Wolf Warrior

[Drunk Monk]

This pits two of my fav underrated martial stars: Jacky Wu Jing vs. Scott Adkins. It's a PLA propagandist mess of a film that was ultimately very disappointing. The opening action scene was promising. Wu Jing gets recruited for the Wolf Warriors, an elite troop that plays the enemy in Chinese war game exercises on the border for the PLA. But in the opening action scene, he offed the brother of a drug lord, who hires Scott and some other white guy mercenaries to assassinate him. So the story takes place inside a mock battlefield during war game exercises, a jungle that is completely monitored by cameras somehow. And the five mercs penetrate and start killing soldiers. There's some subplot about smuggling out a virus that only kills Chinese - it's the underlying subterfuge driving a betrayal at a critical moment, but who cares about that? Now there's the PLA troops in the wargames plus the Wolf Warriors trying to catch the 5 mercs before they cross the border. Remember this is a PLA propaganda film, which means the filmmakers had access to tanks, copters, ATVs and troops of the PLA. So it's big. A big waste however. The action gets really stupid. At one point, Wu Jing steps on a landmine. He's standing on it, knowing that if he takes his foot off, it'll explode. So he delicately and time-comsumingly digs a big pit around the mine. Then he jumps off. It explodes but he is unscathed because his kung fu jump was so badass. WTH? Why didn't he just do that in the first place? What was the point of digging it out? It became like Uncommon Valor in reverse, a small band of westerners against the Asian horde. Finally it comes down to Scott vs. Wu Jing. But it's a mediocre fight at best. So disappointing.