Kung-fu Quarters: Four HBO (Asia) Originals

Master of the White Crane Fist: Wong Yan-Lam (2019, d. Guo Jianyong - HBO/Crave)
Master of the Nine Dragon Fist: Wong Ching-Ho (2019, d. Si Xiaodong - HBO/Crave)
Master of the Drunken Fist: Beggar So (2016, d. Guo Jianyong - HBO/Crave)
Master of the Shadowless Kick: Wong Kei-Ying (2016, d. Guo Jianyong - HBO/Crave)

[I am by no means an expert, nor a connoisseur when it comes to kung-fu, wuxia or Chinese martial arts history, so please excuse me any ignorance I may have to the titular characters of these films or the historical contexts they might find themselves in. ] 

On all the streaming services I am subscribed to I have a watchlist. They're never well-curated, usually just a dumping ground for anything that seemed to have an interesting description, or maybe I had heard about on a podcast, or maybe stars or is directed by someone I kind of like. If it was *really* something I wanted to watch, I would have watched it already and taken it off the list.

On Crave -- a Canadian streaming service with its own original content, as well as curated new release and older movies, and, with the extended package, all of HBO's content -- I discovered these four films. I think Crave had a little Jackie Chan kick for a month or two and these came up in the "More Like This" section.

Given their titles, they all seemed of a piece, perhaps even a connected series, which seemed intriguing enough, so I added them to "My Cravings" and saved them for a later day.  In the frequent perusing of my various watchlists when looking for something to watch, I've passed these over dozens upon dozens of times, sometimes even wondering why they are on there.

With seemingly nothing but time this past week (not true, but seemingly) I started chipping away at "My Cravings". Master of the White Crane Fist was the first of this quartet to be chosen for no other reason than it was the shortest and it was late.

I can't really express why this very middling TV movie spurred me on to watch another, which was of even lesser quality, which then spurred me on to watch another, and by that point I might as well just finish them off. 

I'm not really lying when I say these feel like the kung-fu version of Hallmark movies. They've got some budget but corners are definitely cut in the production values category. The lighting is often natural and oversaturated giving the image an amateurish feel, while the sets can range from decently immersive to obviously anachronistic.  If they were all shot on a studio backlot in China somewhere I wouldn't be surprised, as everything seems so crisp and new, unweathered and not lived in.  One exterior setting in Master of the Nine Dragon Fist reminded me of a Disneyworld main drag.

These films are not really connected in any way, save for the fact that three of the four were directed by the same man, Guo Jianyong, which explains the samey-samey vibe of them, not to mention the speed-up/slow-mo/speed-up pseudo-Zack Snyder technique they use constantly that just makes my teeth itch. But I cannot solely blame Guo because, woof, those scripts all needed at least two more passes before they were ready to shoot.

From my limited experience with historical kung-fu of the Shaw Bros. classics and the like, these seem like they're trying to pay homage to them in terms of both story structure and kung-fu spectacle. But these films make two critical errors. First is they are each too self-serious, they play too far into the melodrama and not far enough into the sense of camp and visceral violent fun. Second, they are using digital cameras instead of film, and there's a surreal grittiness to film that is absolutely lost with the crisp brightness of digital high-definition. These films needed a filter or even a digital pass to mute the brightness. They feel largely sterile.

While I compare them to the rote, predictable Hallmark movies, I also need not remind the loyal Disagreeables (that's you, dear reader) that we have a thing for Hallmark movies over here. We're not snobs.  And in the same way that one can find value in the differences between one Hallmarkie and the next, I too could see the differing redeemable qualities in these HBO Asia/China Movie Channel productions.

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Master of the White Crane Fist: Wong Yan-lam wound up being my favourite of the four, largely because its opening half quickly won me over. It starts with a gang of bandits taking over a tea house theatre, cutting then to a troupe of guards walking their heavily manacled prisoner in the rain, only to arrive at said tea house. The tension becomes thick as the bandits have to play nice to the very suspicious head guard. And then enter Wong Yan-lam, a travelling prognosticator who appears seemingly out of nowhere and gleefully starts engaging the very confused room. Everyone seems to have their own agenda and this quite Poirot-esque mystery builds up exceptionally well for a good forty minutes before it all deflates unsatisfying like a  balloon in a thresher. 

The second half fumbles around trying to concoct reasons for people to fight in between melodramatic exposition. The fight coordination is not bad at all (which can be said for all of the films) but it's not always shot the best nor does the fighting always feel cohesive to the story or character. I mean you think for a film called "Master of the White Crane Fist" that it would spend some time setting up how awesome the "white crane fist" technique is and then showcase said technique, at least in defeating the main villain. But no, the big climax of the film decends into a no-holds barred street-style brawl, which, I have to say, is a pretty fresh thing to do in a kung-fu movie.  All the actors present are particularly good, but the lead actor playing Wong Yan-lam is super charming, and the lead villain actor has the most wonderfully nasty charisma (the credits were too small to read and there's no listings for performers on IMDB or Letterboxd).

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With only a couple exceptions, which I will most definitely get to, the performers in Master of the Nine Dragon Fist: Wong Ching-Ho are also extremely charming. Master Wong himself is the standout but strangely Master Ho is almost the secondary character of this film, as it follows for a long time Man Sing, a Northerner who has come to Guangzhou with his family to find work at on of the city's many kung-fu schools, only to be ostracized for being a Northerner.  The inner-country prejudices are just as prevalent in this film as are the anti-western, anti-opiate sentiments that frame the story.  Man Sing, master of the Iron Shield skill, protects his family from assault by rioting rival schools, but is left desperate without money, food or lodging, and has nowhere to turn but the unscrupulous western opiate trader Mr. James.

Mr. James, in collusion with the local authorities, sets Man Sing out in the streets to challenge all the school masters to a kung-fu duel, to prove who is the most talented in the city.  The intent is to undermine Master Wong's attempts to organize the schools into an anti-opioid patrol, as well as his opiate addiction recovery clinic. While everyone agreed that Master Wong is the most talented, Man Sing surely can give him a run for his money. But Mr. James stacks the deck against him by having his pregnant wife targeted by street thugs, and later has Master Wong arrested for opioid possession (I think he was treating opiate addiction in a methadone kind of way) during which one of the city guard ruthlessly punches his pregnant wife in the gut killing her and the baby...in broad daylight...in front of dozens of witnesses... with no repercussions. ACAB, man. ACAB.

There's a lot of injustice heaped upon poor Master Wong, and for him to triumph in the end means that our poor, deceived, ostracized Northern master Man Sing must lose, and it's so unintentionally soul crushing... I have to wonder if the filmmaker is sort of an anti-Northerner bigot himself, or if it's just careless scripting?

One of the most bizarre aspects of the film is opiate trader Mr. James. He's played by a white performer who is not much of an actor at all. He spends almost all of his time in the film comically looking out a second story window with a spyglass. When he's not doing that, he's stroking his beard menacingly. Or half-grin smirking, menacingly. The performer has no idea what to do with his hands or his face. He's also completely dubbed, both in English and Cantonese (I think...I looked it up and Cantonese, not Mandarin is the traditional language of Guangzhou) by a Chinese performer. The English dialogue is almost unintelligible, while Mr. James's Cantonese (?) voice is hilariously nasal and mumbly. (I think they're further taking the piss out of him). Mr. James is a hilarious cartoon white devil villain and serves as the butt of a very anti Western message... which I have no problem with.

The absurdity of Mr. James elevates this film to nearly "so bad it's good" territory, but its crimes towards Man Sing (including his unbelievably shrill nagging wife) and fridgeing Master Wong's wife really bring the mood down something fierce.

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My experience with other drunken fists/masters/boxing in film and TV it it has always had a tremendously playful aspect to it, but beyond the initial encounter between "Master of the Drunken Fist" So Chan (as written in the movie description but written as Su Can within the film's subtitles) and Lau Pak-Gwai taking place under a very tall dining table there's not a lot of fun to be had in the technique here. Master of the Drunken Fist:Beggar So is an overly self-serious movie that follows Su Can's journey from brash and cocky military scholar, poised to be the next great commander, only to have a sudden and immediate downfall into poverty, mostly as a part of the convoluted machinations from the eunuch Song Fok-Hoi.

Now, Song Fok-Hoi is actually a pretty tremendous cartoon villain, and I wish this film could embrace the campiness the actor brings to the role by matching it everywhere else, but it seems to think it's doing some important historical storytelling...on a Hallmark budget.

It's also a script that can't decide what's more important: Su Can's overplayed redemption story or Song Fok-Hoi's overwrought ambition to, what, stop a rebellion attempting to depose the Dowager Empress as she's wielding too much control over her Emperor child...or something. I really couldn't follow the politics at play here and its storytelling suffers greatly for how much it entangles itself in Fok-Hoi's plans, especially in the climax which reveals schemes within schemes within schemes. Unnecessary.

That all said there are some likeable performances from all the main leads, but it's really a shame that Lau-Pak Gwai is not in the film more, he abruptly departs at the halfway point. I assumed he was off to have a showdown with his old nemesis Fok-Hoi, but, upon review, it seems he just turned tail and ran into the woods. Unheroic.

This story really needed to use The Mask of Zorro as a template, investing more into the mentorship and romance (oh boy the romance between Su Can and Yoke-Long is all over the place tonally -- including an abruptly started and just as abruptly cut away sex scene -- as is Yoke-Long's characterization).

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The final film, Master of the Shadowless Kick: Wong Kei-Ying, doesn't even have the good graces of good performances. Our lead playing Wong Kei-Ying is a dry, charmless performer who may yield sympathy but not much else.

Wong Kei-ying is legendary Wong Fei-hung's father, and little Fei-hung does appear in the film. It was only after the film that I reminded myself who Wong Fei-hung is (Once Upon a Time In China, Iron Monkey, Drunken Master) and suddenly it made sense as to why the film was so focused upon us hearing his squeaky little voice calling out for his father all the damn time, and then the film ends with a post-script mentioning Wong Fei-hungs impending greatness (it really undercuts Wong Kei-ying's importance as the lead of the film, it really, really does). 

The story of Fei-hung's dad, starts out pretty rough but builds in intrigue through its first half with a intricately woven plot that finds Fei-hung's dad embroiled in helping a government official take on an opium gang, only to later learn that said official has kidnapped his master and deceived him into handing him full control over Guangzhou's drug trade.

Like Master of the White Crane Fist, the film's second half is unable to sustain this intrigue the first half establishes, as once Fei-hung's dad discovers General Wei is no hero, he's unable to hide any moves against the General, and ultimately winds up hooked on opium in an ill-advised cinematic side quest. Eventually, Fei-hung's dad must rescue his child (Fei-hung if you didn't know!), sister-in-law and other friends he's made along the way from the General in a tournament of death, which is mostly entertaining if it didn't feel so out of place and unlikely to resolve the far bigger societal problems at hand in the film.

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While Wong Kei-Ying and Wong Ching-Ho both explore China's problematic history with opium and government corruption, it's not really the common thread for all. There could be revenge plots in each of these films, but revenge never ultimately seems to be the motivating factor for the heroes in question, there's always got to be some nobler goal. But in robbing these characters of their revenge fantasies (which these films do repeatedly) the catharses of the films are all pretty much negligible. I didn't find any of the endings very satisfying.

These films, running between 86 and 98 minutes, still feel too long by at least 20 minutes. They should be far tighter, and again, much more fun to watch.

If I had to watch any of them a second time, it would be Master of the Nine Dragon Fist just for being sheer bonkers, yet, I don't think I can really recommend any of these when I know there are far better kung fu and wuxia products out there that deserve eyeballs much more than these.