – a collection of supernatural stories on which films the A Chinese Ghost Story or the Painted Skin franchise are more or less loosely based. This Pu is a writer too (and one eager to peddle his stories), but he’s also an actual demon hunter who operates from a mountain-top house, assisted by goblins Farty, Happy and Thousand Hands. While helping a hapless sheriff’s assistant (Lin Bohong) catch a jewel thief who’s actually a pig demon, Pu comes across Nie Xiaoqian (Elane Zhong), a demon who along with her sister Jing Yao (Lin Peng) feeds on the souls of young women, after promising them eternal beauty. Also on Nie Xiaoqian’s trail is Yan Chixia (Ethan Juan), a wandering demon hunter who’s none other than her former lover.
Posted by LP Hugo on May 22, 2019
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2019/05/22/the-knight-of-shadows-between-yin-and-yang-2019-review/
BLEEDING STEEL (2017) review
On a fateful night in 2007, UN Special Forces agent Lin (Jackie Chan) is faced with a cruel dilemma: to be with his daughter Nancy in the hospital as she desperately clutches to life in the final phases of leukaemia, or to protect Doctor James, a geneticist who entered the witness-protection program after creating for an arms dealer a biochemical weapon whose formula, in the wrong hands, could bring about international chaos. Doctor James has been targeted by Andre (Callan Mulvey), a soldier enhanced with that biomechanical invention. Having painfully chosen international security over his daughter, Lin barely survives an attack by Andre that claims the life of most of his team. The same evening, his daughter dies. Fast forward thirteen years later, and Nancy is apparently still alive, attending high school under the watchful eye of Lin, who poses as a cafeteria worker at her school. Nancy is beset with recurring nightmares, and little does she know that she is the target not only of Andre and his right-hand woman (Tess Haubrich), but also of Leeson (Show Lo), a thief who found her profile in the files of a successful fiction writer.
Posted by LP Hugo on January 9, 2018
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2018/01/09/bleeding-steel-2017-review/
NAMIYA (2017) review
Mere months after the Japanese adaptation of Keigo Higashino’s best-selling novel The Miracles of the Namiya General Store, comes a Chinese adaptation directed by Han Jie, with input from popular novelist, blogger and director Han Han. Three orphans, Xiaobo (Karry Wang), Tong Tong (Dilraba Dilmurat) and Jie (Dong Zi Jian) burglarize a rich woman’s house on new year’s eve, then run away in her car. They decide to lay low in an abandoned general store, but strange things start happening: a letter is dropped in an old letterbox at the front of the shop, and seems to have been written by someone more than twenty years before. The orphans decide to answer it, and get an almost immediate, handwritten answer through the same letterbox, once again apparently from the past. They learn that the store used to belong to a kind old man (Jackie Chan) who would impart wise advice to anonymous people in need through letters dropped in front and behind the store.
Posted by LP Hugo on December 23, 2017
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2017/12/23/namiya-2017-review/
RESET (2017) review
Produced by Jackie Chan and directed by Korean helmer Yoon Hong-seung aka Chang, Reset unfolds in the near future, when time travel is becoming a reality: the discovery and use of portals to parallel universes allows scientists to experiment on sending living tissue back in the past – though only two hours back for now. Xia Tian (Yang Mi) is part of a research team that is on the verge of a major breakthrough, when her son Doudou a kidnapped and held for ransom by a mysterious man (Wallace Huo). If she wants to get her son back, she is to deliver the man all of her research. But even after she complies, her son is killed, and she has no choice but to send herself back two hours in the past to try and save him. With every failed attempt she starts again and in doing so, she creates multiple versions of herself, all dead set on rescuing Doudou.
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Posted by LP Hugo on June 29, 2017
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2017/06/29/reset-2017-review/
KUNG FU YOGA (2017) review
A good one month after the delightful Railroad Tigers, Jackie Chan is back on the big screen, and a good 12 years after their flawed but enjoyable – and oddly heartfelt – adventure The Myth, he reunites with Stanley Tong for Kung Fu Yoga (though Tong was a producer on Chinese Zodiac). This Indian-Chinese co-production that follows illustrious archeology professor Jack (Jackie Chan), who goes looking for an ancient Indian treasure with the help of his assistants (Zhang Yixing and Miya Muqi), some old friends (Eric Tsang and Zhang Guoli), a thief (Aarif Lee) and an Indian princess (Disha Patani). The quest takes them from China to Iceland to Dubai to India, but another, less benevolent search party is also looking for the treasure: Indian heir Randall (Sonu Sood) and his mercenaries.
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Posted by LP Hugo on January 24, 2017
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2017/01/24/kung-fu-yoga-2017-review/
RAILROAD TIGERS (2016) review
After the superb tragicomic elegy Little Big Soldier and the flawed but interesting single-setting thriller Police Story 2013, Ding Sheng has proven to be one of Jackie Chan’s most interesting collaborators, respectful of the myth but not a yes-man, and able to bring ambitious ideas to star vehicles. Now the two have reunited for a wartime adventure set in the winter of 1941, as Japan takes control of Southeast Asia, using the railways for military transportation and supply. Ma Yuan (Jackie Chan) is a railroad worker who doubles as a Robin Hood figure, using his knowledge of the railroad network to ambush, sabotage and steal supplies from the Japanese convoys to feed the Chinese people, assisted by a team of freedom fighters called the “Railroad Tigers” (including Huang Zitao and Jaycee Chan). One day they offer shelter to a wounded Chinese soldier (Darren Wang), who tells them of a bridge that has to be blown up to cut the Japanese army’s supply route and cripple its war effort. The Railroad Tigers, helped by a former sharp-shoother (Wang Kai) thus set out on their biggest and most dangerous mission yet, while Japanese officers Yamaguchi (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi) and Yuko (Zhang Lanxin) try to stop them.
Posted by LP Hugo on December 24, 2016
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2016/12/24/railroad-tigers-2016-review/
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