Fist of Legend / Tai Chi Master

The modern superhero movie has plenty of cinematic progenitors, but hardly anyone ever mentions ‘90s Hong Kong martial arts films, despite the fact that 1993’s The Heroic Trio lays it out there right in the title.  Released the same year, Tai Chi Master - known as Twin Dragons abroad-  is an even more obvious blueprint for Marvel’s comic book kingdom to come, pitting two nearly invulnerable monks against one another for kung fu supremacy.

 

Kicked out of the monastery, Junbao (Jet Li) and Tienbo (Chin Siu Ho) pursue drastically different paths in life.  Kind-hearted and curious, Junbao teams up with a group of rebels out free themselves from a brutal military dictatorship.  Meanwhile, Tienbo goes over to the dark side, pledging himself as a warrior for the Governor and betraying his friends for power and ambition.

 

Directed with frantic imagination by Yuen Woo-ping (who was later recruited by the Wachowski’s to bring the same visual inventiveness to The Matrix), Tai Chi Master is a superhero movie in everything but name.  Virtually invulnerable and blessed with skills that explanation (and the laws of physics), Junbao and Tienbo launch themselves into ridiculously lopsided battles and come out without a scratch.   The wuxia wire work defies gravity in endlessly creative ways;  flipping, rolling, bouncing and leaping with the sort of visceral punishment only pre-CG era stunts can truly dish out.   And we haven’t even mentioned Michelle Yeoh yet!

 

More grounded in its approach is Jet Li’s Fist of Legend, the 1994 remake of Bruce Lee’s seminal Fist of Fury, telling the same story of a Chinese student’s two-fisted rebellion against the occupying Japanese army.  Set up for the murder and ostracized by his own village, Chen Zehn (Li) fights to regain his honor against a cadre of traitors who use his relationship with a Japanese student again him. 

 

Vacillating between angry bad-ass and wide-eyed romantic, the Chen Zehn of Fist of Legend is a contradiction of sorts.  Director Gordon Chan isn’t quite willing to give up the genre’s often slapstick elements which were nowhere to be found in the original.  But returning fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping matches the best action scenes in Lee’s film, staging the “one-man-against-an-entire-dojo” sequence – by now a kung fu cliché – with such innovative energy the audience is left gasping for air.  Li himself gives every scene a physical urgency that lets you know he’s treading on holy ground here…and paying it the proper respect.  

 

Previously released by Dragon Dynasty, MVD Entertainment combines both films on a Blu-ray double feature, porting over most of the old extras (interviews, deleted scenes and a screen fighting seminar at the Kurata Action School so you can try this stuff at home!) and adding some new audio tracks so you can choose Mandarin or the English dub.  Video wise things are a bit scruffy, with a strange digital-feel throughout, but it’s hard to tell if that’s just the materials provided.  Content-wise, it’s a knock-out double-feature that puts modern superhero movies to shame.

 

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