Tokyo Tribe

Sion Sono is a weird guy. That’s a statement I’ve used to start two previous reviews, and it’s one I’m sure I’ll use again. The Japanese director makes astoundingly bizarre movies, covering massive ranges of genres (usually in the same film),

Tokyo Tribe continues the weirdness streak. It’s a rap musical or ‘hip h-Opera’ if you’d prefer, and it’s as strange as it sounds. It’s mostly freestyling with beatboxing as back-up, with characters rapping their lines. There aren’t really any standalone ‘songs’ oddly enough. Sometimes an entire scene will be done in rap, and other times it might only be a few lines. The most you get from the background music is a simple beat. And yet it all weirdly works for the movie.

The movie is loosely structured, with an entire hour of its running time feeling more like set up and exposition, until the second half where things actually happen. The story itself is basic, and the characters are all two dimensional, but the film still sort of works. It is all style over substance but is entertaining. It just isn’t particularly deep or meaningful.

 

In near-future Tokyo, constant earthquakes have reduced the city into a gangland warzone with various street gangs, known as tribes, controlling the different districts and battling each other. The biggest and most violent tribe is the Bukuro Wu-ronz, led by the violent Meera. Meera is the son of psychopathic gangster Beppa, a powerful crime lord with eyes for taking over all of Tokyo. With Beppa’s support, Meera begins a war to take over the streets and eliminate all the tribes.

The Musashiro Saru tribe is peaceful, promoting love and understanding – they welcome anybody and have no interest in starting fights. Meera targets them to start his war, forcing peace-loving Kai to take charge and rally the other tribes together to bring Meera and Beppa down. Caught in the middle of this is runaway action girl Sunmita, who is being hunted by tough foreign fighters working for Satanist priests, and a young street boy determined to protect her.

The film takes a full hour before the plot actually gets rolling, and by the time it does you realise you don’t know anything about the main hero Kai (or that you haven’t actually seen/noticed him for an hour). Most of the movie is set up and preparation, flitting from the various characters rapping. We get more attention given to random evil characters (the foreign fighters, while cool, actually have no impact on any of the story at all). The movie is style over substance, but it’s still disappointing to know nothing about the characters you’re supposed to be rooting for.

Everything about Beppa and his family is absolutely insane and weird, on a completely different level to everything else. Beppa is played with psychotic relish by Riki Takeuchi, who has played Yakuza bosses in a bunch of Takashi Miike films, but nothing quite to vulgar and ridiculous as here. He’s like a horny, sadistic Elvis. There are two women, presumably his daughters (it’s really unclear). One is a hyperactive beatboxing girl who, for the finale, shows up in the iconic yellow Bruce Lee jumpsuit. The other has massive breasts. That’s honestly it for her; she sits around sipping from champagne glasses with ample cleavage on show. Meera’s weirdo brother has a room full of human furniture – nude people painted white who have to stand and sit in position as lamps, tables and chairs. The family is really bizarre, but sadly most are killed off in sudden, anticlimactic fashion.

The film does get a bit uncomfortable at times, usually in the treatment of women. At the beginning, before the main title has come up, the various gangs are introduced while Meera molests a topless police officer and runs a knife across her naked body. Sunmita also has a scene where she’s beaten, stripped and molested by Meera. By the end she’s running around kicking ass, but that scene (taking place in a makeshift brothel) can be uncomfortable. In fact the entirety of Beppa’s operations seems to involve abducting girls off the street and then either turning them into prostitutes or eating them

 

Sion Sono’s films all tend to have a fairly makeshift feel to them – there’s often something makeshift or low budget about the set designs and lighting (one suspects it’s all digital cameras), but he makes it work for his films. That’s especially true here, where the streets of Tokyo are brought to life in big style. The alleys and streets are full of bright neon lights, vibrant graffiti and assorted junk, with a real life to them. They look good and it really sells the whole ‘tokyo tribe’ setting that film wants to set up. The film does compromise this once, in a single shot that seems to have been shot in the middle of a busy, bustling Japanese city, but otherwise the look of the film is great. The various tribes’ hangouts all feel fitting, from disco clubs and nightclubs to abandoned shopping malls. Musashiro Saru hang out in a diner, while Beppa’s family lives in an absurdly luxurious mansion.

The biggest deciding factor in how you’ll like the film is in whether the rap musical gimmick works for you or not. The music isn’t particularly catchy, nor are the lyrics insightful, but it still works, even when some of the performers are lacking (one or two rap in monotone, in particular a narrator characters). The other issue is the odd pace – as I’ve said, the first hour is all build up and introductions, to the point where it feels like the payoff will never come. When it does it’s entertaining, though is does seem to abruptly jump past certain parts. One tribe has a tank that just goes missing, a cool fight in a booby trapped bamboo maze is over too quickly and some big encounters fizzle out completely.

Tokyo Tribe is a weird, entertaining movie, much like many of Sion Sono’s films. It is style over substance, but that style works, even though the movie takes a long time to get rolling. I enjoyed it, though I had more fun with Sono’s other recent movie, ‘Why Don’t You Play in Hell?’

The Monkey King

The Monkey King is a Hong Kong fantasy action film based on ‘Journey to the West’, a popular 14^th century Chinese serial that still has an enduring influence. It’d be perhaps more familiar to western audiences through the dubbed seventies TV series ‘Monkey Magic’, though the material has had its share of adaptations, more recently with the Hong Kong comedy film ‘Conquering the Demons’, the video game ‘Enslaved: Odyssey to the West’ and has even had an American film pseudo-adaptation with ‘The Forbidden Kingdom’ (which is actually not bad in terms of action for this sort of film). The Monkey King is the most recent and perhaps the biggest adaptation yet. It killed it in the Chinese box office, and stands as one of the highest grossing Chinese films or all time.

It’s a full-on fantasy film with a lot of special effects, intricate make-up and practical effects as well. The story is basic, the plot barely moves and the characters simplistic, to the point where it’s barely memorable in those respects, but it looks nice and is still entertaining for what it is, even if it’s just a light popcorn flick. It’s an effects heavy film, with prominent use of green screen and CGI, but also a lot of costumes and animatronics. Some of it looks nice, some of it looks bad and some of it is endearingly cheesy.

 

It’s a pretty familiar fantasy set-up. There are three realms, the divine in heaven, the humans and spirits on earth and the demons in hell. Out of jealousy (and plain evilness) the demons attacked and tried to destroy heaven but the Jade Emperor (Chow Yun Fat), ruler of the divine, managed to defeat them and banished them to a volcanic peak for eternity. To rebuild heaven a divine sacrificed herself by transforming into thousands of crystals, which also created a shield no demon could penetrate to protect it. One crystal fell to earth from the heavens, and from it was born Sun Wukong (Donnie Yen), the cheeky and irrepressible Monkey King. He is trained by the divine to be a warrior for virtue, though Monkey has a dual nature with his mischievous, destructive and high-energy personality. When he isn’t hanging out in the monkey kingdom, he’s harassing other deities by gate-crashing their palaces, smashing their stuff and stealing from them.

The Bull Demon King (Aaron Kwok), leader of the demons, teams up with a duplicitous divine to try and take heaven down again. To do this, they need Monkey - he was born from the crystals protecting heaven and thus may be able to break through it. The two go about manipulating the mischievous, simple minded Monkey into gate crashing heaven, hoping that the mischief he causes will cause disarray and destroy the shield, giving the demons access to heaven.

 

We get Donnie Yen in full-body monkey make-up. I’m talking thick hair covering him from head to toe, looking like a character from Tim Burton’s version of Planet of the Apes. I’d actually maybe go one further, and say he’s like Mike Myers in the Cat in the Hat. It looks completely ridiculous, is the point of what I’m saying, but then that’s true of the entire movie. I don’t know why they felt it necessary to go full simian with him, considering Aaron Kwok’s Bull Demon King is just a normal guy with horns. Yen has a high-pitched voice, constantly makes miscellaneous monkey noises and hops around like a mad monkey person. Which, I guess, is sorta the point of the character. Sun Wukong is an annoying, irritating character, and has been in pretty much every incarnation – it’s just part of who he is. Yen dials it up to eleven, to the point where one could wonder if he wasn’t high as shit on speed and caffeine during the entire shoot. The heavy face make-up also prevents him from emoting with his face, which he attempts to make up for it with the constant, exaggerated movement – Monkey never stops, not even for a second – it’s like the dude has ADHD. Your mileage will vary. One really has to wonder why he took the role – maybe it’s for his children? Yen isn’t returning for the sequel (which is currently filming I believe), and oddly Aaron Kwok is taking the reigns as Monkey, despite being the villain in this film (hopefully he’ll be more energetic than was here).

Chow Yun Fat has fun as the Jade Emperor, a guy who has been running heaven for so long that he finds Monkey’s antics refreshing and fun against the bureaucracy of heaven and the other divines – it’s a shame we don’t get much of him. Sadly almost everybody else just sucks. Aaron Kwok’s Bull Demon King is disappointingly bland. He has no personality – he wants to destroy heaven for some reason, and that’s all there is to it. He’s never maniacal or brooding, he’s just sort of stoic which makes for a dull villain. The Bull King is married to the Jade Emperor’s sister, yet absolutely nothing comes from this. She’s annoyed that he’s still trying to destroy heaven, and that’s literally all there is for the two of them. Likewise a fox girl that Monkey meets is literally just used as a plot device in his manipulation (which follows a pretty similar path as Anakin Skywalker’s manipulation in the third Star Wars movie).

 

This is an effects-heavy film, with seemingly the majority of the sets and scenes being green screen. Some of it actually looks quite good and there's a definite level of polish over everything (heaven’s gardens and palaces are suitably fancy) while others are less impressive (underwater palace looks weird with its ‘underwater’ filter effects). Similarly the action effects are often pretty good. Again, some of it looks shoddy (giant octopus tentacles are poor), but others look really quite great (Chow Yun Fat as a dragon is pretty slick). There are a lot of intricate costumes and effects around, the kind we just don’t see anymore. I’m talking puppet heads and moving parts, the kind of effects work that was mostly replaced with CGI in this day and age. I can understand why, but I still personally love the endearingly silly practical effects work for costumes and animatronics. My favourite for sheer silliness has to be the evil animatronic bear demon. Or, maybe even better, the crab guy who looks like a Power Ranger villain. He’s got human legs, but his torso is a crab costume.

The action scenes have the various spirits, demons and deities flying through the air as they battle, with various special attacks and abilities. Monkey has a plethora of (unexplained but it was in the book) abilities, like being able to change form, creating clones of himself from his hair and using a shape-shifting staff. Other characters have various effects in battle, like Chow Yun Fat’s weird whip/transforming dragon thing or the Bull Demon King’s demonic axe. One divine has what can best be described as flaming rollerblades. Characters zip around the screen, flying through flames and crystals, walloping each other with special effects.

Monkey King is primarily a family film. By that I mean it’s not taxing or complicated, it’s just straightforward with its characters and plot. The story is thin as are most of the characters, and whatever lessons or themes the film has are simplistic (I dunno, ‘be good’ or ‘don’t attack heaven’). There’s no real depth to it, and it doesn’t really have anything there that will stay with you. It’s a popcorn movie – simple entertainment. And I really didn’t mind it. I’m not going to call it a classic, and it isn’t something that will blow you away, but despite its many faults I found it hard not to enjoy the movie. Maybe it was the ridiculousness of it, the silly costumes or the overall slick presentation, but I had fun with it.

Weatherwoman

It’s a lewd comedy that gets increasingly bizarre as it continues, taking a single silly concept (what if a weatherwoman flashed her panties at the end of her broadcast?), runs with it and then goes insane with it all. As a comedy, the humour is mostly generated through just how bizarre it all is. It starts as a simple erotically charged farce but it continues to get more and more ridiculous as it continues, the insanity starting to build up for a finale that’s absolutely bizarre in both conception and execution. There’s something strongly, strangely, endearing about the film and its odd determination to be weird and erotic. This is not a movie you can watch with another person in the room (or in audible range), something I feel I need to specify, and it certainly isn’t the sort of DVD you want lying around.

 

Keiko, a sexually aggressive, strong willed young woman, is working as a lowly office lady at a failing television station. One day she fills in for the regular weather girl, Michiko. Keiko spices up her one-time broadcast by flashing her panties, becoming an overnight sensation that causes a massive boost to the TV station’s ratings. Keiko uses her massive popularity to gain power in the station, her report and conduct getting increasingly lewd as the station’s ratings soar and her popularity grows.

Her success causes problems for Michiko, the former weather woman, who finds her position usurped, is forced to appear in an ill-fated and gross show and ends up as Keiko’s maid (or sex slave if you’d prefer, for all the nude, lesbian making out they do). It also reinvigorates the feelings of Yamagishi, a young man in love with Keiko who feels inspired by her aggressive ambition and confidence.

A secret cabal of executives opposed to vulgarity join forces to take down Keiko, doing all they can to sabotage her image and popularity. Led by the powerful, sophisticated and ambitious Kaori, who wishes to destroy Keiko’s career and become the number one weather woman.

 

The movie is full of panty shots, bare breasts, lesbian sex, sex toys, female masturbation and all sorts of other ridiculous in-your-face sexuality. There are a lot of scenes of Keiko masturbating. More than you’d think necessary. Some of the sex stuff goes weird (the guy into ‘new fetishes’ with schoolgirl costumes and giant teddy bears) and some of it gets gross (like the random guy into enemas). Then it goes ridiculous with several BDSM scenes of Keiko getting tied up and whipped (for plot reasons actually – I’m serious, it’s for the story).

Despite all the ridiculous sex stuff, this is a movie with some surprising themes and ideas underneath its slutty exterior. The ideas of image, popularity and public opinion are dealt with, with how absurdly quickly one can rise to instant popularity over something inconsequential and just how fragile and quick to shatter that popularity can be. It’s done as a farce or blatant satire if you’d prefer; Keiko’s rise to power due to her panty shots is sudden and instantaneous, and her rise is shown in a silly little song number. You could call it all a parody.

It’s also all a silly joking jab at the importance of weather woman, here seen as some sort of divine medium of the weather expected to have control over the elements (not joking, this actually happens). There are more than a few jokes aimed at news broadcasts, with the presenters of the news shown as weirdos (particularly at the end when a duo of presenters commentates on a ‘weather battle’ between Keiko and Kaori).

 

More than that is the idea of powerful women. Under all the masturbating, lesbian sex and panty shots, this is a movie about strong-willed, ambitious women seizing power. Both Keiko and her nemesis Kaori seize and battle for power in both the TV station’s hierarchy and in public popularity. Keiko is strong willed and aggressive, with a determination that sees her forge ahead, unafraid of any consequences. She does falter once, when the story calls for it, which does feel out of place for such a headstrong character, but it isn’t long before she takes charge again in ridiculous, sexually fuelled flamboyance. Kaori is similar, though a little more uppity (she went to Paris, which apparently makes her ‘sophisticated’ as she keeps saying) and has no issues with using people to get her way.

Other characters are played mostly straight. Michiko is a somewhat tragic figure in that her career is all but destroyed by Keiko and Kaori’s rises to power, but it’s a little hard to properly sympathise with her once she’s nude and soaped up. Yamagishi feels like an odd outlier, existing to mostly be in awe of Keiko. The other cast are mostly nameless and there for random jokes (Michiko’s fetish obsessed boyfriend stands out, or the TV station head who just likes seeing panties).

It’s absolutely bizarre. A whole bunch of scenes feature baguettes for some baffling reason. There’ll either be a random character holding a baguette, or will have one just there in the scene somewhere and I have no idea why. The random song numbers are strange, but not as bizarre as the ‘weather report as a variety show event’ finale cooked up by ‘sophisticated’ Kaori. The insanity reaches its climax at the finale, where Kaori and Keiko, dressed in ridiculous costumes, have a ‘weather battle’, where the duo fight by controlling the elements, causing rainstorms, autumn winds and lighting strikes against each other.

 

Weatherwoman is a thoroughly strange, bizarrely entertaining movie all things considered with a thick vein of erotic nonsense. The nudity and sex isn’t used as flavouring, it’s in the meat of the movie, which just makes it all the stranger. It’s a strangely watchable movie, the sort where you become hooked in wanting to see how much weirder, cruder and ridiculous it can get – which, as it turns out, is a lot.   

Iceman

 

Donnie Yen is, at the moment, one of the most prolific Hong Kong action stars working today. His success hasn’t come overnight either, he’s been working in the industry for decades, not only acting but handling action choreography and producing and directing roles as well. He lends himself to some pretty awesome action scenes, with exciting choreography and physical prowess (made even more impressive by the fact that he’s now in his fifties). He also has great acting chops when it comes to it – he can handle dramatic roles with emotional complexity and depth (see Wu Xia and Ip Man) which is more than one can say of a lot of other Asian action stars (Iko Uwais and Tony Jaa, for all their awesome fighting skills, aren't exactly ‘actors’).

Yen has been active in the industry since the eighties, but it’s only been in the last decade or so that he has risen to lofty heights of being one of the greatest and most prolific Asian action stars working today. That’s largely thanks to roles in films like Ip Man, Wu Xia and SPL. But, like just about every action star out there, the movies he stars in aren’t always great even when he’s doing a good job. Even star vehicles can be shoddy, and that’s true of some of the more recent Yen movies, many of which are brought down by poor scripts and confused plots. I actually have a theory that Yen just accepts every single role that he gets offered. That would certainly explain some of the weirder roles he’s done recently (The Monkey King, which I’ll get to later).

And so we come to Iceman. Its part goofy comedy, part action movie and part oddly serious feudal drama and the parts don’t really come together well. Some bits are okay, there are some funny moments and some nice action but none of it comes together well. It’s too messy and unfocused, to the point where even with its ninety minute runtime it feels as though not much has happened. It’s also part one of a two part film (the second part I believe still in production), meaning it lacks a satisfying structure and leaves a lot of loose threads and half boiled characters and plot points when it ends with a to be continued cliff-hanger. If anything, I’d say this movie is nothing more than laying groundwork for the sequel, as by the end it feels like nothing has been accomplished other than to set up what might happen in the sequel (and even that seems vague).

 
A truck carrying cryogenic freezing tanks crashes, damaging its cargo. Emerging from the wreckage is Ying (Donnie Yen), a warrior from Ming Dynasty China who had been frozen in an avalanche for 400 years. He struggles to make sense of the modern world, his confusion amplified when he wanders into Hong Kong’s nightclub district during a rowdy costume party. There he meets May, a party girl with money issues. She doesn’t believe his story and wants to get rid of him, but changes her tune when she finds out his pockets are overflowing with ancient gold, so she latches onto him to fleece him of his money. But then romance blooms, because of course it does, and yadda yadda yadda she falls in love with him I guess.

Also unfrozen in the wreck are Sao and Niehu, two of Ying’s former comrades determined to track him down and kill him as a traitor. They adapt faster to modern society, taking over a street gang as they begin to hunt Ying down. In the background, a cruel and sinister police chief (Simon Yam) is tracking down mysterious artefacts linked to the frozen warriors, and becomes determined to recapture, or kill, the recently thawed warriors.

The comedy stuff is of the goofy, silly and gross-out variety. Sometimes it’s funny, other times its more groan worthy. A recently thawed Ying pisses like a fire hydrant, drinks from a toilet bowl and angrily karate chops a can of tomatoes when he can’t figure out how to open it. Ying’s martial arts combat skills involve the pressing of acupuncture points, leading to some silly scenes of him disabling people (and, in one scene, healing May’s ailing grandmother by pummelling her). In one fight scene a toilet explodes, sending shit flying everywhere. Some of the ‘fish out of water’ humour works, but others just don’t. I did like Sao and Niehu’s early reactions to modern society – the former becomes obsessed with curry chicken and the latter discovers the joys of smoking, guns and pornography.

Everything to do with the Ying’s past is serious which doesn’t mesh well at all with the silly comedy stuff. It’s played straight, giving the standard ‘feudal politics and betrayal’ but barely delving into it so we don’t really know or care about what happened. We constantly hear about a magical artefact that can give the user astounding time-based powers, but it never actually comes into play in the film; it all seems like groundwork for the sequel. Simon Yam’s scenes are straight out of a gritty crime thriller (par for the course for him, it’s basically his acting bread and butter). He’s got the slick high rise building he operates out of, the buttoned-up goons, access to high-tech police forces and even has someone horrifically tortured and murdered for failing him. The issue is that he’s barely in the movie at all – he’s in the background, and gets shown a few times (and towards the end, as they build up to the cliff-hanger ending, we get to know more about him). He’ll be the villain in the sequel one assumes.

The Ying/May romance stuff just doesn’t work, but we get so many scenes of the two of them. They don’t have chemistry and he doesn’t seem interested in her at all. It’s a one sided romance – she falls for his good, positive nature while he’s mostly oblivious as he’s too focused on solving the mystery behind his freezing/betrayal/whatever. It also doesn’t help that May isn’t likeable. She’s more annoying than anything, which makes it hard to sympathise with her when she falls for Ying or . May also might be a prostitute (?). It’s actually unclear what exactly she is meant to be – her ‘job’ seemed to consist of hanging out in an alley next to a club. Yen does a better job of things, playing almost everything as a comedy movie with the almost perpetually cheerful Ying (except in those few flashbacks to feudal times). He’s likeable, and his ‘fish out of water’ innocence leads to some funny moments, but it doesn’t mesh with the fluctuating tone of the movie.

Now the action scenes are only alright. There aren’t too many of them, and the choreography isn’t impressive, but they work for what they are. They’ve got some CGI effects and the like to spruce them up, and various feudal super-powered skills come into play. They just aren’t particularly memorable and many feel a bit anticlimactic. They also come across as silly or ridiculous, even when they’re meant to be serious (Ying ‘surfing’ an avalanche on the back of a shield is silly). Take the finale for instance, Ying fighting Sao and Niehu on a bridge – the villainous duo are wielding large swords and axes, Ying uses a length of chain and there’s even a horse involved. It’s a serious fight, but looks ridiculous because Sao and Niehu’s ‘modern’ clothing and hairstyles make them look completely silly. The scene also is disappointing for the finale, because it has the feel of a mid-film fight. The stakes aren’t high enough, and it ends in such a way where you feel you’re only part-way through the movie.

Iceman is half a movie, part one of two. It ends with a ‘to be continued’ cliffhanger, and the end credits has a scene that looks to build excitement for the sequel (it doesn’t). The biggest issue is that it doesn’t feel like a satisfying whole film. The characters mostly feel like they’re killing time, wandering around aimlessly for the most part, while plot points that get barely mentioned feel like useless padding. The loose tone also doesn’t help. It’s a movie that really needed a better focus – if it dedicated itself to being a comedy it could have worked much better, but throwing in the drama and serious flashbacks confuses the feel of the movie. It’s not an awful film mind you, it’s still entertaining when it isn’t in an odd dramatic lull, but it’s never satisfying or captivating. Yen does a good job in his role, but it’s definitely not one of his better films.     

Chanbara Beauty

It’s a movie based on a Japanese videogame series I don’t think we ever got over here, OneChanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers, which is about a bikini-clad sword-wielding girl who runs around slicing through zombies. And that’s fairly true of the film, which is also mostly about a bikini-clad sword-wielding girl who runs around slicing through zombies. It’s alright. Nothing mind blowing, but it’s entertaining for what it is and there’s a stylistic commitment that works pretty well. It’s a small film in terms of length, scope and scale but it is pretty entertaining. The problem is the tone. It’s a movie that seems almost determined to not have fun with its premise. It mostly plays it completely straight, which is simply baffling. With a more playful tone and better sense of fun then it’d be a much better movie.

In the near future, the large D3 Corporation was researching a way to resurrect the dead which ended up causing a zombie apocalypse, destroying civilisation and turning the world into a horrible wasteland where survivors struggle to fight off the undead. Travelling through this wasteland is Aya, the stoic bikini-clad swordswoman/zombie killer. She’s searching for her sister Saki, who might be evil. Travelling with her is a fat comic relief sidekick Katsuji. They’re joined by Reiko, a badass biker wielding a sawn-off shotgun who claims to know where Saki is – in the clutches of Dr Sugita, the scientist behind the zombie outbreak. She’ll lead them to D3 headquarters, and Saki, if they help her kill Sugita.

Not too much happens. I mean we get scenes of the two girls fighting zombies (fatty sort of bumbles around and hides for the most part), but between all that it’s a weirdly character-focused meander through fairly bland locations. The main three characters all get some sort of downer sadness moment. It’s weird, because one would assume that this movie would go for light and ridiculous action and comedy considering the premise and its videogame origins, but instead it plays it straight and tries to go emotional. It’s also largely what is used to fill out the film’s length – the mid-film action scene is specifically tailored to deliver emotional moments for the cast. Everyone has a scene where they cry because of something sad and personal happening. It’s a pretty short movie, but they manage to drag certain parts out. Within an hour the movie will mostly be over, barring a fifteen minute final fight between Aya and Saki that has a lot of flashbacks, contemplating and stoppages.

Another issue is the characters – Aya is stoic and serious for the entire movie, never smiling, rarely talking and always with a plain expression on her face. It sort of saps the fun out of the movie. It also causes a weird sort of divide between her character’s personality and design – I mean she’s in a freaking bikini for the entire movie. If she could have at least cracked a smile or made a joke a few times she’d be more memorable and likeable, but instead she’s just sort of boring. The comic relief guy isn’t actually funny, and doesn’t really give and relief, while Reiko doesn’t have much going on – she does at least seem to have something of a personality and actually cares about what happens to other people (while Aya doesn’t care). The villains have simplistic motivations. While I’m still unsure what exactly the nefarious Dr Sugita wanted, Saki’s motivations are so basic it’s astounding.

The zombies here are a mix of the slow shambling kind and much faster ones. Every now and then they shove in some additional weirdness, but they never go all out with it. The beginning scene has a knife-wielding karate zombie covered in chains, while the mid-film action scene has a ‘we just watched Kill Bill’ schoolgirl zombie with a spiked ball/chain combo weapon. I feel as though the film needed to go a bit more insane and creative with its silliness, instead of trying to go serious.

 

The production itself is actually pretty decent. It is nothing mind blowing, and one suspects the budget wasn’t massive, but it has a much better level of polish and style than other J-horror flicks. It’s a small movie in terms of scope and ideas, but they do it pretty well. Some scenes do tend to be dark and seemingly poorly lit, which is true of most of the night scenes. The locales are also quite dull and bland – while Aya and her attire is vibrant and ridiculous, the world of the film is sadly grey and drab. Not that it looks bad, just sort of uninteresting – abandoned schools, slums buildings, factories and prisons look ok but we’ve seen this sort of thing dozens of times before in other similar movies.

The action scenes are generally fun and stylish, sort of channelling the feel of the videogame inspiration I suppose. Fake CGI blood gushes plentifully from zombies as they’re cut down by Aya, splashing onto the screen as Aya flips and spins around swinging her sword impossibly fast. Sometimes she uses special attacks, where her blade glows and every slice explodes zombies (its less impressive than it sounds). Sword clashes cause sparks to fly out and in the finale Aya even throws out a fireball. It’s never given much of an in-film explanation, other than that Aya was from some kind of clan that involved teaching children how to fight with swords. Reiko, on the other hand, blows enemies away with her rapid-fire shotgun, which never seems to need to be reloaded.

There is something almost endearing in its design, though some goofy fakery shows up. Aya’s tattoos are obviously fake henna tattoos (you can see the edges where they’re peeling off), while the CGI blood is goofy.

The movie is alright, and has a decent level of polish over it. The action scenes are mostly fun, with the stylistic nonsense working pretty well. But the tone is what brings it down – they should have had a lighter, more fun tone to fit the premise. Instead they played things out seriously, which was to the films detriment. It scores points for trying though, especially considering this is a game-to-film adaptation.

Armour of God

Armour of God is the closest Jackie Chan has been to dying. Within the first five minutes of the movie a relatively straightforward stunt goes horribly wrong, with Chan cracking open the back of his skull and requiring him to have major surgery, lose some hearing out of one of his ears and have a plug permanently inserted into his skull. Normally this would be enough of a major accident to completely stop a film’s production or require the lead actor to be replaced. Instead Jackie Chan went back to work, and took over directing duties as well. And it's a good thing too, since this fun romp is one of the more entertaining Chan movies.

Chan plays Jackie, the Asian Hawk, a treasure hunter/adventurer. He travels around the world, stealing artefacts and auctioning them off for big bucks. He is contacted by his friend Andy who desperately needs his help. Andy’s girlfriend (and Jackie’s former crush) Lorelei has been kidnapped by an evil cult seeking pieces of the legendary treasure, the Armour of God, a armour set said to bestow the owner with great power. They want Jackie to bring them the missing pieces of the treasure in exchange for Lorelei. Jackie and Andy receive backing by a rich Count who owns a few pieces of the Armour of God. He lends them his pieces on two conditions; that Jackie will bring him the full set, and that his daughter, May, goes with them. The trio head off to Eastern Europe to find the cult.

From there we get the usual collection of classic Chan awesomeness. There are fights, there are stunts, there are chases, there is wacky humour and slapstick nonsense, and it’s all a lot of fun. Armour of God also has the benefit of being filmed across Eastern Europe, with scenes in Croatia, Morocco, Austria and Yugoslavia. The settings give the movie its own unique feel against many other similar movies, including those in Chan’s filmography. The action is a lot of fun, and the stunts are pretty good as well. The climax of the film has Jackie leap from a Cliffside and land on a hot air balloon – while that was a bit of editing magic, the reality had Jackie skydive out of a plane to perform the stunt, which is just as freaky and dangerous. The stunt that went wrong was a simple one seen early on – Jackie jumps on a tree. It goes wrong (as shown in the credits) when a branch breaks and Jackie falls to the ground. After that scene, for the rest of the movie Chan has long hair to hide the surgery scars.

This is a pretty weird movie all things considered. There’s some awesome goofiness, such as Jackie’s custom Mitsubishi splitting off into a smaller getaway car. The opening scene is silly old school Asian racism, with tribal Africans depicted as gibberish spouting savages with spears, wooden masks and grass skirts. The evil cultists are a weird mob, made up of swarthy European dudes in monk’s robes, either brandishing machine guns or doing karate. Absolutely nothing about them makes sense, and everything about them is a bizarre series of ridiculous escalation. They live in a cavernous monastery, give out pamphlets in nearby towns, shoot-up concert halls to kidnap women, worship a giant snake statue and regularly hire prostitutes from the nearby town.

On the DVD special features, there’s an interview with Jackie Chan where he talks about the finale. He talks about how most action movies he was used to doing had a standard 1 vs 1 fight between the hero and the villain, and that he was getting tired of that so he wanted to do something different. Thus the finale has Jackie duke it out with four black women with Amazonian physiques. It’s an absolutely bizarre battle in the cavernous depths of the cult’s hideout, and the women simply don’t mesh well visually or conceptually with anything else that’s been going on in. But that’s largely true of the whole movie, it’s a lot of fun and a good time, but it’s so weird as well. This is one of the good ones, which is something I feel I say a lot about Chan movies.

Tai Chi Zero/Hero

Tai Chi Zero and Tai Chi Hero are a pair of Chinese martial art movies that mix stylistic visuals with comedy and action. I have to review these together because they sort of act as two parts of a somewhat cohesive whole. They’re fun and both stylistically and visually appealing (a mix of traditional 19^th century Chinese villages and steampunk robots), though the story in both is a bit unfocused and weak.  They were filmed back to back, and it sort of shows with the costumes and sets. It also shows as they feel like two halves of a whole movie. So let’s begin with the first film, Tai Chi Zero.

Lu Chan is a once-in-a-century martial arts prodigy, possessing the ability to perfectly mimic moves and form. He also has a growth on his head, the ‘Three Blossoms on the Crown’, which, when struck, causes him to go into a powerful berserker rage. Orphaned as a child, the innocent and simple Lu Chan is taken in by the leader of a rebel army who exploits Lu Chan’s abilities to win battles. The strain of fighting has serious health effects though, and a doctor informs Lu Chan that he is dying – the only thing that can save him is to learn Chen style kung-fu to heal his body from the inside.

So Lu Chan travels to the isolated Chen village, only for the townsfolk to kick him out and refuse to teach him – Chen style kung-fu isn’t taught to strangers, it’s kept in the family. Lu Chan refuses to give up, and loiters around the village, getting regularly pummelled by the villagers as he concocts various plans to sneak in. His enthusiasm and determination gets the attention of Yu Niang, the daughter of Master Chen, who is dealing with her own problems. Yu Niang’s ambitious fiancé Fang, who works for a British railway company and has adopted western culture, wants to build a railway through Chen village – it’s his big chance to prove himself to his western bosses. The simple townsfolk aren’t impressed by his western technology and refuse. Fang decides to do it anyway and returns, bringing with him a battalion of armed British soldier and a giant railway-laying steam-powered robot to destroy the village. Thus Lu Chan has his chance to prove himself by foiling Fang’s plan and fighting off the soldiers.

The pace is pretty decent, though it takes its time to get where it’s going. It takes a long time before the main conflict shows up, with the first half mostly being to set up Lu Chan’s backstory and arrival at Chen village. As a result, it feels more like the first half of a movie than a satisfying whole. It does have a beginning, middle and end and mostly stands on its own, if it weren’t for the ending scene that links it directly to its sequel. It’s a bit all over the place with odd detours. There are a weird series of scenes with Fang and his British associate/lover Claire that are just strange. It goes for emotional romance…for the villains. Meanwhile the movie is framing things for Lu Chan and Yu Niang to start a relationship, though the two lack chemistry. There’s also only basic characterisation for the most part.

The problem with Tai Chi Zero is that it leaves you feeling oddly unsatisfied and hungry for more; just as it builds up the movie ends. It’s the first course of a two-course meal, leaving you hungry for more. And that leads us to course two…

 

It’s hard to really talk about Tai Chi Hero without spoiling the end of the first film/part one, but here’s the easy, basic way – the good guys won, but with consequences. Lu Chan is awkwardly married to Yu Niang, though only formally so he can learn Chen style kung-fu (although they do have some feelings for each other). His training begins to fuel the paranoia of the villagers, who fear a prophecy made by a monk centuries before that if an outsider learns Chen-style kung-fu the village will be destroyed. Thus Lu Chan has become a pariah and the villagers want to be rid of him. This coincides with the arrival of Master Chen’s son (and Yu Niang’s brother) Zai Yang and his wife. Zai Yang’s presence, popular, talented and intelligent, fuels the villager’s determination to be rid of Lu Chan, and begins rumblings of a power struggle between Zai Yang and Master Chen. Meanwhile Fang, furious at his defeat and wanting revenge, teams up with sinister American Duke Fleming (Peter Stormare, what are you doing here?) to bribe various officials and get access to an army and artillery to finally destroy Chen village.

Tai Chi Hero is entertaining, but shares the same issues with pacing and story. If anything it comes across as looser and less cohesive – there are a lot of plot threads loosely stitched together with minimal depth and unclear focus. Everything about Fang’s wheelings and dealings and every single Peter Stormare scene feels out of place and strange, while the movie has to contrive the whole ‘cursed prophecy’ thing to have the villagers suddenly hate Lu Chan again.   

 

Lu Chan basically becomes a secondary character as the story suddenly starts to focus on Zai Yang. Zai Yang gets a whole lot of backstory, character development and drama – his relationship with his father is an important thread in the middle of the story. He actually gets given more depth in a few brief scenes than Lu Chan has had over two movies, so maybe that’s why they did it. To be honest it just sort of shines more light on the fact that Lu Chan isn’t a particularly interesting character (or a particularly talented actor). Even in the first film he had nothing going on other than his combat skills, and here he’s given barely any attention barring the few fight scenes. Everything about Lu Chan’s ‘Three Blossoms on the Crown’ is quickly and quietly swept away. It gets brought up in the first third of the movie, and then it’s gone completely and never mentioned again.

Tai Chi Hero suffers from an oddly defused ending that quickly, strangely wraps things up in a little bit too nice of a bow. The big climactic battle begins and is entertaining, but ends up ignored as the heroes circumvent it entirely by engaging in a really strange and not-quite ‘final fight’ worthy solo match with a character we’ve never heard of who is only introduced in the final ten minutes and then everything is solved. To risk spoiling it outright, imagine it this way: if Tai Chi Zero was about a bullied kid fighting back against his bully, Tai Chi Hero is about a bullied kid running away from his bully and then complaining to the principal who makes everything all right. The bullying thing is only an example, but an apt one – Tai Chi Zero/Hero and a lot of kung-fu movies were exactly about this sort of thing, the big and powerful trying to strongarm the small and vulnerable (only with more kung-fu). It just leaves Tai Chi Hero ending on a somewhat muted note. Things are wrapped up so suddenly and quickly that there’s no time for an epilogue or resolution.

 

The two movies vaguely come together into an odd whole of sorts, though I’d say the second film is the weaker due to its looser structure and focus. They’re still an entertaining duo; they just don’t quite come together into a solid whole. The first feels like build up and ends before it gets there, and the second just doesn’t quite sit well on its own. Tai Chi Hero’s ending feels strange in its odd detour and sudden rush to wrap things up, though I’d heard they’re making a third film.

A little bit of miscellany – something I haven’t mentioned much is the acting. Well it’s a mixed bag really – a lot of the supporting cast and side roles are quite decent. The movie is jam packed with real-life martial artists and Olympians as well as known actors. Yu Niang is played by actress/model Angelababy and Master Chen is played by Tony Leung Ka-Fai and both give good performances. Yuen Biao shows up for the final fight in Tai Chi Hero, and Peter Stormare stands around in a dapper suit being sinister in a few scenes. The big weak point is Jayden Yuan, who plays main character Lu Chan. He’s a martial artist/athlete and this is his acting debut, and it shows. His acting is poor, but works enough as the simple, well-meaning and determined Lu Chan. I feel that this is why he gets mostly brushed aside in the sequel – he isn’t a particularly compelling character.

The action in both films is a lot of fun actually. It isn’t particularly impactful but the choreography has a nice flow and it looks good. It’s all elevated by stylistic flourishes which make things visually entertaining. Things like lines appearing that map out movements and kicks and slow motion or CGI for spears being smashed make the action seem more interesting than it is. Talking about visuals, the films both look great, with excellent sets and costumes and CGI used to detail bigger, more extravagant sets. The movies were apparently released in 3D in China, which explains some of the CGI effect.

In the end the movies are both pretty entertaining. They have their faults, mostly in story, structure and characterisation, but I’d argue the movies manage to mostly make up for them through style and visuals. They’re worth watching, though you’ll have to watch both to get the most out of