BEFORE: Wow, what a January it's been, and it's not even over yet. It's been full of ups and downs, good movies and bad, the joy of linking to a few extra, unplanned movies and then the anxiety that came after that, realizing it was now impossible to fit all my January movies into January. Ah, but then redemption when I realized I could excise most of the Nicolas Cage films and reschedule them for March - I had that power within me all along, it just took me a while to realize it. So then relief again when everything lined up again - it turns out watching 32 movies in a 31-day month is a lot easier than watching 37. I've been mostly sidelined by the pandemic and a work slowdown, so I probably could have done it, but it still would have been SO much more work. Instead, my wife and I are trying to straighten up the house a bit, one room at a time, and we're forcing ourselves to throw some things away, which is not easy for either of us.
For a while there, it looked like my January chain was going to extend into February, so the initial plan was to watch this one right after Lunar New Year, but try as I might, I couldn't get it ON to the correct date - I was so focused on tomorrow's film ending up on February 5, so I could give another birthday SHOUT-out. Now that the plans have shifted again, I guess that actress won't be getting birthday greetings from me now - BUT my romance chain will start on February 1, as it should, so that pleases me - I've got to take the small victories where I find them.
I already watched a large number of Asian or Asian-themed films this month (China is the new Sweden) and there were many different linking opportunities that I noticed, most after the fact. But somehow this film didn't share actors with ANY of them - that's just the way it goes. But I've kind of been celebrating Lunar New Year all month, in a way. Maybe there was a better way to link this all together, but since I was doing a lot of it on the fly (kids, don't try this at home) it came together the way it did, the 2022 chain remains unbroken, and that's another small victory. So the Lunar New Year begins in two days, and this is as close to that date I could schedule an Asian film.
Dave Bautista carries over from "My Spy".
THE PLOT: On the hunt for a fabled treasure of gold, a band of warriors, assassins and a rogue British soldier descend upon a village in feudal China, where a humble blacksmith looks to defend himself and his fellow villagers.
AFTER: What's the connection back to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"? In that film, there was a Mount Wudang that featured prominently in the plot, and there was an entire school of martial arts fighting that used the Wudang manual. I kept hearing it as "Wu-Tang", though, because I'm aware of the Staten Island rap group, the Wu-Tang Clan. And RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan wrote and directed this movie. (Officially, the name of the rap group comes from the 1983 film "Shaolin and Wu Tang", but come on, work with me here.)
This film is also co-written and produced by Eli Roth, and "presented" by Quentin Tarantino - which probably means Quentin didn't do any work on the film, he just allowed the use of his name to get the film more attention. My boss has pulled that trick before, you just have to call that more famous director and get the approval of his name, at minimum - it's calling in a favor, costs nothing really, but with the right person's "presentation", maybe the film can get a bigger release.
The subject matter is not really my thing, but I've seen a few martial-arts movies already this month, so I'm grown accustomed to them, but also I'm a little bit numbed to them, so watching all the fighting and the stunts now has very little affect on me, which is a clear sign that I'm ready to move on to some other topic, anything but this. Can't we all just stop fighting for a minute, please? Thankfully, the romance chain is starting in just two days. Wha? How is Dave Bautista going to get us closer to romance? (Actually, I didn't know there would be any romance in "My Spy", but there was a little. That could have been a nice lead-in, only the linking didn't work, so instead I've got to go through "Dune".)
There are so many different clans here, there's the Lion Clan, the Wolf Clan, the Hyena Clan and the Rodent Clan, so it's hard to keep everybody straight here. Let me guess, they all have different fighting styles, right? Then there's Poison Dagger and Lady Silk, the Gemini Twins and Madam Blossom, everybody gets to Jungle Village because they want the governor's gold, and didn't I see this same plot point in another movie - was it the "Crouching Tiger" sequel? They're all kind of mixing together in my brain at this point, but either way, I think this movie came first.
Even though this feels very Tarantino-like (a group of strangers all converging in one establishment, it's very "Hateful 8") there's a lot of martial arts stunt-work, a bunch of warriors defying gravity and doing cool but also impossible moves, so that of course hearkens back to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" for me. I know, I know, there's a whole filmography of martial arts movies that I don't want to get caught up in, but we all have our own entry points to each genre.
The only way I could take this, because even though it's set in the 19th century (?) everything is so darn impossible, is to treat this like a superhero movie, which it kind of is. It's a martial arts movie with superheroes and a modern rap soundtrack, which all sounds a bit crazy, but that's only because it is crazy. Bautista plays Brass Body, a fighter who can't be harmed because he's basically made of metal, he's got an exoskeleton that you can't see, except that the film shows it to us again and again, to remind us that he's somehow metallic, so punches, blades, darts, whatever, can't harm him or penetrate his skin. That's a superhero, or maybe a supervillain, right?
One of the freelancers who comes to town is Jack Knife, a British (?) guy who's there for the gold, but also to take on as many of the prostitutes in the Pink Blossom as he can. Umm, yeah, that's classy. The Lion Clan shows up to try to get the gold, but just as they arrive, the clan leader, Gold Lion, is usurped by his underlings, Silver Lion and Bronze Lion. (Hey, Olympics tie-in!). And Zen Yi, also called the X-Blade, is on the way to town, to avenge the death of Gold Lion, who I think was his father. Other characters show up, but are killed pretty quickly - it's almost like they were introducing spare characters just to kill them in interesting ways.
Meanwhile, there's a blacksmith who's a master of forging weapons that were also impossible for the 19th Century, but that matters little, again, the rules of reality and historical accuracy are not applied, so Blacksmith is kind of like the Tony Stark of 19th century China. He's a former American slave who was granted his freedom, and then an unfortunate shipwreck brought him to the shores of China, where he was taken in by monks and shown the power of the chi energy and martial arts. But he gets involved in the battle for this gold by saving Zen Yi after a battle, and since he built the weapons that killed Zen Yi's father, the Blacksmith is looking to tip the karmic scales back in his favor, so he can purchase his girlfriend, Lady Silk, from the brothel and run away with her. Things don't go as planned, because the blacksmith is taken by the Lion Clan, they torture him for information, and Brass Body cuts off both of his arms. He's left for dead, but found by Jack Knife, who cauterizes his wounds and helps him build new, metal hands. Right. And NITPICK POINT: somehow they work just like regular hands, even though there was no surgery done to connect his arm nerves to the metal hands, which wasn't even a thing back in the 19th century.
I'm really leaving out a lot, because a TON of fights happen, more than I could really keep track of - this is when it all started to feel like a series of WWE wrestling matches, with the survivors moving on to the next opponent, and the losers dying in interesting ways. Repeat as necessary, until there were just a couple people left - but afterwards I couldn't even remember who got the gold, because it all felt just like cotton candy, high-energy at the time but with no long-range nutritional value. Still, a lot of work went into making this film, crafting the story and figuring out each character's back-story and motivation, even if most of those characters don't end up getting what they wanted, but instead die in interesting ways. I guess in a way that's life, but then, what's the point?
In the end, this just isn't my sort of movie - one reviewer, however, said this movie "may just be one of the best bad movies ever" and I'm not inclined to disagree. I've traveled back to one of Dave Bautista's earlier films, this was made before "Guardians of the Galaxy", before "Spectre", before "Riddick" even. Tomorrow I'll tackle one of his most recent films, and then it's on to the romance chain. (I'm tabling "Army of The Dead" and "Army of Thieves" because they seem to be horror-related zombie heist films, so naturally that means they belong in October, unless I can't fit them in there.)
Also starring RZA (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Rick Yune (last seen in "Olympus Has Fallen"), Russell Crowe (last seen in "Broken City"), Lucy Liu (last seen in "Lucky Number Slevin"), Jamie Chung (last seen in "Office Christmas Party"), Cung Le, Byron Mann (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Daniel Wu (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Zhu Zhu (last seen in "Cloud Atlas"), Gordon Liu (last seen in "Kill Bill: Vol. 2"), Andrew Ng (last seen in "Ghost in the Shell"), Chen Kuan-tai, Xue Jing Yao, Telly Liu, Wen-Jun Dong, MC Jin (last seen in "Monster Hunter"), Ka-Yan Leung, Grace Huang, Andrew Lin, Jake Garber (last seen in "Planet Terror"), Osric Chau (last seen in "Fun Size"), Terence Yin (last seen in "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life"), with cameos from Pam Grier (last seen in "Larry Crowne"), Eli Roth (last seen in "The House with a Clock in Its Walls").
RATING: 5 out of 10 poison blowgun darts
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