10-31-2012, 01:40 PM
Well, it took me a while to get through this, but I was rewarded in the end. The star, Jason Yee, was a major Sanshou fighter back in the day. I only met him in person once, but we partied until sunrise. He has shown me some of this in its early stages and I've been meaning to watch it for some time. It's Kung Fu noir, modeled on old hardboiled detective comics. It starts and ends with such a comic book, being opened and closed just like a storybook in a Disney flick. The style uses muted colors and an ongoing internal narration, neither of which worked for me. There's gratuitous violence and nudity. Yee is the bodyguard of a 16-year-old prostitute who gets killed, so he hunts down the killers. The film goes exactly where you expect it might. The reward was towards the end when Yee delivers two extended continuous-shot fight sequences, both in homage to the hammer fight in OldBoy. I'm not sure how long either scene was - they were back-to-back - but they were complex and beautifully executed with Yee taking on a gang of attackers. No sword fights or Bollywood dances. There was some knife work and a mediocre pole dance.
Shadow boxing the apocalypse